Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall [Hardcover]

Andrew Meier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2003

With the power of Lenin's Tomb and Balkan Ghosts, an illuminating portrait of contemporary Russia.

A decade after the Soviet collapse, Russia remains a country in limbo, a land of vast potential struggling with an unfinished past. Journeying to Russia's five corners—Moscow, Chechnya, Norilsk, Sakhalin, and St. Petersburg—Andrew Meier presents a history of contemporary Russia. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Meier explores Russia's unbridled market and often lethal politics. From Chechnya, where he investigates the worst single-day massacre of civilians, to Norilsk, the world's northernmost city, Meier uncovers a common theme: the need to find meaning amid the Soviet ruins. In the tradition of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Black Earth is a penetrating view of the new Russia from a bold new voice in political journalism. 7 maps.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"How do you explain a state in decay?" the author of this engrossing, beautifully written book asks about a country where "the death of an ideology has displaced millions," a third of the households are poor, and epidemics of HIV, TB, suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism are rife. Meier, a Moscow correspondent for Time magazine from 1996 to 2001, attempted to answer the question by traveling to the four corners of Russia so he could report on the suffering of the people as they struggle to survive in the ruins of the Soviet experiment. He began in 2000 by going south to war-devastated Chechnya, particularly the town of Aldy, a district of Grozny, which earlier that year had endured the massacre of at least 60 of its citizens by Russian soldiers. He then traveled north, above the Arctic Circle, to the heavily polluted industrial city of Norilsk, originally a labor camp and now "a showcase for the ravages of unbridled capitalism," where descendants of the prisoners still mine for precious metals. Finally, he went west to St. Petersburg, "a den of thieves and compromised politicians" whose much-heralded revival is largely unrealized and where the people are still haunted by the assassination in 1998 of Galina Vasilievna Starovoitova, the country's leading liberal. After talking to scores of people-from survivors of the Aldy massacre to a harrowed Russian lieutenant colonel who runs the body-collection point closest to the Chechen battleground-Meier paints in this heartbreaking book a devastating picture of contemporary life in a country where, as one man put it, people have "lived like the lowest dogs for more than eighty years." Maps and photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Meier reported on Russia in the late 1990s for the newsweekly Time and ventured to the geographical limits of the gigantic country. His destinations frame the reflective reportage he offers here. His narrative contains a considerable amount of literary allusion, and in the case of Chekhov, he overtly retraces that writer's famed trip to the island of Sakhalin. What Meier encounters there, as well as in his voyage down the Yenisei River to the forbidding Arctic city of Norilsk ("a Pompeii of Stalinism"), is the legacy of the gulag. Meier spares no detail of the country's physical dilapidation and also probes the attitudes of Russians toward the tough conditions of their lives. Nostalgia for the communist system remains prominent, even among some victimized by it, a recurring paradox among the author's many insights about contemporary Russia. These emerge, too, in his chronicle of Chechnya (where he investigated a massacre) and in his accounts of mobsters and liberals in St. Petersburg. In Meier, Russophiles have a kindred spirit who mirrors their own fascination with the vast and troubled country. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (September 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393051781
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051780
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,397,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent coverage of recent Russian history, March 29, 2004

By 

Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall (Hardcover)

This book is about author Andrew Meier's experiences in Russia, where he lived for most of the 1990s. He details much of what he saw of the rise and fall of Yeltsin and the advent of Putin and the events of their rule, including the privatization of many Soviet industries ("an industrial fire sale" of epic proportions), the conflict in Chechnya (the worst fighting in Russia since Stalingrad), and the decline in social and economic well-being of many Russians.

Meier spends a good-sized portion of the book on the subject of Moscow, with its "wretched masses and gluttonous elite," a city that remains the heart of Russia, home of over ten million people, one that grew famous after the collapse of the Soviet Union for its boisterous night clubs and its nearly uncontrolled free market. At least some of the city's character derives from Mayor Yuri Luzkhov, who perhaps has influenced the city in its post-Soviet decade more than any other. Adored by Muscovites - who reelected him in 1996 with 90% of the vote - he has become noted for restoring many of the city's pre-Soviet symbols, such as rebuilding the Resurrection Gate to Red Square.

Much of Moscow and indeed Russian politics has been dominated by the self-styled oligarchs, the new millionaires and billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Vladimir Potanin who arose during the "Great Gab" of the Yeltsin years, grabbing a share of the division of post-Soviet spoils and often growing preposterously rich. Their story is not all rosy however, as many have links to organized crime, and they and Russians everywhere were hit hard by the August 1998 stock market crash and a number of scandals which came to public attention such as the Mabetex scandal and the Bank of New York affair, some involving the highest levels of government.

In contrast to the oligarchs, Meier showed that many Russians were not as well off. Some longed for the days of the Soviet Union, when they felt things were better. A third of households lie below the poverty line, and HIV and drug addiction are a growing epidemic in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere. Crime he writes is particularly rampant in St. Petersburg, where assassinations of rival politicians and industrialists are not unknown.

