For me, the decline of Russia deepens with every bribe I have to hand over

Last night I woke up three times and paid three bribes. In dollars only. I was travelling by train, as one does, from Tbilisi in Georgia to Baku in Azerbaijan. It was the normal thing: angry bangings on the compartment door at the dead of night from men in round military caps the size of bandstands.

The first bribe I paid was to a Georgian soldier, angry that I didn't have a visa. No, I didn't actually need a visa, and, yes, I had been able to enter the country four days earlier without one. But all the same if the year is 1999 and you are a Georgian border guard faced with a man who speaks only 10 words of bad Russian and you are in a position to expel him from a train at 3am - and force him to spend a freezing night on the tracks in the company of wild dogs - well, handing over some dollars might be the only answer.

The second bribe was paid under very similar circumstances, except that this time it went to an Azerbaijani soldier whose cap was even vaster than that of his Georgian counterpart. He seemed to be angry that my passport bore evidence of a prior trip to the number one enemy, Armenia, and once again the only solution was dollars. (The third bribe was to a man whose identity I never discovered. With hindsight I believe he may have been trying to offer me a cup of tea. By this stage reaching for my wallet had become a habit.)

Sharing my compartment, meanwhile, was a sweet old lady in horn-rimmed glasses who kept trying to compensate for my ever decreasing supply of dollars by offering me gifts: crunchy apples from the orchards of the Caucasus, for example, and cakes baked from home-made flour and honey. A true citizen of the USSR, she was a Russian who had been born in Georgia but now lived in Azerbaijan. While young men in camouflage jackets were shouting for money, she was politely asking whether I had read the works of Mikhail Lermontov. I suddenly longed for the return of the Soviet empire.

It had been a similar experience earlier in the week when I arrived in Georgia on the train from Armenia. On that occasion a couple of soldiers were in the act of dragging me out of the train, when an unexpected Revolution of the Common People broke out in the carriage. My fellow passengers literally wrestled my passport out of the soldiers' hands and then sent them packing. "You are safe with us," they said, escorting me back to my seat.

What a far cry from when I first travelled into the USSR by train, just more than a decade ago. Then, even in a place as remote as the border with Mongolia, blond men with long coats and icy cold blue eyes put stamps in foreigners' passports with meticulous correctness. Ten years later, here in the southernmost extremities of the old empire - south even of the main ridge of the Caucasus mountains - I find myself scarcely able to recognise the wreckage that has been left behind.

Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis will, of course, point out that Russia was never meant actually to get beyond the Caucasus anyway, and I cannot argue with that. But in the meantime, life in the ruins of empire is no fun at all. These dirty, dilapidated trains that still struggle between the Transcaucasian capitals take up to twice as long as they used to in the Soviet era. And now foreign tourists have to pay bribes to use them.