Black Earth: A Journey through Russia After the Fall

Good job by Mr Meier.He takes us to places that we probably we dont read about and talks to people who knows what's going on in those places.I especially enjoyed the chapter that talks about Chenchenya and the difficulties in that part of Russia.I also liked his account and views about Vladimir Putin and the fact that sometimes he can be trusted to make things worked in Russia and sometimes he seems to take a step back.The only problem with Mr Meier is that he explains everything with,sometimes, way to many details.In other words, when he describes his journeys and interviews he tries to describe everything: the time of day, the clothes the person is wearing, the tea his drinking ,the color of his hair,ornamets in the house,the weather outside.This will cause that a situation that he is describing takes more than is needed.It took me a while to get used to his style of writing but at the end i was satisfied with his work because he answered a lot of questions that i had.

A good acquaintance with extensive Russia experience, whom I like, has worked with Andrew Meier and reacted with muted enthusiasm when I told her I was reading Black Earth. Although articulate, she struggled to find words for a criticism of Andrew Meier.

So what's wrong with this book? In a way, very little. Meier makes Russians speak directly to us. He takes us through the country and shows us its many facets -- north, south, east, west; past, present and emergent future; liberals, reactionaries, businessmen, writers and psychologists, bracketing the accountant with parents who have lost their children to Russia's history. It is a tapestry as rich as it can get. And he makes people articulate, while leaving them their original voice. I especially liked that he wore his opinions lightly, allowing us to make up our minds.

Meier's book therefore is all that its rave reviews praise it to be, a great achievement. But I still understood the acquaintance who could not bring herself to endorse him. It is a curious detail, a question of rhetoric rather than content. The author retains such a strong presence and character in the book that he reduces the available space of imagination for the reader. He literally seems to crowd us out of some of the narrow apartments in which he is sitting, talking to people. It is as if he often did not want to take us along, but preferred to tell us the story afterwards. This is not so much a criticism, just a curiosity.

