A long night of chaos and desolation:

  Along the way, Meier does provide perspective with segments of historic background and illuminating travelogue through this vast realm. See, also, Gaddis, " "We Now Know," covering the early years of the Cold War through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kotkin, "Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000."
  &
  There are also two major segments - one dealing with the slaughter of at least sixty civilians in Aldy, Chechnya, and the other the murder of the liberal St. Petersburg politician, Galina Vasilievna Starovoitova. Throughout the book, the impacts of that minor little conflict in Chechnya keep surfacing. Throughout the book, the impacts of lawlessness and organized crime murders and murders by security officers keep surfacing.
  &
  Repeatedly, Meier earnestly - naïvely - seeks an understanding of the causes of the senseless slaughter in Aldy. He deplores the extent to which the world has become callous about such massacres - such war crimes - that repeatedly occur around the world. They ypically make an initial splash in the news - remain newsworthy for a short while - and then sink into oblivion usually without any real response.
  &

The communists were just as callous about life as the Nazis - but they were more interested in slave labor than in annihilation.

The attitudes created by seven decades of communism still widely persist.

With little interest in real history, conspiracy theory serves many to explain Russia's misfortunes.

  Throughout the book, we meet survivors of the gulag. The communists were just as callous about life as the Nazis - but they were more interested in slave labor than in annihilation - and there remain survivors everywhere to tell the tales of the gulag's hardships and horror. But the victims of the communists were almost completely random. Comparing Stalin to Hitler, one old Russian survivor asserted - substantially incorrectly: "Hitler killed only his enemies."
  &
  There are several interesting threads that weave persistently through these vignettes.

• In Russia, most of the powerful don't even pretend to be concerned for the public interest. The ambitious in Russia strive for wealth and power as elsewhere - but those who have obtained it have a keen contempt for those who don't - and don't bother to hide it.

• Communist apparatchiks dispossessed from positions of privilege and power by the collapse of the Soviet Union consider Gorbachev a traitor. They show no concern about the people who suffered under their misrule.

• Nowhere in this book is there evidence of the formation of a legally and politically empowered civil society - although there are some often heroic individual efforts to improve the conditions of life or achieve professional goals or combat particular instances of the injustice that permeates life in Russia.

• In vast areas of Russia outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, the lack of a politically and legally empowered civil society also means that there is no high culture, no concern with history, no concern with the building or maintaining of infrastructure or preservation of the environment. The attitudes created by seven decades of communism still widely persist. As yet - with just a distressingly few exceptions - nobody gives a damn for the public interest.

• Russia has gotten rid of communism. However, it is still afflicted with the communist bureaucracy. Businesses face a smothering need for dozens of licenses and approvals - each an opportunity to extract bribes. A bureaucracy that provides neither physical safety for persons or property nor a functioning  commercial law is a dead weight on the economy.

• Everywhere, people engage in retail commerce in sidewalk kiosks. Unlike in Soviet times, there is an abundance and wide variety of goods for sale. For the vast majority of vendors, there is not enough cash - or political influence - to establish proper stores in real buildings.

• Unlike Germany  and its Nazi past, Russia is ignoring its Stalinist and communist past. "Thousands if not millions of Russian children do not know the truth about Stalin and the terror." Still enmeshed in a business-unfriendly political and legal environment, Russians are too occupied with the day-to-day economic struggle for survival to make a priority of examining old wounds.

• Conspiracy theory is everywhere and surrounds every tragedy, every controversy. Much of it is anti Semitic, and much targets the CIA. With little interest in real history, conspiracy theory serves many to explain Russia's misfortunes.

• The destruction of national pride and faith in leadership is one of the most painful losses caused by the Soviet collapse. Vladimir Putin benefits from the major segment of the public that is hungry for leadership it can believe in.

• Should Russia further collapse, it will Balkanize Central Asia - leaving a mélange of possibly warring states.

  &

  Most of the book covers the last few years of the Yeltsin administration and the first few under Putin. The last segment covers the changes brought by and expected under the Putin administration.
  &
  Meier quotes Russian political philosopher Aleksander Herzen, writing about the European revolutions of 1848. The old world had disappeared, but the new one had yet to arrive.

  "Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass."

  This is not a book for those who are easily depressed. However, this is a good read for those who as yet fail to fully appreciate the miracle that is the United States and the other nations that have achieved modernity and stability.

Moscow:

  Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow - presiding over a hearing and planning session about the construction of a new facility - a rehabilitation center for war veterans wounded in Chechnya. He hears the progress reports of the various engineers and supervising officials - but it is the mayor who resolves a dispute over whether to use tiles or linoleum for the flooring.

  "And so it came to pass that Yuri Luzhkov, who on this chilly day could rightly claim a place among the most powerful men in all Russia, spent nearly an hour probing the virtues of linoleum versus tile."

