Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall (review)

In this engrossing travelogue written after the fall of Communism in the former USSR, Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time, travels around Russia—from Moscow to Chechnya to Norilsk, far above the Arctic Circle, then from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg—meeting and talking with oligarchs, rebels, mafioso, autocrats and former gulag prisoners, as well as with the common Russians. Sometimes tracing the steps of Chekhov in his travels, Meier often delves into Russia's turbulent and blemished history as he reports on everything from the Yeltsin years and the rise of Vladimir Putin to the terrifying massacre of civilians in Chechnya on February 5, 2000.

Though Meier is assisted by friends—there is Shevedov, who "got reporters in and out of places they had no business being in," and Viktor Pelevin, literary celebrity of the post-Soviet generation (to name but two)—there is still a pervading sense of violence and fear as he travels about. In Meier's own words, he "never knew when he was being taken around a corner to be executed; kidnapped."

Meier tells of contradictions—two dozen Chechen families living in an abandoned pigsty, and in Vladivostok inhabitants surviving winters with no heat, at the same time that Russian oligarchs and foreign countries vie for the post-Soviet windfall. His descriptions of Russia's violence and corruption, its greed, its bureaucracy, are scrupulous, though Meier readily admits that no matter how long one lives in Russia, it defies understanding.

Though Black Earth is sometimes humorous, as with the account of Sasha, an aging underground painter who under Brezhnev walked into a barren meat store and placed paintings of sausages and hams in its empty display counters, it is more often serious, as when Meier interviews an embittered diehard communist who insists, "Things were better before," or an Omon man in Moscow who admits his own group's responsibility for the atrocities in Chechnya.

Finally, though some Russians, such as Putin, look to their country's future with blithe optimism and others find its future in its past, many despairing young people, seeing no way out, have turned to the needle. Referring to Russia after the fall, Meier concludes that "in the four corners of the country where I had traveled, little changed for the better." In any case, Black Earth is a superb work on Russia after the fall.