Andrew Meier
Andrew Meier reported from Russia as a Moscow correspondent for Time from 1996 to 2001. A recent fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., in 1996 he reported from the war zones of the Caucasus and Central Asia on a year-long fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation. A graduate of Wesleyan and Oxford, his writing on foreign affairs has appeared in Harper’s, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wired, among other publications. He is currently a contributor to Time Europe.
latest work
BLACK EARTH
A Journey Through Russia After the Fall: the latest book on Russia by Andrew Meier, published by W.W.Norton in fall 2003. Illustrated with thirteen black and white photographs by award-winning photographers Luc Delahaye, Jacqueline Mia Foster, Josef Koudelka, Guergui Pinkhassov, Anthony Suau and Vladimir Velengurin, also seen here as background. Buy the book at Amazon >
Inspired by 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 journeys to the five corners of this resurgent land: newly-gilded 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.
Meier descends into the ugly depths of Moscow’s corrupt and often lethal political scene. In his harrowing Chechnya chapter, he navigates among kidnappers, Wahhabi Islamists, artillery shells and the chief body-counter of the Russian Army to investigate the worst single-day civilian massacre of the second Russian-Chechen war. In Norilsk, far above the Arctic Circle, the children of the Gulag reveal Russia’s cultural and economic disenfranchisement from the rest of Europe. In the Russian Far East, Meier follows Chekhov’s famous footsteps to the island of Sakhalin, once the site of a feared tsarist penal colony and now, with its massive petroleum reservoir, the newest prize in the global oil game. In St. Petersburg, known today as Russia’s “Criminal Capital,” he retraces the decisive political turn of the post-Soviet decade: the murder of the liberal politician Galina Starovoitova, while engaging—in a rare and revealing discourse— the man reputed to be the Godfather of the city of the tsars.
Throughout this journey, by turns heartrending and celebratory, comic and terrifying, Meier discovers a common human pursuit: the need to find meaning amid the Soviet ruins, and to unearth—often literally—the past in order to preserve, escape, or, indeed, bury it for once and for all. Black Earth is a riveting tour of a misunderstood and profoundly important nation—the post-Soviet Russia that, to this day, seems unable to decide which way to turn.
Book cover
Publication details
In the U.S.: W.W. NORTON, September 2003 / Hardcover / ISBN 0-393-05178-1 / 512 pages.
In the U.K.: HarperCollins, UK, Early 2004.
For further information contact:
Rachel Salzman
Publicity Manager
W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y.
reviews
“That Black Earth is an extraordinary work is, for anyone who has known Russia, beyond question.” — George Kennan
“Black Earth is the best investigation of post-Soviet Russia since David Remnick’s Resurrection. Andrew Meier is a truly penetrating eyewitness.” — Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror
“If President Bush were to read only the chapters regarding Chechnya in Meier’s Black Earth, he would gain a priceless education about Putin’s Russia.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski
“Even after the fall of Communism, most American reporting on Russia often goes no further than who’s in and who’s out in the Kremlin and the business oligarchy. Andrew Meier’s Russia reaches far beyond... this Russia is one where, as Meier says, history has a hard time hiding. Readers could not easily find a livelier or more insightful guide.” — Adam Hochschild, author King Leopold’s Ghost and The Unquiet Ghost; Russians Remember Stalin
“From the pointless war in Chechnya to the wild, exhilarating, and dispiriting East and the rise of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer—it’s all here in great detail, written in the layers the story deserves, with insight, passion and genuine affection.” — Michael Specter, staff writer, The New Yorker; co-chief, the New York Times Moscow Bureau, 1995-98
Reviewed in:
The New York Times Book Review,
Sept. 7, 2003
The Washington Post Book World,
Sept. 7, 2003
The Economist,
Sept. 13-19, 2003
The New York Review of Books,
Oct. 23, 2003