Black Earth

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

An eye-opening tour of post-Soviet Russia by a young but well-seasoned Time correspondent. Years spent in Moscow and environs have given debut author Meier a decent command of Russian and plenty of insight into the way things work there. Yet, as he slyly remarks, "Longevity in Russia does not always yield understanding. Neither does intimacy guarantee knowledge." Perhaps depressed by years of living in a building where the light bulbs kept disappearing, ten of them being worth a bottle of vodka on the black market, and apparently stricken by the thought that Moscow, though with a population exceeding that of many European nations, might not be representative of the country as a whole, Meier undertook a journey in all cardinal directions that brought him to some hellish locales and introduced him to some iffy cuisine ("plates of glabrous chicken and half-fried potatoes" being among the finer offerings). One was Chechnya, where he found Russian soldiers playing backgammon with the rebels whom they would later be killing, yet one of the strange scenes out of what those soldiers have taken to calling "Putin’s War." Another was the fantastically remote Siberian city of Norilsk, "a severed world," Meier memorably writes, "a Pompeii of Stalinism that the trapped heirs of the gulag still called home." Yet another destination on Meier’s itinerary was Sakhalin Island, where Chekhov once documented the broken lives of prisoners and exiles whose descendants seem to be doing only marginally better. Meier writes with a fine, literate style that sometimes turns to bare-chested bravado, but that thrives on pointing out ironies: the fact that most of those gulag denizens wanted nothing more than to beseen as loyal comrades of the monster Stalin, the fact that Boris Yeltsin, then a Communist functionary, was so drunk on a visit to Sakhalin that he failed to notice that the island’s governor had replaced the obligatory portrait of Lenin with one of Adam Smith. A superb work of travel and reportage, and must reading for Russia hands.