Black Earth: A journey through Russia after the fall. Andrew Meier

for crime – specifically, an illicit trade in just about anything. Odessa, went the old line, was the mama of Soviet crime, and Rostov the papa. Now the crime Lenin called speculation was known as biznes, and the city teemed with crowds buying and selling. The automobile market, one of the largest in Russia, stretched for miles. Moscow had its own sprawling open-air bazaars, where big-shouldered babushkas vied with Caucasian traders, but for any trader working Russia’s southern reaches, Rostov was the dream.

      The crossroads lured not only pilgrims from across the mountains, but a blond, blue-eyed Englishman raised and bred, as he put it, for the financial markets of London. John Warren had lived in the city on the Don for years. Brash and pink in the cheek, he seemed an eternal English public school boy, better suited to the world of Evelyn Waugh than Maksim Gorky. Yet in an unlikely post-Soviet evolution, Warren had risen fast in the turmoil of the new market – from a Moscow apprenticeship in the empire of Marc Rich, the elusive American financier living in Switzerland, to his current position as the honorary consul of Her Majesty’s Government at the edge of the Russian steppes.

      Warren had cause to be pleased with himself. He’d married a Russian beauty and fathered, a year or two back, a blond Sasha. He was fond of reiterating his conviction, gained by experience, that “Russia can work!” His service to the queen, albeit unsalaried, allowed him to affix a miniature Union Jack to the antenna of his Land Rover, an army green Defender, and to ensure, or so he hoped, his own small stake in the local economy. Warren was something of a local celebrity. He wore white shorts and dark sunglasses and careered around in the Defender, the only one in town. His fame, however, had another source: He had dared compete with the locals at their own game.

      Rostov sold everything under the sun, but its first and primary product came from its soil, Russia’s famed black earth, its chernozem. The city does not fall within the administrative borders of the Chernozemie, the Black Earth region that is centered on the Volga city of Voronezh and encompasses the five provinces north and east. Yet on the outskirts of Rostov, one found the same endless fields of rich silt loam that coat the steppes for three thousand miles from Ukraine to Siberia. Black earth is the dark, clumped-together soil that gleams like a black rainbow when its crevices catch the afternoon sun. Born of a thousand years’ decomposition of ancient steppe grass, black earth holds no chalk and no dryness. Few soils are richer in nutrients, and fewer hold water better. Black earth is found elsewhere, but no nation has as much as Russia. Like a belt unbuckled across the country’s girth, it spans its central regions, coating more than 150 million acres chestnut brown. “The tsar of soils,” Vasily Dokuchaev, the nineteenth-century father of Russian earth science, called chernozem. “More valuable than oil,” Dokuchaev called the soil, “more precious than gold.”

      Yet for all its promise, much of the great acreage lies fallow. Russia’s black earth, perhaps like no other of its vast natural resources, betrays the burden of the country’s abundance, the bequest that somehow seems too much to bear. Rostov, in the heart of the Russian breadbasket, seemed to carry the weight of its past, even the remote days mournfully evoked in the greatest literary work of medieval Russia. “The black earth beneath the hooves,” writes the anonymous author of the twelfth-century epic The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, “was sown with bones and watered with blood: a harvest of sorrow came up over the land of Russia.”

      THE CITY HAD LONG been the country’s wheat, barley, and grain capital. John Warren, however, had seen something else, sunflowers. For hours on the train the yellow fields lit the cabin. In the endless stretches of gold, the tall plants stretched toward the sun, their faces black with seeds. Kolya spoke lovingly, almost romantically, of the seeds. It was a ballad sung across the country. Russians love their semechki. Every city, town, and village, no matter how small, was sure to have the seeds on sale-in the markets, at the bus stops, on the streets, and in the passageways below. Black bread and white water remained the first loves. But in the post-Soviet era sunflower seeds became the staple one could be sure to find no matter how bleak the outpost.

      Seeds, Warren had to admit, were not gold. But they held oil. Rostov sunflower oil he thought, could be shipped across the Black Sea and sold in Europe. Business had been good. Now forty-two employees helped him broker everything the black earth had to offer: grains, barley, hops, nuts. Angliisky khleborob, they called him in town, the “English peasant.” He and his family enjoyed an enormous apartment, a floor above the local governor’s. It’d been no fun, of course, to resettle the herd of eighteen who’d lived in it as a kommunalka. But the place really had a glow now. Tsarist antiques filled its elegant rooms, while gilt-framed canvases–“fabulous fakes,” Warren boasted, of nineteenth-century oils – crowded its walls. Not long ago he’d bought a cigarette boat in Istanbul and motored home–“eight sublime days” – across the Black Sea and up the Don.

      That evening I’d caught a report on the news that a worthy in local business had been killed. The deceased had resided, Warren explained, directly below. The apartment, now vacated, seemed a natural target for annexation. “Not a chance,” he said. “Everyone would think I whacked him for it.”

      We went for a meal on Rostov’s Left Bank, arriving at a line of tiered restaurants so gaudy with neon they resembled casinos. One was even called Vegas. En route, at the entrance of a dirt road running deep into a tall field of steppe grass, we passed a sign that read CHANCE. “Open-air bordello,” Warren explained.

      He pulled the Defender into Boris’s Place and we were given the center table on the patio. Warren promptly requested a new waitress – Natasha was his favorite – and ordered deep bowls of sickly crawfish and shashlik sizzling in fat. He’d asked me to join him. English visitors were in town. They needed tending. “EBRD gents,” he said, contract consultants from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He feared boredom looming and intended to stave it off.

      No sooner had Natasha lavished us with food and drink than the lights began to flash, the music blared, and a quartet of dancing girls sidled up. They wore pastel veils, red halter tops, loose trousers of gauzy white. To the electrified beat of “Hava Nagila,” the Gypsies began to gyrate. The EBRD gents were overwhelmed. The younger of the two, newly married, tried to bury his head in his crawfish. His partner, however, a gray-haired economist recently retired and eager “to help out the poor Russians,” forgot about food. Warren whooped and clapped and stuffed hundred-ruble notes into spandex straps.

      “From all of us,” he shouted.

      “No, allow me!” cried the elder economist, tucking his own rubles into the elastic wiggling beside him.

      Our host, Boris, stopped by. It was not his real name. Like most of the men who ran the clubs of the Left Bank, Boris was Armenian. Would we desire company? he wondered, nodding toward a table of gaunt girls in a comer. They wore black and looked bored. No, we were fine, Warren said. Before long the table of girls merged with a table of men next to us. They were a grim crew, anchored by two large pockmarked gentlemen. One wore a white suit, the other black. They both bore gold chains and bracelets. Kingpins from the local Azeri and Georgian mobs, Warren explained. “Colleagues and competitors.” Didn’t he ever worry about safety? “No,” said the honorary consul. “We’ve got a simple arrangement. I control twelve percent of the market. That’s my limit. Anything more, I’m dead.”

       FOUR

      THE TALE READ AS IF it had been lifted from Gogol. It was just one of hundreds, testimonials collected in a book hanging in the half-light of the dank entranceway on Lermontov Street.

      My boy went missing back in January ’95, when his tank burned in Grozny. Write down his name: Aleshkin, Kostya. Went in when he was nineteen. From the Orenburg region, station Donguzskaya. They only told me in the spring that he’d gone missing. I went to Chechnya, found his commanders. They were kind, didn’t kick me out. They fed me and told me to go home, that my Kostya was not among their dead and not among their wounded. So I went to the Chechen fighters. They didn’t insult me either; they swore to their Allah that my Kostya wasn’t among their prisoners. Then someone said: “Go