Black Earth Quotes

“The city is built on an inhuman scale. Everything is by design inconvenient for Homo sapiens.”
― Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall

“He squatted on his haunches, and I joined him. Muscovites, with the insistent air of urbane sophisticates, like to note that the pose is not native to Russia. Balancing yourself on your heels, often for hours, to wait or talk is a custom of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but one that Russians at some point ages ago seem to have taken as their own.”
― Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall

“More than one Moscow banker told me of the day when the Russians entered the Champagne Wars. The music was blaring, and the girls had begun to undress when one Russian diner ordered champagne, Dom Pérignon, at three hundred dollars a bottle. He didn’t drink it. He shook the bottle and sprayed it all over himself. The gauntlet was thrown. At a nearby table another Russian followed suit. The Champagne Wars were not new—the French had been wasting money for show for years—but the Russians took the battle to heart. Soon they were dueling, each trying to spray more bubbly than the other. By the end of the lunch, in a restaurant that accepted only cash, the bill for the champagne hit thirty thousand dollars.”
― Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall

“I knew we were going to pass one of the Soviet Union’s most secret atomic sites, the subterranean labyrinth code-named Krasnoyarsk-26, once one of the world’s most prodigious producers of plutonium. Built to make the fissile material for nuclear warheads, the entire complex had been constructed inside the mountain. It never appeared on Soviet maps.”
― Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall

“Reports had long held that Bykov had backed Lebed with funds, hoping for a cozy relationship. But the enmity, the aide said, had run deep from the start. When Lebed arrived in town to assume the governorship, Bykov had come calling. The two had locked themselves in the governor’s office, told everyone to go home, taken off their suit coats, and brawled. “They beat the hell out of each other,” the aide said. “And the fight continues to this day.”
― Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall

“It wasn’t just ‘divide and conquer,’” said Kazikhanov. “It was ‘divide, conquer, and tie up in trouble.”
― Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall