Andrew Meier: Black Earth

Andrew Meier's Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall (2003; paperback, 2005, WW Norton) is the first of three straight books I read on post-Communist Russia. I figured that the economic collapse of Russia during privatization is a cautionary tale for our times. In effect, what happened was that the Soviet system had discredited itself so utterly that people were ready to believe completely in the most ideological model of capitalism. In the Communist world, only China and a few small countries preoccupied with their place on America's permanent shit-list were able to hold back -- whoever imagined that Albania and Mongolia would follow suit? Still, only Yugoslavia suffered as badly as Russia.

Meier's book doesn't go into the history nearly as deep as I would have liked. It's more like a snapshot from 2000, the year power shifted from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. One part of my interest here was to read something on Chechnya, and Meier has a substantial chapter on that, but again it focuses on the present -- the "clean up" of the Second Chechnya War -- with little on its past. The third book I read, David Satter's Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, goes deeper into the history. In between, I read Tom Bissell's Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, which while actually limited to the borders of Uzbekistan works as a smaller and more detailed Black Earth.

The book starts with a trip to war-torn Chechnya, reconquered by the Russians in early 2000 (pp. 114-115):

The troubles, however, were far from over. All that spring and into the summer, when I arrived in Chechnya, the pace of the war may have slowed, but to those on the ground, both Chechen and Russian, it remained as devastating as ever. After the fall of Grozny the Chechen fighters turned increasingly to a new tactic, low-intensity, but persistent, guerrilla warfare. As in the first war, they bought grenades, land mines, and munitions from Russian soldiers -- some corrupt, but some just hungry or awake to the grim reality that Putin's War would drag on with or without their patriotic duty. Almost daily Chechen fighters ambushed Russian convoys, checkpoints, and administrative headquarters. They killed at night and in the day, choosing their targets at random -- a clutch of Russian soldiers buying bread in a local market -- or with precision: high-ranking Chechen officials whom Moscow had appointed their administrative proxies in the region.

At the same time, the civilian population grew rapidly. By the summer of 2000 more than one hundred thousand Chechens had returned from Ingushetia. They came home to more than destroyed homes and fresh graves. Chechnya was now under Moscow's arbitrary rule. The sweeps continued, and with them, the cases of extrajudicial reprisal. Human rights advocates collected new reports of extortions and beatings, rapes and summary executions. For young male Chechens, however, the primary fear was detention. Each month more and more young men disappeared from the steets. At best the detentions were a rough form of intelligence gathering. At worst they served the enforcers' sadistic urges. But perhaps most commonly, the men were taken hostage merely for ransom. It was also not uncommon that days or weeks later their bodies would be found, dumped at a conveniently empty corner of town.

Shvedov and Issa accompanied Meier's in visiting Chechnya (pp. 119-120):

Shvedov liked to remind Issa and me that before declaring their independence in 1991, Chechens were not the most observent Muslims. "Of all the peoples of the Caucasus," he said, "the Chechens were the last to find Islam." As with much of his ramblings, Shevdov's claim was at best half right. It was true that for decades a folk Islam, not a strict adherence to the laws of the Koran, had predominated among Chechens. It was also true that Dudayev, when he seized power in Grozny, had led a movement for independence first and for religious freedom second. The first chief justice of Dudayev's Shari'a court smoked Marlboros during interviews. But as the first war raged, more and more young Chechen fighters donned green headbands and declared "Allah akbar" in Arabic. The Russian onslaught did what Dudayev had never envisioned: It turned the rebels ever more fundamentalist. By the time the second war began, the talk was less of independence and more of jihad.

Tolstoy had spent some formative years in the Caucasus, providing a reference point for Meier (p. 148):

Tolstoy in his works on the Caucasus blamed neither Cossack nor Chechen. In his 1863 tale The Cossacks, he marveled at the Cossacks' fortitude on the empire's edge. Yet he depicted both Cossack and Chechen as just and their cultures as equally exotic and endangered. Tolstoy left little doubt: Moscow's heavy hand would bring only ruin to the peoples of the south.

After going south to Chechnya, Meier travels north to Norilsk, the largest city on earth north of the Arctic Circle. The city was founded as a slave labor camp under the tsars and continued as a gulag under Stalin. Established for its mines and metals, it is nominally free now, but still a company town (p. 200):

In recent years, the Kombinat had gained fame as the leading single source of atmospheric sulfur emissions in the world. Its smelters have spewed, on average, more than two million tons of sulfur dioxide yearly since the 1950s -- six times the pollution generated by the entire U.S. nonferrous metals industry. Given the geography and the way the winds blow, Norilsk's bad air reaches all the way to Canada. "It's quite something," declared my breakfast partner one morning, a Finnish environmental scientist in town to survey the damage. "Norilsk is one of the largest landmasses on the globe ruined by air pollution."

