“Let’s each make a wish,” Regina implored, clapping her hands. She seemed so euphoric.

Three weeks later she called us in Moscow. It was January 13, long past midnight.

“I’m at work! They’re storming us! They’re shooting—” The connection went dead. Regina worked at the Vilnius TV tower.

In the morning we tuned in Voice of America on Dad’s short-wave radio. Regina’s TV tower was under Soviet assault; tanks were rolling over unarmed crowds. The violence had apparently ignited the previous day when the Soviets occupied the main print media building. A mysterious Moscow-backed force, the “National Salvation Committee,” claimed to have seized power. Huge numbers of Lithuanians kept vigil around their Parliament, defending it. Everyone sang, linking hands. Thirteen people were killed and hundreds injured.

“Hello, 1968,” Dad kept muttering darkly, invoking the Soviet crackdown of Prague. TAKE AWAY GORBACHEV’S NOBEL PEACE PRIZE! demanded a slogan at a Moscow protest rally. Russia’s liberal media, previously Gorby supporters, bawled in outrage—so he promptly rein-troduced censorship. All the while insisting he hadn’t learned about the bloodshed in Vilnius until the day after it happened. Was he lying, or had he lost control of the hard-liners? That dark new year of 1991, all I could think of was Regina’s cake. Smashed by tanks, spattered with blood. Our friendship-of-nations fantasy—where was it now?

I wonder if Gorbachev phrased the question this way himself. For he too must have bought into our anthem’s gilded cliché of indomitable friendship—of the “unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics.” What Party ideologue hadn’t?

And yet from its very inception this friendly vision of a permanent Union contained a lurking flaw, a built-in lever for self-destruction. In their nation-building and affirmative-action frenzy, the twenties Bolsheviks had insisted on full equality for hundreds of newly Sovietized ethnic minorities. So—on paper at least—the founding 1922 Union Treaty granted each republic the right to secede, a right maintained in all subsequent constitutions. Each republic possessed its own fully articulated government structure. Paradoxically, such nation-building was meant as a bridge to the eventual merging of nations into a single communist unity. More paradoxical was how aggressively the Party-state fostered ethnic identities and diversity—in acceptable Soviet form—while suppressing any authentic expressions of nationalism.

The post-Stalin leadership had generally been blind to the potential consequences of this paradox. Whatever genuine nationalist flare-ups occurred under Khrushchev and Brezhnev were dismissed as isolated holdovers of bourgeois national consciousness and quickly put down. The response of Gorbachev-generation Party elites to the national question was… What national question? Hadn’t Brezhnev declared such issues solved? The Soviet people were one “international community,” Gorbachev pontificated at a 1986 Party congress. “United in a unity of economic interests, ideological and political aims.” Were this not his real conviction—so I ask myself to this day—would he have risked glasnost (literally “public voicing”) and perestroika (restructuring) in the republics?

“We never expected an upsurge of emotional and ethnic factors,” the supposedly sly Shevardnadze later admitted.

Unexpectedly, the floodgates burst open.

“Armenian-Azeri fighting escalating in Nagorno-Karabakh; Southern Ossetians clashing again with Georgians—twenty dead!” Our friend Sasha Meneev, head of the newly created “nationalities” desk at the liberal Moscow News daily, would update us breathlessly during our times in the capital. “The Gagauz—Christian Turkish minority in Moldavia, right?—seeking full republic status. Ditto Moldavia’s Slavic minority. Crimean Tatars demanding repatriation; Volga Tatars threatening sovereignty over oil reserves…”

“Sooner or later,” one of Gorbachev’s advisers bitterly quipped, “someone is going to declare his apartment an independent state.”

True to form, the mineral secretary, caught between reformers and hard-liners, vacillated, flipped and flopped. Tanks or talks? Repressions or referendums? Desperate to preserve the Union—at least as some species of reformed federation—Gorbachev would try them all. Without success. The biggest blow would come from his largest republic, specifically from his arch-nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, the Russian republic’s populist renegade head. In summer 1990 Yeltsin announced Russia’s sovereignty (not full independence, but close). Resigning from the Communist Party, he roused fellow republic leaders to “take as much sovereignty as they could swallow.”

Now, in the wake of the bloodshed in Vilnius, Yeltsin—true to his form—rushed to Estonia’s Tallinn to loudly support the breakaway Balts. In February 1991, another uproar. On live TV he called on the embattled Gorbachev to resign and transfer control to the collective leadership of the republics. So began Gorbachev’s annus horribilis. And the political war between USSR and Russia. Moscow vs. Moscow.

Could politics get any more surreal?

Nevozmozhno/ neizbezhno. Inevitable/ impossible. Nevozmozhno/ neizbezhno…

This schizophrenic refrain about the prospects of the Union’s explosion ticked through my tired brain as John and I traversed the empire in its last months—days? hours? years?—in 1990 and 1991.

What would happen? Ethnicities commandeered into Soviet kinship by Bolshevik whims—would they go on slaughtering each other inside convoluted borders drawn up by early Soviet cartographers? Or would a tidal wave of Moscow tanks enforce happiness in the big Soviet family?

From one day to the next we couldn’t imagine—any more than we knew whether at any particular nightfall we’d face rancid sauerkraut or be treated to a pathos-drenched feast by a clan of blood-baying nationalists. A world was coming unstitched. We felt helpless, bewildered, our sardine can on wheels caught up in history’s centrifuge. And how different the foods of our fraternal republics tasted to me. The dishes I revered from my childhood’s garish seventies recipe postcard collections on “cuisines of our nations” now conjured not a friendship buffet but a witches’ brew of resentments freshly stirred up by glasnost. Each family of the Soviet fraternity was unhappy after its own fashion. Each stop we made revealed the particular flavor of some tiny nation’s past tragedy, the historical roots of the conflicts engulfing the empire. How little I, the award-winning cookbook author, really knew about our Union of cuisines.

Snapshot from Samarkand, winter of 1991. Everyone here fights over palov (meat pilaf), the Central Asian monodish. The deeper issue? Stunning Timurid-dynasty Samarkand, the tourist pride of Turkic-speaking Soviet Uzbekistan with its blue-tiled fifteenth-century mosques, is in fact a city populated mostly by Farsi-speaking Tajiks.

Pre-revolution this region was a bilingual khanate. People intermarried, ate the same pilaf, and called themselves Sarts. Unlike the Lithuanians (theirs an actual, pre-Soviet country) neither the Tajiks nor Uzbeks ever had anything resembling a separate national consciousness. Not until Stalin, fearing a pan-Turkic insurgence in the late 1920s, split Central Asia (then known as Turkestan) into five Union republics. Obsessive Bolshevik social engineering supplied each with a semifabricated history, a newly codified written language, and freshly minted ethno-identity. Nifty nationhood package aside, Tajikistan got stuck with some scrappy mountains; Uzbekistan drew the gorgeous Tajik cultural centers of Samarkand and Bukhara. Uzbekistan also scored Amir Timur—a.k.a. Tamerlane the warrior king—who was designated an Uzbek national hero. Funny, since Timur was actually a Mongol who fought against the Uzbeks.