Black Earth A Journey Through Russia After The Fall

Author : Andrew Meier
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393326411
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall written by Andrew Meier and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-01-17 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the power of "Lenin's Tomb" and "Balkan Ghosts, " this is an illuminating portrait of contemporary Russia--a country in limbo, a land of vast potential struggling with an unfinished past. "Black Earth" is a penetrating view of the new Russia from a bold new voice in political journalism. 7 maps.

Author : Jens Mühling
Publisher : Haus Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1909961612
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Earth written by Jens Mühling and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth exploration of Ukraine through encounters with the many different people who live there. “Will someone pay for the spilled blood? No. Nobody.” Mikhail Bulgakov composed this ominous and prophetic phrase in Kiev amid the turmoil of the Russian civil war. Since then, Ukrainian borders have shifted constantly, and its people have suffered numerous military foreign interventions. Ukraine has only existed as an independent state since 1991, and what exactly it was before then is controversial among its people as well as its European neighbors. In Black Earth: A Journey through the Ukraine, journalist and celebrated travel writer Jens Mühling takes readers across the country amid the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Mühling delves deep into daily life in Ukraine, narrating his encounters with Ukrainian nationalists and old communists, Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, smugglers, and soldiers. Black Earth connects all these stories to convey an unconventional and unfiltered view of Ukraine, a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and the center of countless conflicts. In this paperback edition, a new preface is included that takes into account recent developments up to the 2022 war between Russia and Ukraine.

Author : Andrew Meier
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
ISBN 13 : 0007113242
Total Pages : 564 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Earth written by Andrew Meier and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2004 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia today is a world in a dark limbo. The body politic is diseased, the state in collapse. Yet for all the signs of encroaching doom, Russians do not fear the future. They fear the past. Russians have long known theirs is not a land that develops and progresses. It careens, heaves, and all too often sinks. Once again, Russia stands at a crossroads getting by on little but faith, vodka and a blithe indifference to the moral and financial bankruptcy looming from all sides. Andrew Meier's stunning debut explains a state in collapse; how millions of Russians have been displaced by the death of an ideology. It seeks to explain how the Russian government can increase defence spending by 50% whilst the poverty line cuts through a third of its households, and the people face epidemics of AIDS, TB, alcoholism and suicide. Russia's story is told through the voices of Russians who live at the five corners of the nation. It is a dramatic portrait of Russia at a time when the old regime has given way, but the new has yet to take hold. Meier has travelled to the extremes - north to Norilsk above the Arctic Circle; east to Sakhalin, south to Vladikavkaz and west to St. Petersburg. And to Moscow. His writing is classic, poised, poignantly observant and richly human. No one has yet captured the historical, cultural and political disintegration of Russia as well as Andrew Meier.

Author : Andrew Meier
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393242064
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall written by Andrew Meier and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-01-17 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "That Black Earth is an extraordinary work is, for anyone who has known Russia, beyond question."—George Kennan "A compassionate glimpse into the extremes where the new Russia meets the old," writes Robert Legvold (Foreign Affairs) about Andrew Meier's enthralling new work. Journeying across a resurgent and reputedly free land, Meier has produced a virtuosic mix of nuanced history, lyric travelogue, and unflinching reportage. Throughout, Meier captures the country's present limbo—a land rich in potential but on the brink of staggering back into tyranny—in an account that is by turns heartrending and celebratory, comic and terrifying. A 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember. "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 of 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. "[Meier's] knowledge of the country and his abiding love for its people stands out on every page of this book....But it is his linguistic fluency, in particular, which enables Mr. Meier to dig so deeply into Russia's black earth."—The Economist "A wonderful travelogue that depicts the Russian people yet again trying to build a new life without really changing their old one."—William Taubman, The New York Times Book Review.

Author : Andrew Meier
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812981049
Total Pages : 1105 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Morgenthau written by Andrew Meier and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2023-11-21 with total page 1105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “magisterial” (The Wall Street Journal) portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence extending from daily life in New York City to the shaping of the American Century A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • A New Yorker Book of the Year “Exhaustively researched, vividly written, and a welcome reminder that even the most noxious evils can be vanquished when capable and committed citizens do their best.”—David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from Fear After coming to America from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus made history in international diplomacy, in domestic politics, and in America’s criminal justice system. With unprecedented, exclusive access to family archives, award-winning journalist and biographer Andrew Meier vividly chronicles how the Morgenthaus amassed a fortune in Manhattan real estate, advised presidents, advanced the New Deal, exposed the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, waged war in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and, from a foundation of private wealth, built a dynasty of public service. In the words of former mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City.” Lazarus Morgenthau arrived in America dreaming of rebuilding the fortune he had lost in his homeland. He ultimately died destitute, but the family would rise again with the ascendance of Henry, who became a wealthy and powerful real estate baron. From there, the Morgenthaus went on to influence the most consequential presidency of the twentieth century, as Henry’s son Henry Jr. became FDR’s longest-serving aide, his Treasury secretary during the war, and his confidant of thirty years. Finally, there was Robert Morgenthau, a decorated World War II hero who would become the longest-tenured district attorney in the history of New York City. Known as the “DA for life,” he oversaw the most consequential and controversial prosecutions in New York of the last fifty years, from the war on the Mafia to the infamous Central Park Jogger case. The saga of the Morgenthaus has lain half hidden in the shadows for too long. At heart a family history, Morgenthau is also an American epic, as sprawling and surprising as the country itself.