  Once he made his decision in favor of linoleum, the dispute disappeared, and all voted in favor of linoleum. But Luzhkov was not overwhelmed by minutia. Meier relates his grand construction designs for Moscow - driven by ideology rather than a grasp of economic needs.
  &
  Grigori Vasilievich Romanov, a Politburo hawk from the 1980s who considers Gorbachev a traitor and emphasizes how much worse things have become since the fall of the Soviet Union. Things were indeed better during Soviet times - especially for the Soviet elites. Now he grieves for his lost privileges - his lost dacha and car and income.
  &
  He relates how - when Konstantin Chernenko died - three politburo hardliners - including Romanov - just happened to be out of Moscow on trips arranged for them - and Gorbachev was chosen over Romanov on a five-to-four vote of the Politburo members present.
  &

It is one of "the great mysteries of Russia." In many towns, nobody has had a job for years, but car ownership is up "two hundred percent" as are consumer durable purchases, and there are no riots.

A recent poll indicated that about 40% of the people thought that the Bolshevik revolution was good for Russia.

  Four American financiers - including Bill Browder, son of American Communist leader Earl Browder - striving for financial gains and coping with the typical frustrations of the Russian markets. One of them notes one of "the great mysteries of Russia." In many towns, nobody has had a job for years, but car ownership is up "two hundred percent" as are consumer durable purchases, and there are no riots. Gray market activity constitutes a huge proportion of the Russian economy and is not reflected in the official statistics.
  &
  Sergei Kovalyov, a Duma deputy who spent a decade in the gulag and was a close protégé of Andrei Sakharov - deploring the lack of accurate history lessons in the schools. The young learn nothing of the murderous Communist leadership that afflicted the nation until the last few years of Soviet history.
  &
  "We need to teach our children that Lenin and Stalin were the progenitors of a criminal regime, that they were mass murderers," he asserts. A recent poll indicated that about 40% of the people thought that the Bolshevik revolution was good for Russia. The Russian people have yet to come to terms with their past - a failure that could come back to haunt them at some time in the future.
  &
  Viktor Pelevin, a shy young mystic and author, revealing Russia's predicament in a series of widely popular novels and satires.
  &
  Semyon Samuelovich Vilensky, whose mission in life is to save the thousands of manuscripts - memoirs, short stories, poems, plays, novels, diaries - of the prisoners in the gulags. Up to the time he was interviewed, he had published about 50 volumes.
  &

"The Zone:"

&

Russia does not bother to take the finger prints, much less the dental histories or DNA samples, of its soldiers.

  John Warren, an Englishman and honorary British consul in Rostov-on-Don who had made his peace with the local mob bosses, married a Russian girl, and was prospering in the sunflower oil trade and the grain trade. He stubbornly believed that "Russia can work."
  &
  Vladimir Vladimirovich Shcherbakov, the Russian military medical doctor in charge of the military morgue in Rostov that processes and tries to identify Russian soldiers killed in the Chechnya conflict. Of something in excess of 300 unidentified corpses in the morgue when Meier was there, about 270 remained unidentified from the first Chechen war.
  &
  From all over Russia, mothers traveled to Rostov to rummage through the corpses looking for sons missing in action in Chechnya. Russia does not bother to take the finger prints, much less the dental histories or DNA samples, of its soldiers.
  &
  Those that  can't find their sons in the morgue sometimes go on to Chechnya to inquire of the Chechen rebels. From this account, it appears that the rebels receive them with some sympathy and provide them with whatever information they have.
  &

When the Russians later launched an investigation of the massacre, nobody dared to speak, and it was dismissed as Chechen disinformation.

The Chechens were unable to establish a legitimate state during the time between the first and second Chechen wars .

  Issa,  an administrator in Russian controlled Chechnya, half Russian and half Chechen, a muslim who took pride in his high position on the Chechen blacklist of those condemned to die under Shari'a - but who found the Russian military regime in Chechnya hopeless.
  &
  Bislan Ismailov, a survivor of the Russian massacre in Aldy, bore witness to the brutality of the event. Meier records his account of the slaughter in detail. When the Russians later launched an investigation of the event, nobody dared to speak, and it was dismissed as Chechen disinformation.
  &
  Shamkhan, the mullah of Aldy, who had been away during the massacre, accompanying the 3,000 Chechen fighters - the last to evacuate Grozny - during their bloody nighttime retreat across the minefields to escape into the Caucasus mountains to the south. He grieves the failure of the Chechens to establish a legitimate state during the time between the first and second Chechen wars. He castigates the Chechen leaders - "the militarism of [Lecha] Dudayev, the romanticism of [Aslan] Mashkadov, the banditry of [Shamil] Basayev, the foreign Wahhabi virus of the [Arab] Khattab, and the venal hunger of the rest of Chechnya's warlords." He exclaimed:

  "All this we have earned because of our ignorance. Thanks to our lack of enlightenment, we were unable to establish any order."

The OMON were underpaid, lacking in necessary equipment and logistical support, asked to fight under harsh conditions against an enemy that fought out of uniform and just as ruthlessly as they.

  Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Kabatsky, commander of one of the OMON units - units somewhat akin to large urban SWAT teams - charged with responsibility for the massacre while operating under the Interior Ministry. He granted an interview in St. Petersburg.
  &
  He was proud of his unit, and supported Putin's efforts to bring some of the oligarchs to account for their theft of state assets. He supported Putin's effort to establish rule-of-law - a "Dictatorship of the Law" - as the only alternative to the law of the jungle.
  &
  However, he would not answer questions about Aldy. There were strict orders to leave such matters to an official in Moscow - who was invariably unhelpful. The OMON were underpaid, lacking in necessary equipment and logistical support, asked to fight under harsh conditions against an enemy that fought out of uniform and just as ruthlessly as they. He offered no apologies. His unit did its job.
  &

The Chechens are able to purchase all the weapons they need from the ill paid and frequently undisciplined Russian officers and soldiers.

The rebels intend to inflict a slow but constant loss of life on the Russians.

Ilyas, a low level Chechen commander, a Chechen Wahhabi, who explains:

  "The Wahhabis are anyone who believes in the need to cleanse our nation and who will sacrifice himself in the jihad against Russia - [and] against the United States and its allies as well."

  He explains that, more than the few hundred Arab fighters that have come to assist them, the Chechen rebels benefit from funds raised from supporters in Islamic nations. Thus, they are able to purchase all the weapons they need from the ill paid and frequently undisciplined Russian officers and soldiers.
  &
  By assassinations of Russian officers and officials and Chechen administrators collaborating with the Russians - by suicide bombings, sabotage, and the gathering of intelligence - the rebels intend to inflict a slow but constant loss of life on the Russians. There were small teams of well armed fighters organized throughout Chechnya, convinced that resistance to the Russian occupation - even if interminable - was the only moral path for them to take.
  &

  Raibek Tovzayev, a Chechen war lord and a mortal enemy of Basayev. He was thus allied with the Russians, although he "professed an undisguised disdain" for the Russian cause - "and everything to do with geography and history." 
  &|
  Raibek's people controlled a strategic ridgeline between the rugged Caucasus mountain refuge of the Chechen rebels along the Dagestan border and the rest of Chechnya. His domain is lawless and dangerous, with assassinations and kidnappings and blood feuds an everyday occurrence. His father had been assassinated, and he had exacted revenge on the perpetrator and had in turn been targeted about half a dozen times. The Russians just happened to be the enemy of his enemies. He takes Meier to a new checkpoint - the furthest point of control overlooking Chechen rebel territory in Southeastern Chechnya - the only checkpoint in Chechnya not manned by Russians.
  &
  Raibek was killed in August, 2001.
  &

  Khusein Zagibov, who quixotically runs a small rundown, poorly provisioned Tolstoy museum in Starogladovskaya in Northeastern Chechnya. The museum celebrates the great 19th century writer's years in Chechnya and his appreciation of the Chechen people during their earlier conflicts with Russia. Several of Tolstoy's novels use those conflicts as a backdrop - including "Childhood," his first, "The Cossacks," and "Hadji Murad," his last and the work from which Meier took his "Black Earth" title.
  &
  A former journalist, Zagibov could not remember the last time he had been paid. He slept with a shotgun to fend off looters. He had no illusions about either the Russians or the Chechen rebels. Meier quotes from a Tolstoy draft of "Hadji Murad" kept at the museum:

  "[What] always happens when a state, having large-scale military strength, enters into relations with primitive, small peoples, living their own independent life. Under the pretext of self-defense (even though attacks are always provoked by the powerful neighbor), or the pretext of civilizing the ways of a savage people (even though the savage people is living a life incomparably better and more peaceable than the 'civilisers') - - - the servants of the military states commit all sorts of villainy against small peoples, while maintaining that one cannot deal with them otherwise. That was the situation in the Caucasus - - - when Russian military commanders, seeking to win distinction for themselves and appropriate the spoils of war, invaded peaceful lands, ravaged villages, killed hundreds of people, raped women, rustled thousands of cattle, and then blamed the tribesmen for their attacks on Russian possessions."

  Tolstoy might just as easily have been writing about the westward movement of the United States or the expansion of the British Empire during that same period. That was the way of the world in those days.

  Sergei Tsygankov, a Russian lieutenant colonel, who ran the body collection point closest to the battleground. During the five months that he had run the makeshift morgue, more than 2,000 bodies had passed through his tents. He was in poor health and mentally fragile condition. He and the rest of his command drank their sorrows away. No matter how well they wash, they can't get rid of the smell.
  &
  They were so poorly provisioned, that they had to trade body bags - useful for insulating material - for gasoline for his refrigerator truck. He explained the results of such poor logistics:

  "For every ten soldiers we get, only three have been killed in battle. All the rest have frozen to death, or died because someone wasn't careful with a weapon, or died from disease, especially in winter."

  The callous disregard for the value of human life continues in modern Russia. As one prominent result, the greatest danger for Russian soldiers in Chechnya doesn't come from the Chechens, but from the meager logistical provisions of the Russian Army.

