Black Earth
A journey through Russia after the fall
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Due to the level of detail, maps are best viewed on a tablet.
Russia today is a world in a dark limbo. The body politic is diseased, the state in collapse. Yet for all the signs of encroaching doom, Russians do not fear the future. They fear the past. Russians have long known theirs is not a land that develops and progresses. It careens, heaves, and all too often sinks.
Once again, Russia stands at a crossroads getting by on little but faith, vodka and a blithe indifference to the moral and financial bankruptcy looming from all sides.
Andrew Meier’s stunning debut explains a state in collapse; how millions of Russians have been displaced by the death of an ideology. It seeks to explain how the Russian government can increase defence spending by 50% whilst the poverty line cuts through a third of its households, and the people face epidemics of AIDS, TB, alcoholism and suicide.
Russia’s story is told through the voices of Russians who live at the five corners of the nation. It is a dramatic portrait of Russia at a time when the old regime has given way, but the new has yet to take hold. Meier has travelled to the extremes – north to Norilsk above the Arctic Circle; east to Sakhalin, south to Vladikavkaz and west to St. Petersburg. And to Moscow.
His writing is classic, poised, poignantly observant and richly human. No one has yet captured the historical, cultural and political disintegration of Russia as well as Andrew Meier.
Reviews
‘[Meier’s] knowledge of the country and his abiding love for its people stands out on every page of this book, making his journey through Russia after the fall an informed and scrupulously researched one.’ Economist
‘“Black Earth” is the best investigation of post-Soviet Russia since David Remnick’s “Resurrection”. Andrew Meier is a truly penetrating eyewitness.’ Robert Conquest
‘If President Bush were to read only the chapters on Chechnya in Meier’s “Black Earth”, he would gain a priceless education about Putin’s Russia.’ Zbigniew Brzezinski
‘That “Black Earth” is an extraordinary work is, for anyone who has known Russia, beyond question.’ George Kennan
‘From the pointless war in Chechnya to the wild, exhilarating and dispriting East and the rise of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer – it’s all here in great detail, written with insight, passion and genuine affection.’ Michael Specter, New Yorker and co-chief of New York Times Moscow bureau
‘An engrossing, beautifully written book about a country where “the death of an ideology has displaced millions”…Heartbreaking.’ Publishers’ Weekly
About the author
Andrew Meier graduated from Oxford University in 1989. In 1996 he was awarded the Alicia Patterson Fellowship to report on the ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union. He is now Moscow correspondent for Time and writes extensively for the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Harpers, Wired. He also reports for both PBS and NPR.
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.
