The first salvos were erupting from our brotherly republics.

Down with Russian imperialism! Russian occupiers, go home!

Thousands of pro-independence demonstrators marched under these sentiments in Tbilisi, Georgia, in early April 1989. The protests lasted five days. That summer John and I went recipe-collecting in the romantic, mountainous Caucasus. Reaching Tbilisi, we found the histrionic Georgian capital still reeling in shock. On April 9, Moscow’s troops had killed twenty protesters, mostly young women. Everywhere, amid balconies jutting from teetering houses and restaurants dug into cliffs around the Kura River, Tbilisians seethed with opulent rage, calling down terrible curses on Moscow. The Kremlin, meanwhile, blamed the massacre on local officials.

Our hosts in town were a young architect couple, Vano and Nana, I’ll call them—flowers of a young liberal national intelligentsia. Their noble faces convulsed with hatred for Kremlin oppression. But to us Nana and Vano were Georgian hospitality personified. A guest thereabouts is revered as a holy creature of God, to be bathed in largesse. In our honor, kvevri, clay vessels of wine, were dug out from the ground. Craggy wands of churchkhella—walnuts suspended in grape must—were laid out in piles. Cute baby lambs had their throats cut for roadside picnics by the crenellated stone walls of an eleventh-century Byzantine monastery. We became more than friends with Nana and Vano—family, almost. I cheered their separatist, righteous defiance at the top of my lungs.

One evening we sat under a quince tree in the countryside. We were full of dark, fruity wines and lavash bread rolled around opal basil and cheese. I felt at home enough to mention Abkhazia. Formally an autonomous republic of Georgia, Abkhazia was making its own moves to secede—from Georgia. We’d all been laughing and singing. Suddenly Nana and Vano froze. Their proud, handsome faces clenched with re-ignited hatred.

“Abkhazians are monkeys!” sputtered Nana. “Monkeys down from the hills! They have no culture. No history.”

“Here’s what they deserve,” snarled Vano. He crushed a bunch of black grapes savagely in his fist. Red juice squirted out between his elegant knuckles.

It was a preview of what lay ahead for Gorbachev’s Soyuz (Union).

What lay ahead also was the furious rumbling of stomachs.

In trying to reform the creaking, rusting wheel of the centralized Soviet system, Gorbachev had loosened the screws, dismantled a part here, a part there, and ultimately halted the wheel—with nothing to replace it. Typical Gorbachevian flip-flops left the economy floundering between socialist planning and capitalist supply and demand. Deficits soared, output stagnated, the ruble plummeted. The economy was collapsing.

Starting in 1989, John and I began living part-time in Moscow and traveling around the USSR—this for another book now, one my Derridarian was writing himself. It was to be a dark travel picaresque about the imploding Imperium. We stayed during the winter months mainly, during his Aussie summer vacations. I loved our first arrival, after a twenty-hour flight from Melbourne, to Dad’s and Grandma Liza’s welcome spreads, touchingly, generously, improbably conjured out of thin air. Our second arrival a year later was different. In December 1990, Babushka Liza had only diseased boiled potatoes and sauerkraut. I remember the anguished embarrassment in her eyes. The “foreigners” were at her table, and she had only this to offer.

“Nichevo v magazinakh!” she cried. “There’s nothing in the stores! Pustiye prilavki—empty counters!”

The socialist shortage vernacular always reached for hyperbole, so I didn’t take her words literally. Counters might be empty of desiderata—instant coffee, bananas—but in the past you could always count on salt, eggs, buckwheat, coarse brown vermishel. The next day I went to a Davydkovo store. And came face-to-face with IT. Nichevo—nothingness. The glaring existential emptiness of the shelves. No, I lie. The nichevo was framed by castles and pyramids constructed from “sea-cabbage salad”—canned seaweed that made you vomit on contact. Two bored salesgirls sat inside the barren store. One was drawling a joke about “coupons for grade #6 dogmeat.” The joke involved fur, claws, and chopped wooden bits of the doghouse. The other was assembling a mini–Lenin mausoleum ziggurat from the cans.

“A tomb for socialist edibles!”

Her laughter echoed amid the empty counters.

On a TV concert that New Year’s Eve, the big-haired pop diva Alla Pugacheva bellowed a song called “Nyam-nyam” (yum yum). Usually Pugacheva bawled about “a million scarlet roses.” Not now.

Taloni (coupons)—one of many official euphemisms for the dread word kartochki (ration cards). Other evasions included the alarmingly suave “invitation to purchase.” They only rubbed salt in the truth: for the first time since World War II, rationing was being inflicted on Homo sovieticus. What’s more, Gorbachev’s new glasnost meant you could now scream about it out loud. “Glasnost,” explained a Soviet mutt to an American mutt in a popular joke, “is when they loosen your leash, yank away the food bowl, and let you bark all you want.” The barking? You could hear it from space.

As centralized distribution unraveled, food deliveries often de-toured into the twilight zone of barter and shady semifree commerce. Or stuff simply rotted in warehouses. There was something else, too, now: nasty economic un-friendship within our happy Soviet fraternity. Granted increased financial autonomy by Gorbachev, regional politicians and enterprises fought to keep scarce supplies for their own hungry citizenry. Georgia clung to its tangerines, Kazakhstan its vegetables. When Moscow—and scores of other cities—restricted food sales to locals, the neighboring provinces halted dairy and meat deliveries into the capital.

So everyone hoarded.

My dad’s four-hundred-square-foot apartment, besides being overcrowded with me and my six-foot-three Brit, resembled a storeroom. Blissfully unemployed, Dad had all day to forage and hunt. In the torturous food supply game, my old man was a grossmeister. He stalked milk delivery trucks, artfully forged vodka coupons, rushed to beat bread stampedes. He made his own cheese, soft and bland. His ridged radiators resembled a Stakhanovite bread rusk-drying plant. The DIY food movement of late perestroika would awe modern-day San Franciscans. On the rickety balconies of my friends, egg-laying chickens squawked among three-liter jars holding lingonberries pureed with rationed sugar, holding cucumbers pickled with rationed salt—holding anything that could be brined or preserved. 1990: the year of sauerkraut.

To shuffle as John and I did between Moscow and the West in those days was to inhabit a surreal split-screen. Western media gushed about Gorby’s charisma and feted him for the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the cold war. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the dark, frosty air swirled with conspiracies of doom, with intimations of apocalypse. Famine was on its way. Citizens were dropping dead from expired medicine in humanitarian aid packages sold by speculators. (Probably true.) “Bush’s Legs,” the frozen chicken parts sent by Bush père as relief aid had surely been injected with AIDS. The Yanks were poisoning us, trampling our national pride with their diseased drumsticks. Private kiosks sold piss inside whiskey bottles, rat meat inside pirozhki. Ancient babushkas—those kerchiefed Cassandras who’d seen three waves of famines—lurked in stores crowing, “Chernobyl harvest!” at the sight of any misshapen beet.