Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story. By Dmitri Trenin. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; 270 pages; $49.95 and £34.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
8 Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year journey Through the Soviet Collapse. By Lawrence Scott Sheets. Crown; 313 pages; $28. Buy from Amazon.com
“THE dying process has begun”, wrote Alexander Kugel, a journalist and theatre critic, a few months after the bloody Bolshevik revolution of 1917. “Everything that we see now is just part of the agony. Bolshevism is the death of Russia. And a body the size of Russia cannot die in one hour. It groans.” The agony lasted over 70 years. On December 25th 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, on television, relinquished his duties as the last president of the USSR. The hammer and sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin without fanfare. The empire expired with a sigh.
The collapse of the Soviet Union: Russia’s imperial agony | The Economist
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