  Nevertheless - what everyone knows - the Russian officials keep "lowering the figures." If a wounded man dies in the hospital, he is not listed among the killed in battle. Tsygankov has no expectations for the Caucasus except "eternal war."
  &

Without rule of law, "it's impossible to achieve anything."

  Andrei Zhivoi, who had served longer in Chechnya than permitted, had fought under conditions that violated Russian military rules, and as a result had lost both his legs to a mine. He had since received German prostheses through the Soldiers' Mothers Committee in Rostov, married, and was attending law school.
  &
  He knew the central problem in Russia, and was determined to engage in the battle - with dignity and hope rather than with regret. Zhivoi explained that the country had to follow the rule of law.

  "Without that foundation, without a legal order, it's impossible to achieve anything. Anything at all."

Northern Siberia:

&

  There were vast mineral riches under the frozen tundra at Norilsk, and they would be exploited - at any cost. Nickel, platinum, coal, copper, and cobalt are available in abundance in the region, and about a quarter of a million souls remain there to mine them.

  "Like so many of the freed slaves in the American South who settled beside the plantation gates, the former prisoners stayed on to work for the Kombinat."

  Today, the pay for those working for the Kombinat is good - among the highest in Russia. But with privatization - achieved as part of the infamous "loans-for-shares" auction in 1995 - bloated workforces are being severely cut, and the city is shrinking. The locals had also received some shares, but ignorant of their value, they had almost all soon sold their shares at prices well below their value.
  &
  Constructed in the charmless socialist central planning style, Norilsk apartment blocks crumble as the permafrost melts beneath them. It is one of Russia's most polluted cities. An orange-yellow curtain hangs over the region. Vast plumes of sulfur dioxide and other pollutants reach all the way to Canada. Few workers live beyond their fifties. Norilsk is surrounded by the devastation it has caused - about 1,500 square miles of "dead forest."

  "Everywhere across Russia, in the years since the Soviet collapse, the past had been exhumed, laid bare, only to be abandoned, unexamined and unburied. Nothing had settled right. In more cosmopolitan corners, life had of course moved on. In Moscow and Petersburg, sushi bars, casinos and soup kitchens had quickly appeared. But Norilsk, for all its riches, remained a severed world, a Pompeii of Stalinism that the trapped heirs of the Gulag still called home."

  In 2001, the Kombinat again officially closed Norilsk to outsiders.
  &

Many of the people are there because they enjoy a greater sense of freedom and the society of people of simple virtues.

  In Siberia, it's still everyone for themselves. There are many stranded "orphans of the Gulag" whose lives are in tatters and have no place else to go. The young are trapped there, most without prospects, and heroin has captured many of them.
  &
  But many of the people are there because they prefer it - distant from Moscow. They enjoy a greater sense of freedom and the society of people of simple virtues. This even includes the people from the "nuclear cities," who make jokes about how big the flowers are - and how big their children grow - in their radioactive environments. Among the characters Meier meets on his travels:
  &

  Gen. Nikolai Vladimirovich Numerov was travelling back to Norilsk for the first time in fifty years. He offered various explanations for his imprisonment. He had been imprisoned there by Stalin after WW-II along with the other Soviet soldiers who had had the misfortune to be captured by the Nazis and survive. He had been imprisoned as an American spy when a girl he was with unknowingly spoke to two foreigners who happened to work at the American Embassy.
  &
  He had founded the Association of the Victims of Political Repression, and claimed 300,000 members. He ranted against Gorbachev, glasnost, Yeltsin, Jews and privatization.
  &

  Volodya Birger, a shy, 49 year old pony tailed computer programmer, a passenger on the cruise up the Yenesei, whose mission in life was to "memorialize the dead" from the Gulag camps in the Krasnoyarsk region. He had been given access to the archives of the Interior Ministry in Krasnoyarsk in return for answering the pleas of the children and grandchildren who were now eager to rehabilitate relatives who had been imprisoned.
  &
  For thirteen years, he had been interviewing all who came to him or whom he could locate - survivors and relatives - methodically recording on stacks of index cards the details of lives lost to the Gulag - "Name, Hometown, Date of Birth, Statute imprisoned under, Transit Prison, Year of Arrival, Year in Camp, Year of Departure, - - -" He knew he could never get them all, but he already had 36,000 cards. The heirs of Stalin's victims were entitled to compensation - a small sum but something that would be appreciated.
  &

It was all a "mistake" - a horrible "mix-up" that would undoubtedly soon be discovered and "worked out." After all, they had done nothing wrong.

"A great many of the [prisoners] not only had believed in the system but had yearned to be recognized as supporters."

