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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating narrative of a fascinating country, 26 Sep 2004
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.
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