“Wow,” I thought after I collected my jaw off the floor and said goodbye. “He’s got the Thing. He’s got it bad.”

I should know. I’ve had the Thing most of my life. The Soviet Thing: an addictive mixture of wonder and disgust evoked by all aspects of that communist empire.

The Thing used to rule whole sectors of our military, academia and media. Of course, it suffered a pretty bad blow 20 years ago this month, when the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost. But it’s still powerful, maybe now more than ever, as an unacknowledged absence in American life. We live in a country with a USSR-size hole in its soul.

Like Ronnie Dunn, I come from Texas, a place where people used to run for city council on their anti-commie credentials. Better Dead Than Red could have been our state slogan. The summer of 1984, after making his possibly-not-accidental gaffe that he’d begin bombing Russia “in five minutes,” President Ronald Reagan descended on my hometown for his joyful renomination. The Dallas RNC was a festival of Cold War hard-assery.

In that atmosphere, rebellion was easy: just pop open a textbook and learn the Cyrillic alphabet. That’s what I’d been doing at the only high school in Dallas to offer Russian. I figured I’d become a foreign correspondent like the guys whose names graced the USSR sections in bookstores: Harrison Salisbury, David Satter, Hedrick Smith. Go to the Soviet Union, decode mysteries, publish fat tome. Easy!

And then I actually went there. Inspired by the Юs and Яs I was tossing off, my grandparents booked us on a five-city group tour of the USSR. The summer of 1985, we boarded a plane for Leningrad.

I found everything I wanted — a world apart, bleak but exotic. Our first hotel room overlooked an unfinished construction pit filled with dirty water. Television showed factories, Mikhail Gorbachev and ballet. Outside the windows of our tour bus, the grim signage flattered my primitive Russian: a book store was called BOOK STORE; the restaurants, RESTAURANT. We were the wards of Intourist, the state (and only) tourism agency, and our guide was chirpy and sweet in English. But I could spark apparatchik contempt in her face whenever I mangled her native tongue, which was often.

The Soviets paid their flat-footed American tourists (code name, “Dear Guests!”) way more attention than we deserved. Every meal was an alcohol-laden banquet, in between which Intourist arranged endless cultural displays and/or “exchanges” with wincing local journalists. Away from our minders, people swarmed us. In Yerevan, friendly Armenians invited us to parties, wheedled us out of Eurythmics cassettes, and — in the case of the young ladies — tried to get into our pants. In Kiev, a sad college student approached me to practice English. I was obsessed with finding propaganda souvenirs, so he took me to a lonely shop, sighing as I snatched up GLORY TO THE WORKER posters.

When I got back to Dallas, I missed all that Soviet attention horribly. Then I realized that it was still all around me, if fainter. After all, the Soviets had missiles dedicated to my hometown, a place that, if you asked me, had nothing better going for it than some new parking ramps downtown. Our parking ramps could be the start of Armageddon! They were special. Yet they also remained unexploded.

The Soviets engaged us on our favorite terms, ideological. In the shining light of their competitive fixation, anything we did right was a moral victory. Just watch this archival footage of Richard Nixon debating Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in 1959. Nixon is bragging about color TV cameras. And he’s having the time of his life.

Middle Eastern terrorists are disorganized; the Chinese have an annoying habit of making all our stuff. The Soviets stood apart but hated us like pros. How can you ever get over an enemy like that?

The Supreme Soviet voted itself out of existence on Dec. 26, 1991. I don’t recall caring any more than the rest of America. We won. Not only was the USSR a has-been, but it had also devolved into 15  countries whose names I wouldn’t have recognized except that I’d been to some of them. I’d stopped studying Russian years before — the trip had the perverse effect of making me realize the language was actually hard. But then immigrants from former Soviet lands started showing up. They were Afghanistan War veterans, artists, just ordinary guys overstaying their visas. They told me little scraps of jokes in Russian that I could understand. They introduced me to underground Soviet rock I could’ve heard in 1985 if I’d had a clue.