The most interesting section was the one on Chechnya. Located a thousand miles south of Moscow between the Black and Caspian Seas, this Connecticut-sized area of 6,000 square miles is one of the so-called small nations that lie within Russia's borders, once romanticized by Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov in military epics starring "swarthy mountaineers with bejeweled daggers and mysterious black-eyed" women. He chronicled the war in Chechnya - really two wars - the first war began on New Year's Eve 1994 and ended on August 6, 1996, launched to quell a nationalist uprising and in which as many as 100,000 died. The peace that followed brought little more than poverty, banditry, a kidnapping trade, and some local attempts to impose Shari'a law. War with Moscow became inevitable again though when in 1999 two of the most famous fighters of the war - Shamil Basayev and the Saudi mercenary Khattab a.k.a The Black Arab - launched raids into the mostly Muslim neighboring republic of Dagestan (firmly within Russian borders) and a series of massive bombings in August and September of that year killed nearly 300 people in Moscow and elsewhere. Though there were some doubts about a Chechen link to the bombings, the nation united behind what is sometimes called Putin's War, as over a hundred thousand Russian soldiers descended upon Chechnya in September of 1999.

At great risk to himself - unescorted and unapproved journalists in Chechnya were forbidden and kidnapping is a common local occupation - Meier toured Chechnya. Meier wrote of the zachistka, Russian for a "little cleanup" or a mopping up operation, a routine of the operations during Putin's War, which generally meant a house-to-house search for members of the Chechen opposition, though some have compared them to Stalin's purges, the chiski. Sometimes these operations resulted in civilian deaths, such as occurred in the village of Aldy on February 5, 2000, recognized (eventually) by even the Russian government as a war crime, when civilians were slaughtered and people were summarily executed.

The author saw some of Siberia, flying to the city of Krasnoyarsk and boarding a steamer, sailing 1300 miles up the Yenisei, Russia's second largest river, to the mining town of Norilsk, north of the Arctic Circle. Built of the Gulag he writes, it was the stereotypical Soviet industrial city built over the bones of prisoners used as slave labor, a city ordered by Stalin to exist in one of the world's harshest climates, founded to exploit a vast mineral wealth. Though still producing most of Russia's nickel, platinum, copper, and palladium, the need for workers had decreased in the city. Sadly though many of those who live there - descendents of the original zeks or prisoners (if not former zeks themselves) - have become institutionalized, having no where else in Russia to go to.

Meier also visited Vladivostok and the surrounding region and the island of Sakhalin, the subject of much of Chekhov's writings, which well before the Soviets and Stalin was a distant destination for prisoners, as well as. A rugged region often quite isolated from Moscow, long a haven from Tsarist rule and a last holdout for White partisans during the Civil War, here the locals have long been used to self-reliance. Although the region - particularly Sakhalin - is rich in timber, fur, salmon, and offshore petroleum, development (at least to the benefit of the locals) has been stymied by what some refer to as the three Russian diseases; greed, corruption, and bureaucracy. Attempts at foreign investment in the area have been complicated if not thwarted by organized crime and corrupt politicians.

This 450 page book is too massive to adequately summarize here; excellent coverage of Russia since the Fall, with copious end notes and an exhaustive bibliography.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Disheartening but Beautiful, January 9, 2004

By 

John Wood (San Miguel de Allende, Gto., Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall (Hardcover)

The world had so much hope when the Soviet Union fell. We all waited for the emergence of a great new democracy. Instead, the ugly reality was the rise of the oligarchs and the Russian Mafia, the bitter, bloody wars along ethnic lines, the corruption and injustice. Meier describes all this at a human level: Stories of dispossessed Chechen villagers, gulag survivors, oil workers in Sakhalin, victims of Petrograd's gangsters. What's happening in Russia is far worse than we imagined.

He writes as an insider, a participant in the Russian way of life, able to move through cultural, political and administrative obstacles to reach the powerful, the formerly powerful, the disinherited, the downtrodden, the rebels, the survivors. He brings us their words, ringing of truth, because no one ever could invent their stories: The massacres of villagers in a pointless war no one wants, The environmental disasters of the extraction industries, The assassination of democratic leaders by gangsters protecting their turf, abetted by the government. These tales provoke outrage.

Offsetting the dreary facts, Meier's writing draws the reader on: Deft characterizations of the people he meets, evocative descriptions of places, insightful historical contexts. Russia's despair is disheartening; Meier's prose is beautiful.

Moreover, the people we meet have vitality and intelligence. They cope within their system, struggle to keep evil at bay and work to improve their lives. The system is rotten; the people are inspiring. They are the hope of Russia.

Black Earth is an informative look at a great country as it struggles to undo the damage of 80 years of Communism. Highly recommended.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very insightful, September 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall (Hardcover)

I read this book while I was on vacation in Russia and the Ukraine. I thought it was quite good, although I thought the section on Chechnya rambled slightly.

As far as this book being an example of too much bad news, my response is this is Russia, for God's sake. There is no shortage of bad news there. How could you write an upbeat book about Chechnya, the history of the Gulag, Sakhalin Island (the section about that actually does have some "good" news), or the mafia state that has emerged in post-Soviet Russia?

Face it. You can't. As for this book's merits, all I can say is that reading it made me far more informed about current affairs in Russia (something my Russia tour guides remarked about frequently).

If you want "cheerful," don't read books about countries with these kinds of problems.