  Olga Yaskina, a Polish woman from Yaroslav, she went into exile deep in the taiga forests near Perm with her family just after WW-II. She was then 16 years of age. She was arrested and sent to Norilsk in 1952, but was released - "just in time' - in 1955, a couple of years after Stalin had died. She recounted some of the horrors of the Gulag.
  &
  Olga tells of the naïveté common among those imprisoned in the Gulag. It was all a "mistake" - a horrible "mix-up" that would undoubtedly soon be discovered and "worked out." After all, they had done nothing wrong. "If only the people at the top knew," some incredibly believed, things would be put right.
  &
  Indeed, very few of the prisoners were actually political dissidents, Meier notes. "A great many of the [prisoners] not only had believed in the system but had yearned to be recognized as supporters."
  &
  Now, that was all over. Few still believed in Moscow. But like many prisoners too long in jail, they had become institutionalized, unable to live on the outside. Even cash inducements and offers of new mainland apartments have not succeeded in getting the retired and excess workers to resettle. Many took pride in what they had endured and achieved, and in their city all alone above the Arctic Circle.
  &
  Olga tells of the prisoner strike that broke out in several Gulag camps soon after Stalin's death. They still believed in the system, and sought only to be heard about their terrible working conditions. It lasted about ten weeks, when the guards broke it up with fire hoses and violence. But the camps were slowly liquidated thereafter. Workers were retained or attracted to the region by incentives - especially better pay than obtainable elsewhere in Communist Russia.
  &
  Olga stayed in Norilsk. "Where were we to go?" In Norilsk, at least, there was work and a small apartment. And there was also her husband. Like many other female prisoners, she had married a guard.
  &

  Vasily Romashkin, an engineer who had been among the first prisoners, had also decided to stay. After release in 1947, he rose to become a chief engineer, and took pride in his accomplishments.

  "A new life would have been impossible. Even freed, former prisoners were often given long terms of exile or suspended rights. Few [prisoners] could gain a propiska, or residency permit, to go back home. Even for those who succeeded in winning back passports, they were 'dirty,' branded with the details of their camp time. They knew they would be considered vragi naroda, enemies of the people, and it would be hard to get a job or an apartment anywhere else."

  Vladimir Potanin, a communist apparatchik and Moscow banker who - as a result of the notorious "loans-for-shares" auction - obtained control over the fabulously resource rich Kombinat mining complex in Norilsk, Siberia, and is now one of the world's richest men. Meier interviewed him in Moscow.
  &

Russia needed the resources, and there was no other way to get them.

  Aleksei Borisovich Loginov - also interviewed in Moscow just before his death at 95 years of age - had spent 17 years in Norilsk during its Stalinist period, retiring as an engineer-colonel. He expressed no regrets for Norilsk. Russia needed the resources, and there was no other way to get them. No softhearted talk about human rights or inhumane work conditions for him. The city and the mines could not have been built in the frozen tundra without prison labor. (Prison labor is an essential ingredient in these workers' paradises.)
  &
  He had traveled widely in the U.S. after WW-II, purchasing mining equipment. He treasured his memories of that trip. He knew how differently mining was developed in the U.S. than in Russia, but  the U.S. always had money and equipment to work with. Despite his tough talk, he was not unaffected by his experiences in Norilsk. His nerves shot, he had asked to be relieved in 1957.
  &

Sakhalin:

The oil companies had so far contributed $60 million to a development fund, but most of it had disappeared without observable impact.

Russia could only exist by the sale of its abundant natural resources. It could produce almost nothing efficiently enough to sell in competitive world markets.

  But Sakhalin was already a depressing world of exiles and prison camps, of drunks, rapists, murderers, and the generally discontented. Its atmosphere permeates his work, "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "The Cherry Orchard," and "The Seagull." "The Island of Sakhalin" provides an encyclopedia of Russian forced labor during those times.
  &
  After the Soviet collapse, Sakhalin, like Vladivostok and the entire Maritime Province, had quickly abused and discouraged the foreign investors initially attracted by the region's prospects. Crime, corruption, disease and despair - and the lack of legal framework - smothered economic prospects. The riches of natural resources - coal, timber, fur, salmon, crab, red caviar, and oil - were not enough to make up for Sakhalin's lawless environment.
  &
  By 2000, Meier found it one of the poorest provinces in Russia, with per capita income of about $30 per month. Its population was in rapid decline.

  "Nearly all the 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 [and derelict]."

  Only the international oil companies had the resources to overcome all obstacles and establish themselves on Sakhalin - complete with a gated and guarded "American Village" for foreign staff. Nevertheless, living conditions at the work camps which serviced the offshore oil rigs was rough.
  &
  The oil was piped directly off island. The island's gasoline was almost all imported - and the highest priced in Russia. The oil companies had so far contributed $60 million to a development fund, but most of it had disappeared without observable impact.
  &
  "We are a rich country of poor people," Putin had once exclaimed. Nowhere in Russia did Meier find that truth more evident. Russia could only exist by the sale of its abundant natural resources. It could produce almost nothing efficiently enough to sell in competitive world markets. On Sakhalin, as one Western oil man explained to an ardent Peace Corps volunteer: "There is no culture, there is no history, and there is no environment."
  &

