From 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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Booklist
Meier reported on Russia in the late 1990s for the newsweekly Time and ventured to the geographical limits of the gigantic country. His destinations frame the reflective reportage he offers here. His narrative contains a considerable amount of literary allusion, and in the case of Chekhov, he overtly retraces that writer's famed trip to the island of Sakhalin. What Meier encounters there, as well as in his voyage down the Yenisei River to the forbidding Arctic city of Norilsk ("a Pompeii of Stalinism"), is the legacy of the gulag. Meier spares no detail of the country's physical dilapidation and also probes the attitudes of Russians toward the tough conditions of their lives. Nostalgia for the communist system remains prominent, even among some victimized by it, a recurring paradox among the author's many insights about contemporary Russia. These emerge, too, in his chronicle of Chechnya (where he investigated a massacre) and in his accounts of mobsters and liberals in St. Petersburg. In Meier, Russophiles have a kindred spirit who mirrors their own fascination with the vast and troubled country. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
