Descending into Lenin’s tomb, which sits like a squat, truncated pyramid in Kremlin Square, marked a literal low point of my business trip to Moscow in January 1990. Emerging from the gloom to resume my meetings however, I was still the optimistic American.

No natural light penetrates beyond the first level of the mausoleum, and by the time you stand at the bottom and snake around the glass coffin to stare at the well-preserved founder of the Soviet Union, who died in 1924, the intended affect of macabre awe has been produced.

Staring at Lenin’s waxy face, I stumbled in the dim light, more from the weight of history than the physical scene. An armed soldier stepped toward me, but saw I had no bad intention.

It was shortly after the fall of the Wall that I met a Russian in San Francisco touted as a leading example of perestroika. Andrei and I hit it off, and quickly formed a joint venture.

The premise with him, and my Silicon Valley partners was to “pour the foundation for an ecologically and ethically sound market in Russia with America’s former superpower enemy.”

Our motto was to “combine the best with the best to the benefit of both former enemies.” It seems absurd now. After all, what we got was the worst with the worst in Putin and Trump. Not to mention a regional repeat of World War I trench warfare after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But I still feel there was a chance to move in another direction at that time.

Before my trip to Russia I met or talked with the heads of some of the biggest companies in northern California at the time. For example Ford Aerospace executives, a few who worked on the Explorer, the first American satellite after Sputnik. Or Saul Price, the founder of Price Club, which later became Costco.

The stereotypes of the Russian peoples’ plight at the time were true. As one of the first Americans to stay with Russians in their homes, I saw toilet paper stacked floor to ceiling in a closet of the spacious apartment of my well-connected host.

Another basic premise was that both the USSR and the US were on the verge of collapse, and that America needed an infusion of Russian spiritual and intellectual resources as much as Russians needed material goods and education about how a market worked.

My mother, a fervent anticommunist, used to say, “When the Russians finally throw off the chains of communism, we Americans will be there to help them build a democracy and market.” It went in one ear and out the other by the time I was 13. But something must have been operating, because there I was, in Russia, acting on my mother’s vision.

Indeed, it was as though it had gone from mother’s mouth to Russian ears. Everywhere I went, people in all walks of life, from former boxers to museum directors, treated me as if I was the leading edge of a wave of Americans coming to help them recover from the dead-end of communism.

My epic fail came to mind after reading Rafael Behr’s latest column, which ends:

“Maybe the US constitution will withstand assault by MAGA authoritarianism. Maybe the model of rules-based, globalised free trade isn’t lost forever. Just maybe. But also maybe the fall of American democracy is a looming geopolitical shock equivalent in scale to the collapse of the USSR.”

There’s no maybe about it. And the fall of American democracy isn’t a “looming” geopolitical shock. It has been reverberating since Donald Trump was elected the second time, after a Biden interregnum that failed to heed the foreshocks of the first Trump presidency.

With 20/20 hindsight, the massive earthquake of Trump redux along the fault lines of American democracy appears inevitable. But the real rupture was an internal collapse that occurred 35 years ago. I knew by the spring of 1990 the dreadful direction things were going to take, in America and Russia.

Right away, the hubris of American exceptionalism effectively green-lighted Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. Bush Senior wanted a quick and clean war to display America’s global dominance, and to battlefield test new weapon systems, from laser-guided bombs to stealth fighter-jets.

Bush got a “glorious victory.” As many as 200,000 Iraqis died from direct or indirect injuries, while the US combat deaths were 149.

But it came at the cost of the American soul. Though a decade of strutting triumphalism would follow the collapse of the USSR, the Persian Gulf War was the last straw for the American spirit.

I went into a funk after the war. Having endured cycles of depression in my 20’s, I knew it wasn’t depression. Having foreseen the internal collapse of America paralleling the external collapse of the Soviet Union, it wasn’t despair either.

Weeks later, walking the hills of South San Francisco Bay after an intense meditation that completely quieted the mind, the question arose again: What is this funk?

It’s the only time in my life I heard a voice that I’m sure didn’t come from my own head. “You’re in mourning,” it said in a rather exasperated tone.

Instantly I felt the relief of seeing the thing that had beset me, and having the right word for it. Immediately however I asked: What am I mourning?

“You’re mourning the death of your nation’s soul,” came the instantaneous response.

In 35 years the truth of it has never wavered. The United States collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union. It’s just taken that long for it to fully and tangibly manifest.

Martin LeFevre

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