“THE dying process has begun”, wrote Alexander Kugel, a journalist and theatre critic, a few months after the bloody Bolshevik revolution of 1917. “Everything that we see now is just part of the agony. Bolshevism is the death of Russia. And a body the size of Russia cannot die in one hour. It groans.” The agony lasted over 70 years. On December 25th 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, on television, relinquished his duties as the last president of the USSR. The hammer and sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin without fanfare. The empire expired with a sigh.

There was almost no blood on the streets of Moscow that year; the only deaths were those of three young men killed on the night of the failed coup in August 1991. (Today almost no one in Russia remembers their names or celebrates their sacrifice.) The disintegration of the Soviet empire was “relatively peaceful and orderly”, as Dmitri Trenin writes in a sober and analytical book, “Post-Imperium”. It could certainly have been worse, but the collapse unleashed civil and ethnic wars on the periphery—in the Caucasus, Moldova and the most deadly one, Tajikistan. Estimates vary, but about 200,000 people are believed to have died in the post-Soviet conflicts.

“8 Pieces of Empire” by Lawrence Scott Sheets, an American reporter who spent 20 years covering the post-Soviet conflagrations for Reuters and National Public Radio, is a powerful reminder of how relative the words “peaceful and orderly” really were. His book takes the reader inside some of these wars, which were largely ignored by a world preoccupied with the reunification of Germany and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Different in genre and scope, both books are nonetheless shaped by personal experience.

Mr Trenin, who heads the Carnegie Moscow Centre, served the empire as a military officer in East Germany. Mr Sheets, who now works for the International Crisis Group in South Caucasus, went to the Soviet Union to study Russian in 1987 and returned shortly before Mr Gorbachev's final presidential speech, hoping to become a foreign correspondent. His book is an invaluable eyewitness account of the traumas of the Soviet collapse told through the lives of those who were caught up in it and often buried under it. The book is written with a disarming honesty, sympathy and humility.

The “pieces” in the title refers not only to geography but to people who were scattered: a Bulgakov-loving, rebellious racketeer in Leningrad; a Russian officer left behind at a forlorn border post between Armenia and Turkey, guarding a foreign frontier with another foreign state and trying to flog snake venom to passing journalists; an ageing former Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, who helped to end the cold war but failed to prevent a hot one from starting in his native Georgia, which he came to rule in the 1990s.

Stalin's birthplace, the “wine-and-song-filled Georgia”, was one of the first to descend into anarchy. In 1992 two gangsters (both with artistic backgrounds) pushed out a crazy nationalist president (himself a former writer) and roamed into an autonomous Abkhazia on the pretext of having to guard passenger trains with tanks. Soon, a nasty ethnic war consumed this former Soviet playground. It was a “war that nobody started”, as a Georgian put it at the time. It lacked a plan, strategy, front line or regular armies, but it had plenty of vandalism and ethnic hatred.

The tragic absurdity of the war comes alive in the detail. A bunch of armed men calling themselves “knights” and “guards” downed chacha (moonshine) while they waited in the sweltering heat for a pilot to fly them and their tethered lamb to Abkhazia. “Sweaty with gregariousness, they act like they're going to a party,” writes Mr Sheets. “Or a funeral pyre for the empire.” A few weeks later he flew back from Abkhazia on another rickety plane, this time overloaded with zinc coffins and lucky refugees jammed in the toilet.

Russia's intervention in 1993 resulted in Georgia's defeat. But the wounds left by the wars never healed, in part because they continued to be prodded by all sides. They were reopened in 2008, when Russia attacked NATO-aspiring Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The consequences of Russia's own two wars with Chechnya, north of the Caucasus Mountains, have also been grievous. Mr Sheets ends his book with a description of one of the most horrific episodes of those wars: the school siege in Beslan in 2004, when more than 1,000 people, mostly children, were taken hostage by terrorists. In the worst Soviet tradition, the state lied about the number of hostages and the terrorists' demands. After two days government forces stormed the school, using tanks and flame-throwers. Mr Sheets met hostages emerging from the inferno, wounded, filthy and in shock. A wailing teenage boy tried to call his dead sister on Mr Sheets's mobile phone.

“Feeling at best an interloper and at worst a tragedy speculator, I put my equipment away,” he says. Writing for nearly 20 years about people being killed “is a bit like exposing oneself to radiation”; both mind and body are affected. Today Mr Sheets works to prevent more conflicts. It is in this capacity that he warns darkly in the last paragraph of the book that the Russian empire could easily fragment still further.

This might seem odd when so many are worried about Russia's neo-imperialist rhetoric. Yet as Mr Trenin convincingly argues, Russia is not a neo-imperialist state, but a post-imperialist one that lacks both vision and appeal, and the economic and human resources for any expansion. With a shrinking population, that accounts for only 2% of the human race, and a declining share of former Soviet trade, “the Russian empire is over, never to return.” Mr Trenin sees Russia's policy as pragmatic and responsive, perhaps transferring his own sensibility onto the government. But he remains honest in his analysis. The current system which is based, he says, on economic growth without development, capitalism without democracy and great-power policies without international appeal, is unsustainable. Russia's main threat is not to the outside world, but to itself.