Black Earth
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: November 15, 2004
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 544
ISBN-13: 9780007113248
Subjects: European history: postwar, from c 1945 -; Russia; 21st century; c 1990 to c 2000; History: World
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.