Some of us knew what was coming.

The date I knew the Soviet Union was going to die was on my birthday February 24, 1988 when the anti-Armenian pogrom in Sumgait, Azerbaijan broke out. I told all my b-school classmates that day that the Soviet empire is finished because the nationalism genie is out of the bottle, and they'll never be able to put it back in. Wait a couple or three to four years and it'll all break apart.

I was in a campground on Lake Balaton, Hungary in August 1988 when thousands of Ossies from East Germany were in their Trabis waiting for Austria to open its border with Hungary. The Romanian refugee boyfriend of the daughter of the campground's owner spoke good English, French and Italian so we could understand each other. He said, "just wait, this whole system is on the verge of collapse", talking about all the Soviets' east European Communist mafia satellites.

Living in Milan, Italy from September 1989 you could feel the cracks widening, that eastern Europe had taken an accelerant that was out of Gorbachev's control. I could feel it in the ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1986. The open disdain of the Serbs for the Bosnian Muslims was far more openly expressed than when I'd been there in 1980. Again, once the nationalism genie was out, there was no way the communist system could put it back in.

Now they're back with a different mafia with a flag business model, but with all the old Bolshevik "active measures" disinformation warfare updated for a digital society. Putin started his genocidal war against Ukraine on my birthday. So I declared war on Putin with my only sphere of competence in combat: words.