And so I started studying Russian again. In 1998, I made the first of many trips back to the former Soviet Union, to Yerevan. The party town I remembered had been replaced by a dark maze of casinos and starving dogs. In Kiev, Nike — or was it Adidas? — emblazoned the window of the old propaganda shop. I was finally a correspondent, not of static mysteries, but of breathless, murky, heart-rending change. But my bosses didn’t know exactly where I was. “What did you learn in the USSR?” the CEO of a major-market public broadcaster asked when I returned.

What better sign that we miss the USSR than our total refusal to learn what that mess of nations is called now? Sometimes I’ll meet smart, usually trilingual kids in a former Soviet republic — say, Moldova — who’ll ask what story about their country interests Americans. How can I tell them the truth, “None”? If Moldova wants half a nanosecond of our attention, it might pick a better name, such as that of its biggest shopping center, Malldova. Then get back in the news-from-confusing-places line behind its 14 siblings.

What we crave is menace, and only Russia occasionally fits the bill. (Bonus — still easy to find on a map!). True, its citizens just seem to want ordinary things like matching towels, fair elections and the rule of law. But fortunately, Russia’s leaders don’t (they prefer matching jet décor). If anyone misses the Cold War more than we do these days, it’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. When he goes head-to-head with Sen. John McCain, it’s just like old times.

Yeah, old times. Dangerous. Surreal. And all the more so because we can’t even remember what it was originally about. We only know that at some point, something bad made us feel good about our place in the world, and now it’s gone.

By the end of my interview with Ronnie Dunn about Soviet art, he was openly regretting it. “I kinda don’t want the secret out, to be honest with you,” he said when I asked if he could share his passion with the country music world.  Oddly, though, he keeps talking about it. He just doesn’t link to any of these stories on his website or fan pages. I don’t blame him. Many of his fans are as politically conservative as he is, and I imagine he has a healthy respect for the limits of what they can absorb. Collecting art might be sissy. Collecting Soviet art? There’s still room for something traitorous in that vintage hobby.

In his latest New Yorker piece, David Remnick writes, “This month, Russians will commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union with almost universal silence.” Remnick has an A-league case of the Soviet Thing, but for once, he’s wrong. Whether they’re singing old protest songs or penning obscene new ones, Russians have been talking about today’s anniversary constantly. How could they not? They lived through the bizarre nightmare of the USSR. We’re the ones who haven’t woken up yet.

Nine years ago, Grebenshikov burst onto the Western scene in a way that no Russian singer had done before or since. It was at the end of rock’s “We Are the World” feel-good period, and BG became the designated perestroika poster boy. Long-haired, brooding and fluent in English, Grebenshikov appeared on the front page of the Village Voice and in the pages of Rolling Stone, New York and Mother Jones, and was the subject of “The Long Way Home,” a documentary by filmmaker Michael Apted (“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Gorky Park”). The film shows Grebenshikov’s struggle to record his album “Radio Silence” with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. With most of its songs in English, “Radio Silence” was to be Grebenshikov’s big Western debut.

Despite all the hype, “Radio Silence” unfortunately remained true to its name. Now, when Grebenshikov travels in the United States, it’s almost as secretly as the illegal concerts he once played in the Soviet Union. His shows are only publicized within the country’s Russian immigrant community, and most of his music is only available by mail order, in Russian bookstores or in RealAudio on the Web. Before the start of a recent U.S. tour, Grebenshikov sat backstage at a Chicago nightclub smoking and strumming a guitar. Gone were the American promoters and journalists, replaced by a jet-lagged and nervous but devoted Russian entourage. Grebenshikov was still unmistakably a rocker — he’d chopped off most of his hair and dyed the remains blue, the same color as his eyes. But at 44, he also looked older and wiser than most veterans of the genre.

“I see myself primarily as an artist working within the confines of the Russian language,” he says. Within America’s English-only rock empire, those confines make fame impossible. But they’ve helped Grebenshikov, of late, to produce some of the best work of his 25-year career.

As a youth in Leningrad, Grebenshikov spent most of his time tracking down smuggled copies of Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and anything else he could get his hands on. “I heard the songs of Dylan, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, and wondered why no one in Russia was writing like that,” he said.

