What was it like to live at the end of the Cold War? While Francis Fukuyama mulled Kojève, Hegel, and the end of history, a KGB officer in Dresden was lamenting his leaders’ surrender and would later proclaim the fall of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” A Russian living in that country’s vast eastern territories experienced a dismantling of the state services, which, however imperfect, had guaranteed a basic standard of living—and a dismantling