It’s far too easy to write cliché-ridden retrospectives on post-Soviet Russia: it is riven with corruption, has somehow become an even more capricious and cruel nation, and is simply struggling to get on with itself. That last bit is undeniably true; if anything can be said of the Russians, it is that they are resilient, suffering the ravages of Stalinism, Virgin Lands, psychiatric political reeducation, and the utter collapse of society with a stiff upper lip that goes beyond stoicism to something almost spiritual.
Black Earth is a story told in five parts: Moscow, Chechnya, Norilsk, Sakhalin, and St. Petersburg. By going to the so-called “Five Points” of Russia, Meier hopes to encapsulate the incredible range and diversity of Russian life. In this, he can be said to have succeeded: the sheer insane distance of the country—which dwarfs anything we have in the U.S.—would make for a gripping travel narrative, if Meier weren’t also a skilled reporter.
Russia, recall, stretches 11 time zones, from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin. Most of the country is tatitudinally north of Vancouver, with weather to match. Traveling around such vastness can hardly be captured in a single book, or perhaps even a series of books—Russia has always been too big to be contained merely by writing about Russians, who, though they make up about three quarters of the population, do not represent the depth of the country’s ethnic and religious diversity.
Meier begins his story with his own torrid love affair with Russia, one any Russophile can easily relate to. The budding fascination with their history, culture, and language is one I have gone through myself, though my skills with the language lag far behind my interest (it’s damned hard to learn). In Moscow, the immediate aftermath of “The Fall,” or the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was dramatic: it was a free-for-all, overnight turning from one of the most controlled to one of the absolutely freest markets on earth. Naturally, crime and corruption soared to undreamed-of heights, as they do in these situations. But, as with before, the Russians themselves soldiered on, eking out whatever existences they could.
The story of Moscow is well known enough—it is, after all, the focus of most foreign glances at the country. But Russia is more than Moscow. Meier’s journey south to Groznyy, and to the suburb of Aldy, was by far the most harrowing. Recounting the incredible misery the military suffered upon Chechnya is beyond this review; suffice it to say I was in tears more than once as Meier relayed accounts of both the traumatized soldiers returning home (a constant theme among recently returned young conscripts), and far more importantly, those innocent civilians who somehow managed to survive the indiscriminate massacres and killings.
Indeed, there was one touching moment, when Meier asked one of the Chechens showing him around if there could ever be peace. “This is the Caucasus,” he replied. “There is eternal war.”
Things take a different turn when Meier travels to the far north, to the former GULAG-cum-mining town of Norilsk. This burned-out, polluted mess, the most populous city in the continuous permafrost zone, the largest city situated the furthest north, was utterly depressing. There is not a single tree within 30 miles of the large nickel smelter that dominates and poisons the town; if it weren’t for the comparatively high wages people are paid to die slowly chunking metal, no one would live there by choice.
Founded in 1935 as a slave labor camp, the site of a brief uprising in the 1950′s, and site of unspeakable horrors and nightmares, Norilsk was almost as depressing to read about as was Groznyy. Just in a different way, as there people claim to have hope that their lives will proceed on, despite the rapidly deteriorating conditions.
Meier next takes us to the far east, from Vladivostok off to the remote Sakhalin Island. This is another former slave labor camp, once visited and glowingly written of by none other than Anton Chekov (for its cheap Asian hookers, no less). Like all other places in post-Soviet Russia, Sakhalin has seen better days—remarkably enough for a former Island-sized prison camp at the farthest reaches of the Soviet Empire. Its environs have not fared much better: Vladivostok and the surrounding towns complain of Chinese encroachment (much as at the U.S. southern border), there is severe political corruption and unreliably city utilities, and the area is in danger of turning into yet another wasteland.
Sakhalin, you see, has oil. It is one of the least explored fields on the planet, and also happens to be one of the few remaining marine wildlife refuges. This is not by design, but by accident—its sheer remoteness has made exploiting it difficult, and now environmentalists are in a race against time to protect the natural landscape from the oil companies.
While it was interesting to read Meier’s interpretations of the big cities of Russia—Moscow and St. Petersburg—and while those cities formed appropriate bookends for the story he told, it was his impressions of the “in-between,” or what Americans would call “flyover country,” that stuck with me. Political corruption, political assassinations, the opulent mafia and decadent oligarchs, all these are familiar to the casual Russia watcher. The human stories of what’s happened since the USSR went away, however, are not, at least not as much.
It is here, in the human dimension, where Meier truly succeeds. It would have been too easy to simply write a political or economic history of post-Soviet Russia, but instead Meier tried to capture a broad swath of ordinary people living through yet another humanitarian catastrophe. It is darkly beautiful, in a strange way—perhaps like the earth referred to in the title.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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