He bought a guitar, and soon he was incorporating the standard blues chords of American rock ‘n’ roll into his Russian folk songs. The result was music that was, by Western standards, unusual — and by Soviet standards, utterly immoral. Calling themselves Aquarium, Grebenshikov and a group of friends began performing in apartments and warehouses, sometimes escaping through the window when police came to break things up. They used the instruments they had on hand — a cello, a flute, bongos, a few guitars — to create the “poetic rock” sound Grebenshikov sought. Using primitive equipment, they recorded illegal cassettes and sent them out into the world, where they were dubbed hand-to-hand across the Soviet Union’s 11 time zones. Fans began making pilgrimages to Grebenshikov’s communal apartment, where they left reams of legendary graffiti in the stairway: BG was an angel, a savior, even Bog (God) himself.

All this was in spite of the fact that Grebenshikov’s songs were often indecipherable. That’s the irony of his language barrier in the West — Russian audiences often don’t understand what he’s talking about any more than American audiences do. In “Sonnet,” for example, one of Aquarium’s early songs, he croons the poetry of his early childhood friend Anatoly Gunitsky in soulful, minor notes accompanied by a haunting cello line:

The dancing goblet looks like a hook
Around which diamonds are strewn
But I didn’t kiss you even once
My disgusting, legless friend.

After dismal sales and a depressing tour in the West, Grebenshikov eventually went home and fell back in love with Russian language and music. Through the early ’90s, he wrote a series of simple, hypnotic songs that needed no translation. His recent concerts in America drew Russians of all ages, including a younger generation that doesn’t remember his underground days. Instead of scrawling graffiti in his stairwell, fans now write long testimonials to BG on the Web.

But, like the country he once aspired to conquer, Grebenshikov has a serious aversion to looking backwards. He’s declared an end to his “Russian folk” period and turned to other genres, especially blues. His 1997 album “Lilith” was recorded with members of the Band, and although some of the songs fall into generic rock ruts, Grebenshikov does at times reach a funky new level of expression. More recently, he’s released a charity album of Tibetan Buddhist mantras, “Refuge,” with percussionist Gabrielle Roth.

After being a student of Western rock for years, Grebenshikov may now have something to teach pop fans everywhere. When he performs in Russian for audiences who don’t understand his language, he says, there are still certain moments that captivate everyone, regardless of their native tongue.

“There are things that are universal enough that every person who listens to it will perk up their ears,” he says. “Nobody looks at it broadly enough to create that type of music consistently. But I know that it exists.”

“Ohhh, who did it?” a man in a tuxedo moaned. “None of us! It just wafted over!”

I’d come to Oxford a couple weeks earlier through a work-exchange program, the kind that lures students to Europe with the promise of legal employment, a virtual vacation abroad. The invitation extended only through the first six months after graduation, so I’d flown across the Atlantic right out of college. Years before I had briefly visited Oxford and longed to return to its confusing spoke of streets, yellowed stone and dew-covered pastures. After majoring in English, and seeing as many BBC documentaries as I could, I figured I knew everything there was about life in England — especially that it could be awful, in a fortifying sort of way. Of course, I had no idea.

Work-exchange programs exist because students, it is thought, need to learn about life in foreign lands — therefore students, of all people, deserve special dispensation from the world’s complex immigration and employment laws. But there is one problem with the equation. Of all travelers, students are probably the least equipped with the sense of humor required to survive in countries with bad food and double-digit unemployment rates. I needed a few more years on the job market to offset the very earnest effects of my education. Landing fresh and green in England, I did not find England, or myself, funny at all.

Back in the banquet hall, the sleeves of my white catering shirt were stained with red wine, green butter and sweat. During a break between courses, I milled around with the other waiters in the kitchen. “They just eat till they frow up,” one woman muttered. “It’s disgusting.” I found myself talking with an American my age who was headed to Glasgow the next day to study political science. Lucky bastard. I told him about my new day job, filing and typing for an academic program that studied the plight of refugees. He pointed a half-eaten piece of melba toast at me. “What is the definition of a refugee?” he demanded.

I shivered with joy. Here was an invitation to the sort of pointless intellectualizing I’d relished just weeks before on my own campus. “From what I can ascertain, it’s anyone forced to leave their native country for any reason,” I said.

“How about, then, the Jewish diaspora in relation to the present state of Israel …” he started, but couldn’t finish because it was time for me to clear the coffee and serve port and sauterne.