A perennial question (p. 208):

Many years ago, when I was still living in the Moscow kommunalka a few blocks from the Kremlin with my friends Andrei and Lera, they took me to visit a dacha far outside town. It belonged to a friend of Lera's, an old Jewish woman, the soft-spoken matriarch of five generations of women. She had lived several lives, had survived the ravages of World War II and Stalinism. If anyone, I thought, she would know.

What was the difference, I asked, between Stalin and Hitler?

"Hitler," she replied without pause, "killed only his enemies."

Meier's third trip was east, first to Vladivostok in Primorye Krai and then to the island of Sakhalin, half of which had been ceded by Russia to Japan following the 1905 war (pp. 243-244):

For the politically astute, however, the favored target lay far to the west, in Moscow. The Kremlin, they sighed, knew how to take but not to give. Moscow, they said, created their misery by failing to domesticate the regional governor, Yegveny Nazdratenko. For nearly a decade Nazdratenko made Primorye his duchy. He had long gained renown -- "Nasty Naztradenko" local U.S. diplomats dubbed him. He relished the limelight and even the role of the rogue. He flouted public mores, ignored the mounting discontent, and throughout the Yeltsin era disobeyed the Kremlin itself. At one point he even made a point of presenting the skin of a Siberian tiger, a fine example of the endangered Amur species, to his good friend -- the Belarussian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko, Europe's last dictator. At his peak, Nazdratenko performed on a split screen: He played to the Russian love of the outcast while currying the requisite favors among the elite in Moscow. In the end, however, the cold did him in.

In Primorye, thanks to the freezing winds off the Sea of Japan, winters chill to the bone. For years Nazdratenko so mangled the region's delicate energy policy that millions spent the winters without heat. The combination of mismanagement, embezzlement,and political brinksmanship was stunningly callous. Each winter the governor reprised the spectacle. Each year he blamed the crisis on rivals in Moscow. Vladimir Putin was not one to tolerate such insolence. Putin's ascent spelled Nazdratenko's downfall, although he did not fall hard or far. The new president named him head of the State Fisheries Committee. The position, as the Moscow press commented loudly, offered more than sturgeon and caviar.

On the prison camps (pp. 252-253):

The katorga -- derived from the Ionic Greek kateirgo, meaning "to shut in," and in the passive "to be kept down" -- was the system of servitude, instituted by Peter the Great, whereby criminals and political undesirables were shackled into the service of the state. Katorzhany, the poor souls sentenced to katorga, wore iron chains on their hands and feet. On Sakhalin they were often shackled to the wheelbarrows they used in the mines. The katorga, no matter how the Bolsheviks cursed it, presaged the Gulag. In his Gulag Handbook, Jacques Rossi, the French survivor of Norilsk, offers a comparative "Table of Tsarist and Socialist Penal Servitude." Tsarist norms, Rossi notes, had exceeded the Soviets'.

In 1881, after revolutionaries tossed a bomb under Alexander II's carriage, killing him, Alexander III, having heard reports of Sakhalin's riches and the impossibility of escaping it, established a penal colony on the island. By 1888 Sakhalin had become the empire's "most important penal establishment," in the words of the nineteenth-century American explorer George Kennan. A great-uncle of the renowned diplomat of the cold war, Kennan the Elder, as he is known, crossed Siberia but never made it to Sakhalin. The tsarist censor banned his book on the exiles of Siberia, but a Russian edition did circulate, and Chekhov had studied it. He knew the American had promised that "as long as General Kononovich," the commandant of Sakhalin, whom Kennan had befriended in Petersburg, "remains in command of the Saghalin prisons and mines there is every reason to believe that they will be intelligencly, honestly, and humanely managed." Chekhov was not as convinced.