  Meier first braved the flight in an old Vlad-Avia Tupelov to Vladivostok - the old Soviet fleet's Pacific home and the entrepôt for the Gulag camps and the gold fields to the north. In May, 1944, two prominent left wing ideologues from the U.S., Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore, were taken on a Potemkin tour of the complex, and predictably allowed themselves to be favorably impressed.
  &
  Vladivostok is a Russian crossroads within easy distance of China, the Koreas and Japan. However, the economy nevertheless remains smothered by corruption a decade after the end of the Soviet state. Hunting and gathering in the vast inland forests provide the basics for survival. Smuggling and a thriving gray market make the city livable. Looting from naval arms depots, and from telephone and electric lines, was common. As civilization retreats, many towns have been left without modern services.
  &
  Chinese traders, Korean loggers, Japanese fishermen, and Vietnamese laborers mingle in its streets. Unemployed seamen from the fleet rusting in the harbor grumble about the yellow peril, and predict an inevitable loss of the territory. Chinese laborers in substantial numbers slip across the border from one of China's poorest regions to find work in Primorye, the Maritime Territory. Chinese and Japanese tourists frequent its hotels during the summer season.
  &

  Meier then traveled through Sakhalin. He mixed with people striving to survive, many police officers or other security officers, and several petty officials - many drowning their sorrows in alcohol. He describes the drab hopelessness of their lives. Fights and murders are a daily occurrence.
  &
  In the north, he must travel by hitching rides. There is no public transportation. He soon concludes that any male with an automobile and a job has to be with the police, border guards, federal security service, or the military. He visits towns, coal mines and prison camps described a century earlier by Chekhov.
  &

  Denis Dyomkin, a local Vladivostok reporter for Kommersant, the leading business daily in Moscow, drove Meier north to see the country. He was noted for having won a minor court case against the notoriously corrupt Governor. But his prospects in Vladivostok were grim, and he yearned to get to the main office in Moscow. Everything of note happened only in Moscow.

  "Reform [in Vladivostok] meant only one thing, a free criminal zone. And politics? What did that matter? Politics were not even real. Life was shaped by the brute force of business, big business."

  Valentin Fyodorov, interviewed in Moscow, was Sakhalin's reformist first governor after the Soviet fall. He replaced the office portrait of Lenin with that of Adam Smith, attempted many reforms, encouraged the oil deals, but made many enemies among the local apparatchiks and lasted only a couple of years.
  &

The "three great Russian diseases," greed, corruption and bureaucracy, were the primary culprits to blame for Russia's misfortunes. 

  Vera Boltunova, a local Duma deputy and editor of Sakhalin's most independent newspaper, had helped lead the demonstration that had deposed the local Party boss in 1988. However, the romantic era had not lasted long. Yeltsin had presided over the destruction of their hopes and dreams. 
  &
  Vera didn't trust the foreign oilmen, but she knew that Russia needed no help to destroy its hopes for development. The "three great Russian diseases," greed, corruption and bureaucracy, were the primary culprits. 

  "To put a single fishing boat on the water, Vera went on, one needed the signatures of forty-nine officials. To put up a kiosk, one needed twenty-two. I understood the calculus: the more signatures, the more bribes."

  Anatoly Ivanovich Filipov, with skill and luck and a few connections, had taken advantage of the period of reform just before the Soviet fall to establish a fishing concern that now employed 600 permanent employees, 2,000 in season, had an American partner and eight boats that brought in 15,000 tons of fish in an average year, and shipped nearly 4 million tins of salmon to Europe. To keep going, he had to deal with them all - the politicians, the mobsters, "and, worst of all, the bureaucrats."
  &

  A foreign legion of contract oil workers - men who had worked all around the world - were encountered when Meier traveled north to visit the first offshore oil rig. They significantly outnumbered those from Russia. The pay was good, but work and living conditions were tough. It was "a well-paid hell."
  &
  Everything about the effort to exploit the vast energy resources beneath the Sea of Okhotsk was heroic in its proportions and dangers. Repeatedly, Meier heard tales that contradicted company assurances about oil spill preventive measures. The area was disturbingly similar to Alaska's Prince William Sound, with its abundant but vulnerable ecosystem. There were stories of significant spills and damage to sea life, from whales to herring. Meier tracked down one of the eye witnesses to a great herring die-off.
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St. Petersburg:

  St. Petersburg is now a den of thieves and compromised politicians - renowned for the number of its leading citizens recently murdered. It is now nicknamed "the Criminal Capital" of a nation beset by criminality. But the rate of suicides in the city is twice as great as the rate of murder, and four times higher than the European average.
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  St. Petersburg is also the city of the blokadniki who survived the long bloody siege during WW-II. Meier provides accounts of this, too.
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Starovoitova's death marked the end of "the Great Romanticism" which flickered fitfully during the first decade after the Soviet fall.

