The histrionics of discontent possessed a carnival edge. A perverse glee, almost. Force-fed cheerful Rodina songs, Soviet society was now whooping up an anti–fairy tale of collapse.

It was during such a time—when deliveries were called off for lack of gasoline and newspapers shrank to four pages because of lack of ink; when the words razval (collapse), raspad (disintegration), and razrukha (devastation) echoed everywhere like a sick song stuck in the collective brain—that the Derridarian and I journeyed around the USSR for his book of Soviet-twilight picaresques.

Picture sardine cans on ice: rickety Zhiguli cars were our means of transport, usually on frozen roads. Lacking official Intourist permits, we couldn’t legally stay at hotels, so we depended on the kindness of strangers—friends of friends of friends who passed us along like relay batons in a Soviet hospitality race. Between summer 1989 (the Caucasus) and December 1991 (the Caucasus again) we must have clocked 10,000 miles, give or take another endless detour. We roamed Central Asia, jounced through obscure Volga regions where some old folk still practiced shamanism and swilled fermented mare’s milk. We rambled the periphery of boundless Ukraine and the charmed mini-kremlins of the Golden Ring around Moscow.

HUNTERS IN THE WINTER! appealed a sign in the gauzy Ukrainian steppe. PLEASE ARRANGE TO FEED THE WILD ANIMALS.

Our first driver was Seryoga, my cousin Dasha’s blond wispy husband, who’d fought in the Afghan war.

“So we’re near Kabul,” went a typical Seryoga road tale. “So this frigging muezzin’s not letting us sleep. So my pal Sashka takes out his Kalashnikov. BAM! Muezzin’s quiet. Forever.”

Seryoga taught me several crucial survival skills of the road. How to spray Mace, for instance, which we practiced on his grandmother’s pig. Also bribery. For this you positioned an American five baks note so that its edge stuck out of a pack of American Marlboros, which you slid across the counter with a wink as you cooed: “I’d be obliged, very obliged.” The bribing of GAI (traffic police) Seryoga handled himself. Not always ably. On one particularly grim stretch of Kazan-Moscow highway we were stopped and fined “tventi baks” exactly twenty-two times. It was the GAI boys’ version of a relay.

The dizzying landscape diversity of our multicultural Rodina celebrated in poem, novel, and song? It was now obliterated by winter, dissolved in exhaust fumes, brown compressed snow, the hopeless flattening light.

Our departures from Dad’s crammed Moscow quarters… Up in the five a.m. blackness to make the most of the scant daylight ahead. My dad in the kitchen in his baggy blue track pants, packing our plastic bags with his radiator-dried rusks. Broth in his Chinese aluminum thermos; a coiled immersion heater for tea. Rationed sugar cubes. Twelve skinny lengths of salami from the hard-currency store to last the trip. We embrace. Sit for exactly one minute in silence—a superstitious Russian departure rite.

Our arrivals… Whether in Hanseatic Tallinn or Orientalist Tashkent, the potholed socialist road always led to an anonymous Lego sprawl of stained concrete blocks—five, nine, thirteen stories—in identical housing developments on identical streets.

“Grazhdanka (citizen)!” you plead, exhausted, desperate, starving. “We’re looking for Union Street, House five, structure seventeen B, fraction two-six.”

“Chavo—WHA?” barks the grazhdanka. “This is Trade Union Street. Union Street is…” A vague motion somewhere into snowy Soviet infinity.

No map, no public phone without the receiver torn out. No idea if your friends-of-friends hosts are still awaiting you with their weak tea and their sauerkraut. An hour slogs by, another. Finally the address is located; you stand by the sardine can on wheels in shivering solidarity, a half-petrified icicle, as Seryoga dismantles the Zhiguli for the night so it won’t be “undressed.” Off come the spare tire, the plastic canisters of extra gas, the mirrors, the knobs. The pathetic moron who relaxes his vigilance for even one night? He buys his own windshield wipers at a car-parts flea market, as we did the next day. I think Tula was where this road lesson occurred. Tula—proud home of the samovar and stamped Slavic gingerbread, where we nearly keeled over from a black market can of expired saira fish. Or was it in the medieval marvel of Novgorod? Novgorod, which I remember not for the glorious icon of a golden-tressed angel with the world’s saddest twelfth-century eyes, but for the hostile drunks who spat at our license plates and pulled our wispy Afghan vet out of the car to “tear open his Moscow ass.” Novgorod, where I got to use Mace on actual humans.

We’d stopped in Novgorod en route to the more civilized Baltic capitals—Estonian Tallinn, Lithuanian Vilnius, and Latvian Riga. It was the empty-shelves December of 1990; Gorbachev, floundering, had just replaced half his cabinet with hard-liners. The previous spring, the Baltic republics had declared their independence. To which the Kremlin responded with intimidation tactics and harsh fuel sanctions.

And yet we found the Baltic mood uplifting, even hopeful.

In Vilnius we crashed with a sweet, plump, twenty-something TV producer with a halo of frizzy hair, a dusky laugh, and boundless patriotism. Regina was the fresh modern face of Baltic resistance: earnest, cultured, convinced that now was the time to right historic injustices. Her five-meter kitchen chockablock with birchbark Lithuanian knickknacks felt like the snug home branch of Sajudis, Lithuania’s anti-Communist liberation movement. Boho types in coarse-knit Nordic sweaters came and went, bearing scant edibles and the latest political news—Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, had just resigned, warning about a return to dictatorship! Regina’s friends held hands and prayed, actually prayed for the end of Soviet oppression.

I’d been to Vilnius when I was eight, on a movie shoot. To my dazzled young eyes, cozy “bourgeois” Vilnius seemed a magical porthole onto the unattainable West. Particularly the local konditerai scented with freshly ground coffee and serving real whipped cream. The whipped cream drowned my sense of unease. Because, boy, the Lithuanians really hated us Russians. Later, Mom, ever eager to bust up my friendship-of-nations fantasy, explained about the forced annexations of 1939. This might have been my opening foretaste of Soviet dis-Union. I remember feeling terribly guilty, as if I myself had signed the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact handing the Baltics over to Stalin. So now I prayed along with Regina.

With Christmas approaching, Regina got a crazy idea. Šakotis!

Šakotis (it means “branched”) is the stupendously elaborate Lithuanian cake resembling a spiky-boughed tree. Even in bountiful times nobody made it at home: besides fifty eggs per kilo of butter, šakotis demanded to be turned on a spit while you brushed on new dripping layers of batter. Regina was, however, a girl on a mission. If Vytautas Landsbergis—the soft-spoken, pedantic ex-musicologist who led the Sajudis movement—could defy the Godzilla that was the Soviet regime, she could make šakotis. Friends brought butter, eggs, and a few inches of brandy. We all sat in the kitchen, broiling each craggy layer of batter to be stacked on an improvised “tree trunk.”

The šakotis came out strange and beautiful: a fragile, misshapen tower of optimism. We ate it by candlelight. Someone strummed on guitar; the girls chanted Lithuanian folk songs.