The year 1991 began with fearful apprehension. There would be changes, but what would they bring? Would there be violence? For many people, food supply was becoming problematic. Gorbachev’s tack to the right in late 1990 led to killings in Lithuania and Latvia. Western governments clucked in distress but were clueless, as recent disclosures confirm. The Ethnic Conflict Genie, suppressed since 1918, sprang from its bottle: Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians, Tadjiks, Ossetians, Balts, Armenians and Azerbaijanis all faced conflict, ranging from standoff to outright bloodshed. Westerners fail to understand the problems of a woeful ecology, a chaotic tax system coupled with institutional corruption, and the 25 million Russians living in fourteen former republics, ominously called "the near abroad." Having said all that, the story of the end of the USSR is not that it ended so badly, but that its people began so determinedly, in fits and starts, to build their lives anew.