Other Books
Black Earth
A Journey Through Russia After the Fall
Publishers Weekly & Kirkus Starred Reviews
Book of the Year Lists: The Economist, New York Public Library, Times Literary Supplement, Amazon
"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.
Praise for Black Earth
That Black Earth is an extraordinary work is, for anyone who has known Russia, beyond question.
— George Kennan
"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
“A poignant and powerful portrait of a shattered nation.”
– TIME
“The best piece of journalism written about Russia in English, and likely to remain so for a long time.”
—John Lloyd, former Moscow bureau chief, Financial Times
“The best non-academic book on Russia since the mid-Nineties. . . . Black Earth is like the best sort of love letter; mournful, obsessive and exquisitely readable.”
—The Times (London)
"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 him 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
"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
“Andrew Meier experiences the huge human and ecological wreck left by the Russian past. He talks to gangsters, apparatchiks, intellectuals, oligarchs. He gives us not merely the buzz and glitter of Moscow and St Petersburg, but the squalid house-to-house fighting in Chechnya, the gloom of post-Soviet Arctic Norilsk, and—a rare experience—distant decaying Sakhalin. Meier is a truly penetrating eyewitness.”
– Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror, for Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year)
The Lost SPy
An American in Stalin's Secret Service
A dramatic story of secrets, espionage, murder and cover-ups — the most important Cold War spy story for a generation.
For half a century, the case of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York intellectual brutally murdered in 1947 on Stalin’s orders, remained hidden in the secret files of the KGB and the FBI – a footnote buried in the rubble of the Cold War. Then, in 1992, it surfaced briefly, when Boris Yeltsin handed over a deeply censored dossier to the White House. The Lost Spy at last reveals the truth: Oggins was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviets.
Based on six years of international sleuthing, The Lost Spy traces Oggins’s rise in beguiling detail – a brilliant Columbia University graduate sent to run a safe house in Berlin and spy on the Romanovs in Paris and the Japanese in Manchuria – and his fall: death by poisoning in a KGB laboratory.
Praise for The Lost Spy
“A meticulously researched and beautifully written biography.”
—Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History
“Utterly fascinating, a sad and sinuous study of true belief carried beyond all reason.”
—Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times
"An espionage thriller of the first rank."
—Sean Wilentz, Bancroft Prize-winning historian, Princeton University
“The meteoric Russianist and biographer Andrew Meier has given us a book about the ideological delirium that possessed the planet between those two dates, drawing us into a labyrinth peopled by ghosts and dreamers and carnivorous chameleons."
—Martin Amis, author of House of Meetings
“A brilliantly crafted account of true belief and its many terrible betrayals.”
—Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal
"The Lost Spy is a masterful work of historical recovery and fascinating story brilliantly told."
—Orlando Figes, author of A People’s Tragedy
Chechnya
To The Heart of a Conflict
Excerpted from Black Earth
Andrew's Meier riveting portrait of Chechnya, a land ravaged by indescribable carnage, enables us to understand the origins of this brutal conflict like no other recent work.
The barbaric, terrorist siege in the summer of 2004 that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent children in Beslan did not begin either there or in the take-over of a Moscow theatre in 2002. As Andrew Meier explains in this utterly compelling account, the most recent Chechen war actually broke out on New Year's Eve in 1994 when Boris Yeltsin sent hundreds of tanks to the center of the city of Grozny in an effort to quell popular demands for independence from Russia.
Six years later, Meier, braving great personal danger, traveled to the scene of one of the largest civilian massacres carried out by Russian troops, reporting on the carnage in which over 60 Chechen civilians including a pregnant woman and many elderly were brutally slaughtered in one of the war's most horrific "mop-up" operations.
Days after a Chechen woman became the conflict's first female suicide bomber, Meier visited this war-torn province, encountering, among others, kidnappers, Wahhabi Islamists aligned with the Taliban, and a stream of Russian mothers arriving at the morgue to identify their fallen soldier sons.
Chechnya is Meier's stunning report from a region where the death toll has already exceeded 100,000 people, and a book that attempts to comprehend what compels men to shoot children in the back.
Praise for Chechnya
"The centerpiece of Black Earth is Meier's description of the tragic war in Chechnya. But here again, he describes not only the politics and the morality of the war, but what it feels like actually to be there, on the ground, asking questions in a very strange place."
— Anne Applebaum, Sunday Telegraph (UK)
“Meier is no idealist and details the violence and venality of Russia with clarity and care….[his] meticulous reconstruction of the massacre at Aldy makes gripping, harrowing reading.…the book is an excavation of Russian identity.”
—Jason Burke, The Observer (UK)
"If President [George W.] 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