On the state of the nation (pp. 257-258):

"We are a rich country of poor people," Vladimir Putin conceded not long after he settled into the Kremlin. Nowhere in Russia was that paradox more evident than on Sakhalin. In the Yeltsin decade of license that beggared the provinces and stole Russia's dreams of reform, few regions fell farther faster. Sakhalin ranked near the bottom of every economic indicator. By the time I arrived in 2000, per capital income hovered at around thirty dollars a month. Nearly all its coal mines were closed. Fishing trawlers rusted in its quiet ports. And the pulp mills, as its clear-cut timber was sold off island as whole logs, were shuttered. Several of the mills, built by the Japanese in the 1920s and 1930s, were shells and turning fast to ruins. Worse still, with so many of its factories and military bases closed, the population had contracted sharply -- from 714,000 residents int eh last days of the Soviet Union to fewer than 600,000 in 2000.

In Moscow government economists and Kremlin aides warned that Sakhalin was an aberration, an exceptional case exacerbated by the weight of the Soviet military collapse and the burden of its Japanese past. Yet in all the national plagues -- crime, corruption, disease, and despair -- the islanders scored high. For them, the onslaught of the oilmen and the accompanying talk of future reward offered little solace. The island's workers frequently had gone months without pay. For years they tried everything. They staged demonstrations, lay across railroad tracks, petitioned the bosses. Nothing worked. In their desperation they turned to drama. Viktor Lysenko, a millworker who had not seen a paycheck for two years, chained himself one winter day to the gates of a local mill. Then he drove a nail through his hand. His attempt at self-crucifixion failed. The police intervened. But Lysenko's coworkers were undeterred. They threatened to set themselves aflame. At last hey did see a trickle of cash, not long before the bosses closed the mill altogether.

You did not have to search far to see how the island that once haunted Chekhov continued to stagnate. Sakhalin was beset by an uncomfortable paradox. There was plenty of oil around, just none for local consumption. The paradox, in part, was the fault of the Soviet central planners. The old pipelines, first installed under Stalin, ran across the northern tip of the island, due west from the Soviet-era fields across the narrow Tatar Strait and over to the mainland. Sakhalin oil and gas had fed the defense plants of Komsomolsk and Khabarovsk, but not the apartment houses of Yuzhno. Little had changed since the Soviet collapse. Nearly all the gasoline on the island was still imported. And in the summer of 2000 Sakhalin boasted the highest gasoline prices in Russia.

Putin made a brief stop in Sakhalin in 2000 on his way to a G-8 conclave in Japan (p. 259):

Only once before had a Russian head of state visited. In 1990 Yeltsin had stumbled into Yuzhno for along lost weekend. Valentin Fyodorov, Sakhalin's populist leader at the time, did not have fond memories of the visit. "It was a disaster," he said, "for me, for him, and for the revolution." Yeltsin was drunk the whole time. In Moscow, Fyodorov had given me a photo of Yeltsin on Sakhalin. He was slumped on a sofa. "And that was in the morning." He sighed.

Yuzhno is the capital of Sakhalin, on the far south tip of the island. Northern Sakhalin has large oil fields, which are being leased to western oil companies, providing little or no direct benefit to those who live there -- even most oil workers are imported (pp. 266):

In Yuzhno I had learned that although the oilmen had brought the promise of transformation to Sakhalin, for many on the island the foreigners had also brought the threat of disaster. Even before I got to the camp, I had heard the worst fears: that a world-class oil spill not only would have a disastrous effect on the rich ecosystem of Sakhalin but could spread south to hit Hokkaido and Japan's fish industry. Concern for the future of Sakhalin's environment, oddly enough, pervaded conversations with the oilers. The company men went out of their way to detail how SakhEnergy had taken every possible precaution to avoid spills, while the contract men quietly told me otherwise. The confessions came from the most unlikely sources, at the most unexpected of times and places.

The fourth trip was to the west, St. Petersburg, where Meier focuses on the 1998 assassination of Galina Starovoitova, a leading liberal political figure, which provides a backdrop for the endemic crime in post-Soviet Russia. He visits a psychiatrist, Andrei Kurpatov (p. 335):

The increase in suicidal ideation, Kurpatov claimed, didn't arise from an isolated neurosis. It stemmed from 'the loss of self." He elaborated. Russians had never had the concept of, let alone the respect for, the individual. In the West there was a long-standing, time-honored cult of the individual. "Ever sine Freud," he said, "desires, fears, depression have been of supreme concern in the West." Russians, on the other hand, never enjoyed such attention. "No one in our country ever treated fear," Kurpatov said. "No one ever had fears." Just as no one in Soviet Russia ever suffered depression: "They were simply 'lazy.'" He took out a piece of white paper and placed it squarely in the center of his plain desk. He uncapped a black pen, seemed to consider making a line, but instead put the pen itself across the middle of the page. In the old days, Kurpatov said, for as long as anyone now alive could remember, the borders of the psyche were clearly drawn. "There were no individuals," he said. "Everyone belonged to the state."

