“[An] unforgettable memoir” (Boston Globe) that provides a window into the wildly divergent nations that once comprised the Soviet Union, from a former NPR reporterNot with a bang, but with a quiet, ten-minute address on Christmas Day, 1991: this is how the Soviet Union met its end. But in the wake of that one deceptively calm moment, conflict and violence soon followed. Some of the emergent new countries began to shed totalitarianism while other sought to...