Andrew Meir's Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, recently on the New York Times list of Notable New Paperbacks, is a disquieting account of an ailing Russia. Meir, a longtime Russian correspondent for Time Magazine, organizes his portrayal geographically, with sections devoted to Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Far East, and the Arctic town of Norilsk. Written as a journalistic travelogue, we follow Meir as he travels across Russia encountering individuals whose stories tell the altogether larger story of a Russia in disarray, adrift in confusion about its identity, its role in the world, and its relationship with its tumultuous history. Meir's journalistic account is wonderfully written, providing the novice to Russian history and literature enough background for understanding, and the more knowledgeable, a window into a dispirited Russia.
Black Earth also helped me better understand the rise of Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB official now turned Russian "strongman." In the current international climate, following elections in Iraq and Palestine, it seems as though Russia has regressed from nascent experimentation with freedom and democracy, to its more familiar form of autocratic rule. Putin has clamped down on the Press, with most of the Russian media now being either government owned or pro-Putin. He has removed any credible overt opposition. Furthermore, in the minds of many in the West, Putin's arrest of the oligarch Mikhail Khordakosky on fraud charges following his bankrolling of an opposition party smacks of a political sham trial. To many, myself included, Putin's Russia has seemed like a Russia reverting to old form, Putin the latest successor to Russia's legacy of autocrats. After reading Black Earth, however, my picture of Russia and its relationship to Putin has undergone a change; while the evolution of Russia into "Putinism" may not be positive, his popularity is certainly understandable.
Following the fall of the USSR, Russia fell into economic and political chaos. The 1990's was a time when state property, oil fields and mines for example, were sold at dirt cheap prices. Shares in these properties, some owned by state workers, were bought for cents, and it was in this manner that Russia's so called Oligarchy was born. Most famously represented by Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, these oligarches became fabulously wealthy through mixtures of fraud, corruption, and violence. The oligarches became billionaires in a country where most of the population was desperately poor and having difficulty adjusting to a form of rampant capitalism, where the law could only be bought, and mafia assassins were the real authorities. To many Russians, as is made clear in Meir's book, the freedom of the Yeltsin years seemed more like anarchy. It is perhaps a paradox, but freedom cannot exist without rules and the Rule of Law, and Russia under Yeltsin was a "Wild West" of capitalism where privatization meant the looting of state wealth by a lucky few, leaving the rest of the population in a state of bewildered poverty.
If anything characterized Russia during the Yeltsin years, it was a lack of order. To many Russians, Putins's autocratic rule represents the restoration of order. Russia has experimented with democracy twice in its history: in February of 1917 under Kereknsy and the Mensheviks, and during the early Yeltsin years. In both instances, what resulted was chaos followed by the return of strong-handed rule. If Putin's rise is decidedly less monumental than the rise of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, it is because Putin represents a return to the past style of leadership of the Tsar. Putin is no revolutionary; he is merely ending Russia's experimentation with any form of democracy, and reinvigorating the notion of Russia as an empire.
Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in Russia's frayed relationship with Chechnya. Russia, for centuries, has seen itself as an empire. Under the Romanovs and then the Bolsheviks, Russian dominion stretched across thousands of miles, dozens of ethnic groups, and over millions of Muslims and Jews. If there has been one troubled spot in the empire enterprise, it has been the Caucasus, and more specifically Chechnya. Throughout the nineteenth century there were Chechen rebellions against Russian rule, all defeated, albeit with much difficulty, by the Russians. Under Stalin, the Chechen population was deported to Siberia, and only returned to their native land after Stalin's death and the rise of Khrushchev. The Chechens have thus represented, for centuries now, a hindrance to Russian domination of the Caucasus. The current war in Chechnya, in which Russian armed forces have committed horrible massacres and leveled dozens of cities, is seen by many Russians as part of an "old problem." The larger point, however, is that the Caucusus represent Russia's historical image of itself as an empire. The war in Chechnya, fought with an especial determination by Putin, can thus be seen as a further attempt to restore order to Russia's identity; in short, to re-root Russia to its past.
Putin's popularity within Russia thus becomes quite understandable when seen in the context of the post-Soviet Yeltsin era. While to many in the West, the latter era may have been seen as the humble beginnings of democracy and capitalism, to most Russians, this was an era represented by the rule of corrupt oligarches, the demise of law and order, and the destruction of national identity. Putin has centralized power in himself, bringing the order of the strongman ruler, and has returned the rhetoric of a powerful Russia standing on the world stage. While Putin may have been the death-knell for Russian democratization, that Russia was on a path to democracy before Putin, is a dubious assertion. Meir's Black Earth, by giving a powerful firsthand account of a tumultuous Russia over the last fifteen years, has reshaped my vision of Putin, making his rise more understandable.
Black Earth thus stands as no less than a tour of modern day Russia. We meet Chechen fighters, young Russian Army recruits, rich mafioso, and former gulag prisoners. We are shown a Russia adrift in a difficult and complex historical juncture, struggling to deal with its problematic past, present, and future. With an extremely high rate of HIV infection, rampant heroin and alcohol abuse, as well as poverty and a declining population and average life-span, Russia is negotiating many issues at once. As Russia's success is not assured, Meir's book is a sad one. It is also , however, brilliantly written, at times riveting, and always incisive. It has helped reshape my understanding of today's Russia, as well as its President, Vladimir Putin.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has famously descended into organized crime and anarchy. Here, Andrew Meier travels to both well-covered and forgotten locations around the vast country to find how bad things have gotten, for Russian officials and regular people. Meier's travels begin in Moscow with a good outsider's view of the capital's twisted politics and uncontrolled mafia capitalism. Next is a trip to Chechnya, where war still rages despite the West's disinterest. Here Meier includes coverage of a massacre of civilians by the Russian military in the village of Aldy, and the nearly hopeless efforts of residents to find justice. Meier then travels to the far northern Siberian city of Norilsk, which has no reason to exist except for the extraction of minerals, performed by prison camp labor in the Stalin years; then the island of Sakhalin in the far east, where Moscow's grip has always been weak, leading to unique types of individualism and anarchy. Finally Meier reaches melancholy St. Petersburg, where a hoped-for renaissance of enlightenment and culture has failed under mob lawlessness and government corruption.

These travels bring out some useful big-picture conclusions about the fate of Russia and its people. A history of prison camps and slave labor have resulted in a widespread disregard for personal rights, today's control of the economy by oligarchs and kingpins is merely a new form of feudalism, and Chechnya is just a microcosm of the ethnic separatism that could engulf vast regions of Russia. Best of all, Meier implies that Russia has gone through many revolutionary leaps in social order during its history - feudalism to monarchy to totalitarianism to capitalism - and all of these leaps failed to bring about the expected Russian golden age. Most of all, Russia continues to feel all the horrors of its past, regardless of efforts to glorify or suppress past atrocities and failures. The only problem with this book is a long, slow, and meandering writing style that could really use an editor. Meier veers off into many over-descriptions and unfocused coverage of human stories and political trends, while his sometimes lofty attempts at political philosophy don't always come to believable conclusions. [~doomsdayer520~]

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.