More psychology related to war (p. 336):

Then there was Chechnya. The Chechen syndrome, which had crowded the halls of the Vladivostok clinic, here filled an entire wing. The illness exposed, he said, a fundamental fear that plagued all society. It was not the experience of battle, or a particular instance of brutality, that haunted the boys who came home from Chechnya. It was the loss of their guns. The war gave the Russian soldier a tool of survival. Once he was home, the state stripped him of it. The gun was not only power but the centerpiece of a new identity. "In Chechnya," Kurpatov said, "a Russian soldier learns to trust no one. Not his comrades, not his officers. He is alone, with one friend, his Kalashnikov. Naturally, when he comes home and steps out into the street, he feels naked, fearful, unable to cope. Unlike others, he knows what his life costs: nothing. If he cannot adapt, he goes into shock.

Presumably there's an Afghan syndrome as well, which may very well be the same, although at least during the Afghan war period there was a more coherent sense of state purpose than existed under Yeltsin. The Russian military in Chechnya seems to combine the worst traits of the US in Iraq with some additional dysfunctions, like the Russians' inability to trust their own officers or each other.

The last chapter is on Moscow. One further note on the Aldy massacre (p. 390-392):

Even before September 11, 2001, in the inconvenient "small" wars of the post-cold war era, mass murder had made a remarkable comeback. Massacres now arise so often then have become a staple of modern journalism. The news that the blood of innocents has again been shed is nearly certain to make the front page. Such prominence, however, may reveal a predilection for sensation over substance. For as often as such massacres appear in the headlines and flicker across the television screens of the West, they are not given the limelight for long. [ . . . ]

Aldy was no different. From Washington think tanks to Chechen kitchens, even the best informed reached for the catchphrases of the post-Soviet era to explain Aldy. To many, it was true that what had happened in the village on February 5, 2000, was "just another massacre." But this time even Russian officials recognized it was a war crime. Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions, the protocol governing internal armed conflicts, is eminently clear. Summary executions, even of armed combatants, even in war, are not acceptable practice. It was true, of course, civilians had been slaughtered in Chechnya before, and more would be afterward. Yet this time, at least in the first weeks that followed the massacre, the official response took a hopeful turn. Families of thirteen victims received death certificates stating that their relatives had been killed in a "mass murder." [ . . . ]

Not long after the dead in Aldy were reburied for the final time, Yuri Dyomin, Russia's chief military prosecutor, told an audience of Western human rights advocates in Moscow that he regretted "the time I have wasted" investigating reports of abuses "based on disinformation." He went on to accuse Chechen refugees of spreading shazki, fairy tales.

Over time western interest in Russia cooled. The country had, after all, been wrecked to the point where it wasn't much of a threat, and looted to the point where there wasn't much left to steal; the ideological kit had been sold and bought, and by then was best forgotten (p. 417):

After the debauchery of the Yeltsin era, the West's romanticism with reform cooled. By 2002, the powerful in Washington, London, and Paris no longer worried about, "Who is Mr. Putin?" After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they fretted about "losing Mr. Putin." Putin, after all, had made a historic choice. He had sided, however tactically and temporarily, with the West. He had given his blessing to the United States to use former Soviet bases in Central Asia to wage war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Washington's criticism of Russian excesses in Chechnya, never very vocal, became muted. Chechnya was suddenly not just a Russian problem but another front in the global fight against Islamic terrorism.

Russian capitalism comes of age (p. 434):

The U.S. Department of Commerce agreed. On June 6, 2002, it officially declared Russia a free market economy. The optimism was shared by few Russians. The poverty line after all still cut through a third of Russia's households. Per capita GDP, at twenty-one hundred dollars in 2001, was nearly a thousand dollars shy of Panama's. (Portugal's was more than six times higher at sixteen thousand dollars.) True, stocks were up again, but who owned stock? The capitalization of Russia's entire stock market, moreover, equaled less than a sixth of General Electric's. True, the fall of the Soviet bloc had opened new markets for the men who now controlled Russia's oil and gas, but the rest o the populace discovered only the downside of globalization: the onslaught of foreign brands and the competitive advantage of exporters East and West.

posted 2007-09-19