Black Earth
Subtitle: A Journey through Russia After the Fall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: January 30, 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 516
ISBN-13: 9780393326413
First sentence: IN THE OLD DAYS, before the breakneck final decade of the last century, before the end of empire and the epochal shift that followed in its wake, in the days when dissenters were dissidents and poets were prophets, when "abroad" meant Bulgaria, Budapest, or Cuba at best, when leather shoes and silk ties were not bought but "gotten," when colleagues were "Comrades" and strangers "Citizens," when HIV and heroin were exotic plagues born of bourgeois excess, when artists and soldiers pointed to ceilings and dropped their voices, when churches held archives and orphans, when lovers met in parks because apartments housed generations, when everyone professed to believe in the Party, the Collective, and Vodka but in truth trusted only Fate, God, and Vodka, I first came to Moscow.