  Galina Vasilievna Starovoitova had been a persistent voice for reform in the Duma for nearly a decade. She was a long time associate of Yeltsin. She was a radical reformer with international renown. She fought against them all - "nationalists and bureaucrats, unreconstructed Communists and would-be capitalists." She sought "free elections, a parliamentary system, freedom of speech and freedom of the press." As Putin put it, she was "either loved with devotion or hated with fury."
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  Meier outlines her impressive efforts to push Russia in a reformist direction - efforts that were met with frustration and a steady loss of real influence. Her death marked the end of "the Great Romanticism" which flickered fitfully during the first decade after the Soviet fall. With interviews of her aged parents and others who knew her, Meier provides an account of her life and character.
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  Vladimir Sergeyevich Kumarin, a reputed criminal chieftain in St. Petersburg, had lost one arm in an earlier attempt on his life, and was afflicted with a heart condition. In two rare interviews, he gave Meier his account of the evolution of the criminal gangs and corrupt law enforcement agencies during the last two decades. He had, he said, simply gone into business with some friends, done well, and was unjustly reputed to be the head of a criminal organization.
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  But times were changing in the Putin era, and many gang lords have been forcibly made to realize their vulnerability. There was now a movement to make their businesses legitimate, with transparent, audited books and a public record of shareholdings. Kumarin had decided to live a legal life. He and many others like him were now concerned with public relations, and ostentatiously engaged in civic projects. Quiet, he said, was good for those in business.
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  But the bodyguards and the danger would stay with him forever.
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Russia was neither democratic nor capitalist, but feudal. The new nobility - the oligarchs - accumulated wealth only through grants of fiefs that they had not earned by their own efforts - fiefs "once state owned and still maintained by peasant serfs" - fiefs "won by pledging allegiance to the man [Yeltsin] on the throne."

  Dmitri Sergeyevich Likhachev, Russia's most prominent historian, born in 1906, he had seen it all and experienced it all, including four years in a northern prison camp, the siege of Leningrad, and the whole sorry period of Soviet history. Meier interviewed him just before his death.
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  Likhachev noted somewhat favorably the viewpoint that Russia was neither democratic nor capitalist, but feudal. The new nobility - the oligarchs - accumulated wealth only through grants of fiefs that they had not earned by their own efforts - fiefs "once state owned and still maintained by peasant serfs" - fiefs "won by pledging allegiance to the man [Yeltsin] on the throne."
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  The current primary growth industries - the exploitation of natural resources and "reaping rent from protection" - were still generally the same as in the Middle Ages. "Timber, silver, gold, and vodka: They traded everything these men do now."
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  But now, things were even worse than in feudal times. Commerce now is conducted without the code of honor that existed in those days.

  "They lived by their word. Handshakes were done in public. Deals were blessed in church. And if one of their number dared to break his word, no one would hire a hit man. They would simply never do business with him again."

  It was the moral collapse that most worried Likhachev. He recognized the sufferings of the tsarist days, but compared to current developments, they were at least bounded  by a social ethic. Nowhere at the top or in the upper strata of today's society did he see such an ethic. But in the mass of the people, he still discerned a moral conscience.

  "[Likhachev explained that] it ruled the lives of people in towns across Russia whom nobody knew. They were not political leaders or generals or men of great wealth, but ordinary people working hard in everyday lives to keep the balance in the land. If not for them, the moral eclipse would be too great. Nothing less than the survival of the country, he warned, was at stake. 'And if Russia edges over the abyss,' he added, 'she will not go alone.'"

  The main streams of the current ideological ferment in Russia are outlined by Meier. The nation is so vast and diverse, that it is unrealistic for the nation to have a single unifying or even dominant ideology. There are the "Westernizers" and anti-western "Slavophiles" and nationalistic "Eurasians" who glorify Russia's uniqueness. There is also a tendency to blot out the past - an anti-historical "renunciation" of a past that had little to recommend it at best.
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  Lev Lurie, political columnist, historian and teacher, tells some of the lowlights of the criminally  contaminated business and political scene in St. Petersburg. It is his view that crime exploded in St. Petersburg precisely because, for awhile, unlike Luzhkov in Moscow, the governor was weak, and so the struggle for power had become anarchic.
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Individuality was difficult  to grasp for a people that had always belonged to the state and viewed themselves as a part of the state.

  Andrei Kurpatov, a young psychiatrist working for meager salary for the government but with a growing private practice, explained his views about the noxious psychological impacts of modern Russian life.
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  An entire wing of the hospital was filled with victims of "the Chechen syndrome." It was not combat or brutality that troubled the veterans, but the loss of their guns.

  "In Chechnya, 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."