Author : Charlotte Hobson
Publisher : Granta Books (Uk)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Earth City written by Charlotte Hobson and published by Granta Books (Uk). This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlotte Hobson spent her gap year as a student in Voronezh, in deepest provincial Russia. Her arrival coincided with the collapse of this society, as initial optimism about the fall of communism gave way to disillusionment and uncertainy. These feelings are mirrored in the doomed love affair she has with the vodka-swilling Mitya. They too started out in a mood of wild optimism, and felt that anything was possible. Until in the spring the snow thawed, and revealed the black earth beneath.

Author : Osip Mandelstam
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0811230988
Total Pages : 173 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Earth: Selected Poems and Prose written by Osip Mandelstam and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia’s foremost modernist master in a major new translation Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, developed into “a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song … something like a goldfinch tremolo.” Peter France—who has been brilliantly translating Mandelstam’s work for decades—draws heavily from Mandelstam’s later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet’s tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant “Stalin poem.” A selection of Mandelstam’s prose irradiates the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante’s Tuscany, and the centrality of poetry in society.

Author : Jens Mühling
Publisher : Haus Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1909961779
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Troubled Water written by Jens Mühling and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the countries bordering the Black Sea told through the stories of the people who live there. Fringing the Black Sea is a diverse array of countries, some centuries old and others emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jens Mühling travels through this region, telling the stories of the people he meets along the way in order to paint a picture of the mix of cultures found here and to understand the present against a history stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond. A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Mühling brings together a cast of characters as diverse as the stories he hears, all of whom are willing to tell him their complex, contradictory, and often fantastical tales full of grief and legend. He meets descendants of the so-called Pontic Greeks, whom Stalin deported to Central Asia and who have now returned; Circassians who fled to Syria a century ago and whose great-great-grandchildren have returned to Abkhazia; and members of ethnic minorities like the Georgian Mingrelians or Bulgarian Muslims, expelled to Turkey in the summer of 1989. Mühling captures the region’s uneasy alliance of tradition and modernity and the diverse humanity of those who live there.

Author : Vladimir Alexandrov
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 0802193765
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Black Russian written by Vladimir Alexandrov and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “altogether astonishing” true story of a black American finding fame and fortune in Moscow and Constantinople at the turn of the 20th century (Booklist, starred review). The Black Russian tells the true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, a man born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. But when his father was murdered, Frederick left the South to work as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he traveled to London, then crisscrossed Europe, and—in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time—went to Russia. Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the “Sultan of Jazz.” Though Frederick reached extraordinary heights, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick’s own extravagance brought his life to a sad close, landing him in debtor’s prison, where he died a forgotten man in 1928. “In his assiduously researched, prodigiously descriptive, fluently analytical” narrative (Booklist, starred review), Alexandrov delivers “a tale . . . so colourful and improbable that it reads more like a novel than a work of historical biography.” (The Literary Review). “[An] extraordinary story . . . [interpreted] with great sensitivity.” —The New York Review of Books

Author : Peter Baker
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0743281799
Total Pages : 475 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kremlin Rising written by Peter Baker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-06-07 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Hedrick Smith's The Russians, Robert G. Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power, and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb comes an eloquent and eye-opening chronicle of Vladimir Putin's Russia, from this generation's leading Moscow correspondents. With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, a childhood hooligan turned KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, resolved to bring an end to the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to reveal the culmination of Project Putin, the secret plot to reconsolidate power in the Kremlin. During their four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through the key moments of his tenure that re-centralized power into his hands, from his decision to take over Russia's only independent television network to the Moscow theater siege of 2002 to the "managed democracy" elections of 2003 and 2004 to the horrific slaughter of Beslan's schoolchildren in 2004, recounting a four-year period that has changed the direction of modern Russia. But the authors also go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encountered -- both those who have prospered and those barely surviving -- and show how the political flux has shaped individual lives. Opening a window to a country on the brink, where behind the gleaming new shopping malls all things Soviet are chic again and even high school students wonder if Lenin was right after all, Kremlin Rising features the personal stories of Russians at all levels of society, including frightened army deserters, an imprisoned oil billionaire, Chechen villagers, a trendy Moscow restaurant king, a reluctant underwear salesman, and anguished AIDS patients in Siberia. With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putin's insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling new revelations about Russia's leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land that he is building. As the first major book on Russia in years, it is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the country and promises to shape the debate about Russia, its uncertain future, and its relationship with the United States.