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


Time, 27 October 2003
A poignant and powerful portrait of a shattered nation.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Andrew Meier stood witness to the tumultuous final years of the USSR. But when many other journalists had taken leave of this vexed and beguiling land, believing it drained of stories. Meier returned, covering Russia and the former Soviet states as a Moscow correspondent for Time magazine from 1996 to 2001. In all, Meier reported from the lands of the former Soviet Union longer than almost any other Western journalist.

Inspired by both Russophile American writers like Edmund Wilson and native geniuses like Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - both of whom had attempted to penetrate Russia's veils of secrecy and lore - Meier journeyed to the five corners of this resurgent and reputedly free land: newly rich Moscow, war-torn Chechnya, arctic Norilsk, haunted Sakhalin, and proudly crumbling St. Petersburg. Such a wide lens makes Black Earth perhaps the most insightful book on post-Soviet Russia written to date, one that captures its present limbo - a land rich in potential, yet its people ever fearful of staggering back into repression and tyranny.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

… Andrew Meier's Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, a book in which the author recounts his travels crisscrossing post-Soviet Russia, is a throwback, and all the more interesting for being so. — William Taubman

The Washington Post

Russia remains a land of interesting questions. How is it possible for a country to be free but not democratic? Is there a civil war brewing between the oligarchs and the Kremlin? Will Russia revive as it has so often in the past and be a mighty nation again, or must it reconcile itself to the fate of France and England? Andrew Meier neither asks nor answers those questions. He does something more valuable -- he renders a vivid yet necessarily inconclusive portrait of Russia in its current season of violence, corruption and sorrow. — Richard Lourie

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. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

"Dark and wondrous as ever" are the words that conclude Meier's odyssey through the killing fields of Chechnya, up the Yenisey River to Norilsk in the far north — once part of Stalin's gulag — to the wild east of Sakhalin, where oil substitutes for gold. A journalist advantaged by fluent Russian and a youth's readiness for adventure, he probes deeply into the lives of everyone he meets, from the poor to the potentate, while traveling by road and river. Meier's passion is for the victims, for those who survived the camps and those caught in the Chechen "meatgrinder," and he works hard to get their stories, sometimes at great risk to himself. The result is a compassionate glimpse into the extremes where the new Russia meets the old, written with verve and humor.

Kirkus Reviews