Twenty years ago next month, a group of students gathered in the Soviet city of Voronezh for a birthday dinner. As well as Russians, there were South Ossetians and Georgians round the table – all friends back then. Although the shops were emptying of food as the Soviet economy slowly fell apart, the hosts had somehow laid on a feast of Georgian dumplings and Armenian cognac. Later, as the party overflowed into the corridor of the student hostel, two Russians with guitars belted out a rock song by a Soviet group, Kino, that captured the mood of the time: “Change! Our hearts demand it/ Change! Our eyes demand it/ In our tears, in our laughter/ In the pulse in our veins/ We’re waiting for change.”

It was the 23rd birthday of Oleg and Albert Dryaev, Ossetian twins who were my roommates as I spent a year as one of a group of British students of Russian in Voronezh, a million-strong city 300 miles south of Moscow. At this time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms were at their height. The optimistic mood that night reflected the feeling that change really was on the way. Within months, we would witness the first semi-free elections for seven decades – accelerating a process that within three years would sweep away the Soviet Union itself.