I got nine pounds for my three hours of banqueting — money I desperately needed as I waited for my end-of-the-month paycheck. I hadn’t been able to shake an obvious association between British currency and weight. Nine pounds seemed like a lot of money, a hefty sack of change that could help me do all the British things I wanted to do: see plays, ride trains, buy Yardley soaps. It got me, instead, less than a week’s worth of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. I begged the temp agency for more banquet jobs just for the variety the leftovers gave my diet.

I’d also heard other work exchangers say they planned to stay longer if they could find under-the-table work at a pub or restaurant. Six months were the limits of our horizons, stamped on our passport, registered with the police and Her Royal Highness’ Secretary of Employment. Staying wasn’t an option anymore, I just didn’t have the special something to make it in England’s underground food-service economy.

In Dorset-on-Thames, I drew the wrath of a demonic headwaiter by getting fingerprints on the polished silverware. I broke a glass before a pubful of thick-headed Welsh golfers. I could not uncork bottles. At Magdalen College, my hands trembled as I poured coffee before smirking portraits of Addison and Steele. I had been assigned to stand at the college president’s door and open it when his guests arrived, but they’d remained, perplexed, on the other side while I tugged and tugged at the unyielding oak slab. Finally, the president had swept by and pulled it open with a flick of his wrist. The wrought-iron handle turned just like a doorknob, I marveled. How modern.

At my day job, meanwhile, I cataloged articles about Ethiopian Jews starving themselves from woe; about Mozambican children forced to see their parents murdered; about outbreaks of pellagra in Africa caused by incompetent aid administrators. “More refugees,” the secretaries in the crowded academic office would sigh with every coup d’itat abroad.

“Home” was not much relief. I lived for a while in a house with a Pakistani family of nine, who squashed themselves together so I could have my own room. Though they made a tidy illicit profit, I felt bad about taking up so much space and hid in my room, listening to BBC Radio and reading “Emma.” Really, I did not read novels anymore, I freebased them. Sometimes a violent thwacking would disturb my junkie stupor. It was either someone breaking into a car by the factory next door or my drifting neighbors on the canal doing aerobics atop their houseboats.

Each day I’d walk to work through a graveled alley by the railroad, the sort of patch of nowhere that could be anywhere. If I squinted a great deal, and blocked out the sight of Gothic spires, I found I could imagine myself at home in Texas, listening to trains rumble across the flat landscape. It seemed the most pathetic thing of all, to be homesick in the very country I’d dreamed of when I had been home and thoroughly sick of it. But the alley still lured me. One morning I was nearly blindsided by a little boy running out his back gate with a school bag. “G’bye, Mum!” he shouted and sped on, dodging puddles full of sky. I saw every smeared gray foot of the road in front of me clearly for the first time. To the boy, this was the most familiar place on earth, I realized. It would always be the center of his private map of the world.

It was then, somehow, that I finally got the hang of England, the dampness, the brown food, the wretched wages. I had no more banquet jobs to help me get by — a perky agency representative said I seemed frustrated by catering. But I lost my frenzied urges to see every manuscript in the British Museum and own every Laura Ashley dress on the rack. I did the washing and watched the telly.

Soon frost rimmed Oxford’s every cobweb and gargoyle, suddenly giving the winter mornings a radioactive nostalgic glow. During my last week, the temp agency called me and asked, out of the blue, if I could do another banquet.

The dons at St. John’s College were dining with American oil men. I arrived to find the wait staff almost outnumbering the dozen or so diners. We cleared some plates, poured some wine and then had very little to do. The head butler, a serious-looking man in a green frock coat, scowled at us and strode out of the kitchen. I waited, with a familiar sense of ineptitude, to be dismissed.

But the butler reappeared with a 15-year-old bottle of Beaujolais. He poured us each a glass. “Plenty more where that comes from,” he said. “Cellar goes all the way back under St. Giles.” The St. Giles Road outside was as wide as a city block.

The butler sipped from his glass, flashed us a poker face and pushed through the swinging doors back to the dining room. He had been laughing all night long without cracking a smile. The Beaujolais tasted mellow and sweet, and the kitchen staff would not let us stop drinking until long after the banquet was over. Oxford was frozen and empty when I finally stumbled home over streets I’d never known were stuffed with wine.