It has been almost thirty years, the span of a generation, since the Soviet Union disappeared virtually overnight.

Along with it went the Soviet empire. Eastern European countries that had been vassals of Moscow since the end of World War II became independent and free. Other European empires had come to an end a few decades earlier, only after Britain, France, and Portugal fought with atrocious brutality to resist nationalist liberation forces. In contrast, the Russian elite gave up their colonies over the course of little more than a few months, without a single shot being fired. The Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union’s military alliance of Eastern European states, simply dissolved.

In the Soviet Union itself, nationalist passions, led by the Baltics, swept through the federation’s fifteen constituent republics. By 1991, they had all become independent, too. Russia was left on its own, shrunken, deprived of large expanses of its seashore, and politically separated even from its Slavic cousins in Belarus and Ukraine.