Update: Moscow, August 19, 1991. Tanks rumble up the bombastic thrust of Kutuzov Prospect. Soviet TV plays Swan Lake… over and over. Party hard-liners announce control of the government. Gorbachev? Under house arrest at his Crimean dacha. Officially the “state of his health” doesn’t permit him to continue as president. The right-winger vice president Comrade Yanaev is taking over. Comrade Yanaev’s hands tremble visibly at his press conference. Not quite sober for history’s call.

Hello, Avgustovsky putsch—the August coup.

We stare at our television in a seaside suburb of Melbourne, where Mom happens to be visiting me and John from New York.

“Vsyo, eto vsyo,” Mom is crying. “This is the end!”

I keep dialing my father in Moscow. And getting through.

“Da, putsch, putsch…” Dad giggles sardonically.

“Ma, Ma,” I keep reasoning, nine thousand miles away from the scenes. “If things were that bad they’d have cut the international phone lines!”

They’d have cut Yeltsin’s phone too. Instead, there he is in all his bearish populism, defiant atop a tank outside the White House, the Russian parliament building. In popular elections that June he’d become Russia’s first freely elected leader in a thousand years. Now he rallies Muscovites to resist the takeover. Crowds cheer him on. Citizens weep and complain openly for imperialist cameras. The plotters’ script has been botched: Is this any way to run a putsch?

Over the next two days the coup goes phhht, and in such a pratfall style that to this day Russian conspiracy theorists question what really happened. Things move at shocking speed after this. Yeltsin bans the Communist Party. More republics head for the exit. Gorbachev clings on in this crumbling world, still devoutly for the Union, even in its now hobbled form. The friendship of nations: no longer only a cherished ideological trope for Comrade Gorbachev. Without it he’s out of a job.

“I’m not going to just float like a lump of shit in an ice hole,” he informs Yeltsin in December, after 90 percent of Ukrainians icily vote to secede from his Union.

That December of 1991 my Derridarian and I returned for our final road trip—south via Ukraine to the rebellious Georgian subrepublic of Abkhazia, wedged in between Georgia and the southern border of Russia. What with the chaos and gasoline shortage, nobody wanted to drive us. Finally we found Yura, a thirty-something geology professor with a Christ-like ginger beard. “I refuse to give bribes—out of principle,” he informed us quietly. This was bad news. On the plus side: his rattletrap Zhiguli operated on both gas and propane, slightly increasing our chances of actual motion. The propane stank up the car with a rotten-egg smell. On the road Yura pensively cracked pine nuts with his big yellow teeth; his cassette tape whined with semiunderground sixties songs about taiga forests and campfires. Geologists—they were their own subculture.

Yura’s Zhiguli was a metaphor for the disintegrating state of our Soyuz. Innocent tourist side jaunts metastasized into days-long quests for accelerator components. Every fill-her-up of black market gas cost five monthly salaries. Meantime all around us they were renaming the landscape. Kharkov in Ukraine was no more; it was Kharkiv now, in Ukrainian. Lenin and Marx streets clanged into dustbins.

By the time we sputtered into Abkhazia’s civil-war-torn Black Sea capital of Sukhumi, I no longer knew whom to side with in ethnic conflicts, whom to trust. I now put my faith in anyone who put out a hot meal. I trusted and loved the wiry young Abkhazian driver lent to us by the local writers’ union to help fix our sardine can on wheels. The kid proudly took us to his parents’ village house for a meal. We ate bitterish, gamy wild duck shot that morning—smothered in a thick, tomatoey, fiery sauce. It might have been the most memorable dish of my life. Then the excellent youngster stole Yura’s last gas canister.

To Sukhumi we carried an introduction from our Moscow acquaintance Fazil Iskander, the greatest living Abkhazian writer. During an electrical blackout we called at the darkened flat of Alexei Gogua, chief of the Abkhazian Writers Union. We found the gray-haired Gogua writing in his pajama pants by a flickering candle. What terrible straits we’d landed him in! Abkhaz hospitality demanded a resplendent welcome. We were visiting foreign writers—sent by Fazil, the Abkhaz Mark Twain. But Sukhumi’s infrastructure was shattered. Which is how a Zhiguli convoy of separatist culturati accompanied us to the well-lit country house of a prominent winemaker.

Shortly before seven p.m. I slipped out to the kitchen.

“Due to the situation which has evolved…”

The inevitable/impossible was finally happening. At seven p.m. on Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was giving his resignation speech.

The situation had developed further and fatally for him. Several weeks earlier, his thorn-in-the-side Yeltsin had secretly met leaders of Ukraine and Byelorussia at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in a Byelorussian forest. The troika’s advisers and lawyers cooked up a devilish plan: As founding members of the 1922 Union Treaty, the three republics had the power to annul it—to simply dissolve the USSR! In its place they formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Byelorussian herbal vodka lubricated the signing. Before bothering to inform Gorbachev, Yeltsin telephoned the news to George H. W. Bush. (“Dear George,” he addressed him now.) At a subsequent meeting in Kazakhstan, eight more republics went ex-Union. Clearly Gorbachev was finished.

And yet his TV announcement caught me by total surprise, there with my uneaten spoonful of Abkhazian corn mush. Reading from a paper, often awkwardly, the last leader of Sovetsky Soyuz spoke for ten minutes. He lauded his own democratic reforms. Admitted mistakes. Took credit for the elimination of a totalitarian system and for “newly acquired spiritual and political freedom.” About the new freedom and such he wasn’t fabulizing exactly, but the ladies around me gently waved him off. His phrases rang meaningless, false—simply because after all his flip-flopping, who’d ever believe him?

The USSR’s dying minutes still replay in my mind in dazed, elegiac slow motion.

I recall the exact words that Gorbachev mangled in his crass provincial accent (so at odds with his suave international image). I taste the salty cheese in the corn mush, inhale the kitchen’s garlicky pungencies; I hear the thudding splat of a pomegranate heavy with seeds that—another metaphor for the Imperium?—fell on the kitchen floor and cracked open.

The Abkhaz women had been watching impassively for the most part, chins propped in hands. But as the resignee thanked his supporters and wished his countrymen best, the lady of the house whispered:

“Zhalko, a vse-taki zhalko.”

“Zhalko,” echoed the others: “A shame, a shame, in the end.”

“Zhalko,” I murmured along, not sure what we were wistful about. The sudden humanity of a tone-deaf reformer—hero abroad, villain at home? The finis, the official, irrevocable curtain falling on our fairy-tale communal lie, the utopian social experiment for which millions of lives had been brutally sacrificed—now signing off in the most undramatic fashion imaginable? Empires! They weren’t supposed to gurgle away in ten badly colorized minutes. The locomotive carrying citizens into a brighter tomorrow wasn’t meant to just run out of gas and die in the middle of nowhere, like one more woebegone Zhiguli.

As Gorbachev later wrote in his memoirs, he got no farewell ceremony, no phone calls from presidents of former Soviet republics. They didn’t believe in the friendship of nations. Were there any murmurs of “a shame” from them at the end?