  Then, there was the problem with the sudden outbreak of individualism. Russians had never had to deal with the uncertainties of freedom, Kurpatov explained. Individuality was difficult  to grasp for a people that had always belonged to the state and viewed themselves as a part of the state. And these difficulties were naturally made much worse because of the dysfunctional nature of current political and economic life in Russia. He called it a "complete loss of any unified sense of self."
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  There had been a widespread naïve belief in the miraculous. It was in the culture and in the literature. Obviously powerless to help themselves, people waited for miraculous deliverance. Before the revolution, it had been the miraculous tsar who would improve their conditions. Afterwards, it was the miraculous collective. "Today," Kurpatov said, "we have no more miracle workers."
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  Then, there were the troubled children. Everywhere in Russia, there were troubled children being raised by fear and the television. Nowhere do they get proper attention or positive reinforcement. All too frequently, there is "no reward for good behavior."
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  Many of the young saw no way forward. Drugs and AIDS claimed them in droves. Meier describes some of the feeble official responses to these related tragedies.
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  Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the world famous Kirov Theater, now named the "Mariinsky Theater," was a dynamic embodiment of Russian culture. He was now one the the world's  most sought after conductors, and was on a nonstop mission to maintain and expand his theatrical organization in St. Petersburg.
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  He was Russia's most captivating cultural star, with powerful and rich patrons in Russia and worldwide, heading one of Russia's most fabled institutions. But even he did not travel around St. Petersburg without a bodyguard.
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  "Give us time," he pleaded. Things are slowly evolving.

  "Things at last are moving in the right direction. Everyone's trying to rebuild his own world, to remake himself anew."

Prospects under Putin:

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During his administration, Yeltsin had built nothing to replace the Soviet state he had dismantled.

  Putin is a believer in the state and in its precedence over the individual, Meier points out. He came to power after currency devaluation and defaults on public debts and amidst fears that the Russian Federation itself would fragment along the lines of its 89 regions. During his administration, Yeltsin had built nothing to replace the Soviet state he had dismantled.
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  Putin acted quickly against the most unruly of the regional governors. Then he reduced the unruly legislature to "a supine body dominated by one faction" - the party Putin had put together to control legislation. To run the seven federal super districts into which he carved Russia, Putin drew on officials from the Army and FSB - the successor to the KGB. Next came the prosecution of the two oligarchs who happened to own the major independent media empires in Russia. Both soon found that the climate abroad was better for their health.
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  Meier quotes approvingly from George Kennan, the genius of U.S. containment strategy who foresaw the Soviet collapse almost half a century before it happened. Russia must find its own way toward modern governance.

  "Give them time, - - - let them be Russians; let them work out their internal problems in their own manner. The ways by which peoples advance towards dignity and enlightenment in government are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate processes of national life. There is nothing less understandable to foreigners, nothing in which foreign interference can do less good."

  Clinton and Yeltsin had been great friends who had much in common. But now, with Bush and Putin, the "era of romantic intentions and ambitious aims had ended. In both capitals a new pragmatism, lean and cold, ruled."
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  Roy Medvedev, Marxist historian and author in 1971 of "Let History Judge," the seminal work on Stalinism, spoke optimistically of "the Putin miracle."

  "Putin, like Andropov, understands the need to keep order above all. He realizes the state collapsed with the end of the USSR, and for years, we lived in essence in a failed state."

  Medvedev asserted that Putin realized the need for a centralized, strong authority to keep the centrifugal forces from tearing it apart. Medvedev still believed that Marxism could work in Russia.

  That essential centralizing force had disappeared when Gorbachev had dispersed the power of the Communist Party Secretariat to protect himself from opposition within the party. See, the segment on "The end of Communist Party rule," in Kotkin, "Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000."

  Oleg Khlevnyuk, a young historian, examined the new Russia under Putin. There was a widespread renewal of a sense of identity as Russians. The nation was coming together.
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  There was still no indication of a restoration of Soviet totalitarianism, but there was fear of some degree of backsliding. The political scene would be "controlled." "Pluralism - - - was a virtue of the 'civilized world,' something to strive for. Russia was just not ready yet." Khlevnyuk explained:

  "It's a police state, and we'll have to sacrifice personal liberties, the rights of minorities, and so on. [But for Russia, right now, the alternative] was just too dangerous."

  Democracy isn't easy. Democracy takes time.

Most Russians now blamed the liberalizing forces that triumphed in 1991 for the subsequent decline that followed.

  Inessa and Marat Krichevsky, the parents of Ilya Krichevsky, a young poet who was one of the only three people to have been killed in the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August, 1991. The defeat of the coup effort paved the way for Yeltsin to take power and disband the Soviet state.
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  Few people in Russia still saw that event as a favorable turning point in their lives. Much disappointment and suffering had followed, as had the near anarchy of the Yeltsin years. Most Russians now blamed the liberalizing forces that triumphed that day for the subsequent decline that followed. But Inessa and Marat had no such doubts. Their son did not die in vain.

  "Are they [the doubters] blind? We now live in a completely different country! Not just the bankers and mobsters and oil barons. We do as well. We can travel. We can say what we want. We can meet foreigners -- a reporter even! -- in our apartment. We can shop in stores that are full of goods and open twenty-four hours every day. And to think people still think it was all in vain!"

  But now they put their faith in Putin, and had voted for him. They viewed the military officers in Putin's government as men of honor and conscience. These men would put a stop to the thievery and lawlessness that had afflicted Russia. There was no other way that offered hope of success.
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