Product Description

Russia 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. This text explains a state in collapse. It explains 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 per cent 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 portrait of Russia at a time when the old regime has given way, but the new has yet to take hold.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #824374 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 511 pages

About the Author
Andrew Meier graduated from Oxford in 1989. In 1996 he was awarded the Alicia Patterson Fellowship to report on the ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union. He was Moscow correspondent for Time from 1996 until 2001. He is a recent fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington and is a contributor to Time Europe. He also writes extensively for New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Harpers, Wired and broadcasts journalism on NBC and PBS. This is his first book.

Customer Reviews

A fascinating narrative of a fascinating country
Andrew Meier is a former Time Magazine correspondent, an American who fell in love with Russia as a student and vowed to return. This is a very fine book and was an absolute pleasure to read but is a little difficult to pigeonhole. It's almost easier to say what it's not. Black Earth is not a modern history of Russian political evolution, it's not an exploration of the causes of the war in Chechnya, it's not an exposé of organised crime and it's not a biography or critique of Yeltsin's or Putin's Russia.

It reads almost like a travelogue, or a portrait of the present, as Meier starts in Moscow, travels to the Caucuses then up the huge Yanisei river by boat to Norilsk on the Arctic Circle (site of a famous Siberian Gulag). He then moves to the Far East and Sakhalin island to visit Russia's vital oil industry. Finally he's back west in Petersburg before returning to Moscow.

All the way through the book he introduces us to the people of the regions he visits - the witnesses of a Russian army massacre in Chechnya, the people who choose to live in the Arctic isolation of Norilsk, the oilworkers (Russian and foreign) on Sakhalin, the elderly survivors of the siege of Leningrad and a modern day (alleged) organised crime boss, and his neighbours in Moscow. He recounts ordinary peoples' stories, their hopes and fears, how they've fared since the end of the Soviet Union and what they think of the country they live in. Meier's love of, and fascination with, the people of this vast expanse of a country shines through, but so does the feeling of decay that now infests this former superpower.

Black Earth is a narrative of a window in time (late 1990's, early 21st century) in the evolution of this former communist superpower to... what? Russia is a country that, inexplicably maybe, fascinates many - so much so that a term, Russophile, has been coined for Westerners that have a love for this colossal bear of a country and, when you've read Black Earth, you'll understand what it is to be a Russian today. It may help to know that if you liked Anna Funder's Stasiland, you'll like Black Earth.