Russia: Black Earth is, as the veteran US diplomat, George Kennan, states on its dust-cover, an "extraordinary work". Most books on the new Russia are devoted to political and economic analysis of the years since the red flag was lowered in the Kremlin as 1991 drew to a close. Meier, a former Time magazine bureau chief in Moscow, takes a different tack, writes Séamus Martin.
His is a book of personal reminiscences with a touch of travel writing thrown in. In some respects it is successful and striking in its impact. But there is a multitude of frustrations too. Readers who know Russia will, from time to time, be stopped in their tracks in otherwise compelling passages by an inaccuracy, an overwrought use of English or an obvious contradiction.
It might be better to get some examples out of the way before moving on to the book's more positive aspects. The Black Earth region for which the book is named is, Meier writes, "centered on the Volga city of Voronezh". At its nearest point, Voronezh is some 400 kilometres from the Volga River.
Referring to the failed hardline coup in Moscow in August 1991, he points out that a poll showed 43 per cent of Russians thought Boris Yeltsin had, on this occasion, merely "used the disorder in the country to seize power". In the very next sentence Yeltsin is described as the undisputed hero of those events.
Moscow becomes the victim of Meier's tendency to overstatement. When I went back there some weeks ago as an election observer for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a German colleague visiting the capital for the first time gasped at the huge city's brash new dynamism. "It's like Las Vegas," was her first impression - but later she appreciated the charm of the city's more graceful areas.
For Meier, however, Moscow is a city in which first impressions "do not lie". He writes of streets so broad that "one can traverse only beneath them, through dimly lit passageways that shelter refugees of the new order: makeshift vendors who hawk everything from Swedish porn to Chinese bras; scruffy preteens (sic) cadging cigarettes and sniffing glue; hordes of babushkas who have fallen through the torn social safety net and are left to sell cigarettes and vodka in the cold; the displaced stranded by the host of unlovely little wars that raged along the edges of the old empire. And everywhere underground the stench of urine lingers with the acrid aroma of stewed cabbage and cheap tobacco".
These are Meier's impressions and in each case there is an element of truth. The impressions don't lie only if you don't explore. Meier ignores the thread of old Moscow that runs through the brash modern city. The stylish old district between the broad and bustling shopping streets of Novy Arbat and Tverskaya does not fit the picture he wishes to portray. Here, none of Meier's overstatements apply. The magnificent art-nouveau architecture of the Ryabushinsky Mansion where Gorky once lived; the delightful park at the Patriarch's Ponds in which the opening chapter of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is set; the ancient manor house where Ivan the Terrible's "enforcer", Malyuta Skuratov, lived; the Church of the Ascension where, in 1831, Pushkin married the beautiful Natalia Goncharova - none of these fit into the writer's scheme of things.
On the plus side there are visits to the Far East, to Vladivostok and the island of Sakhalin, where dollars were changed into roubles in the hotel's "night bar", a not-so-glorified brothel which has hundreds of equivalents right across Russia's 11 time zones in hotels of Soviet provenance.
More importantly, there are striking interviews with figures from Russia, new and old. An encounter with Vladimir Sergeyevich Kumarin, reputed head of the Tambov Gang that turned St Petersburg into Russia's capital of crime, gives the reader an insight into the type of character who emerged from the depths in those heady, lawless days when the USSR came to an end and the writ of the Russian Federation had not yet run.
General Nikolai Numerov comes from a different casting agency. A Gulag survivor who quickly, perhaps too quickly for his own reputation, climbed back to a comfortable life, Numerov comes through as the epitome of a certain type of Russian male. There are still shortages in some parts of Russia but the krutoi muzhik, the Russian macho-man, is still in plentiful supply.
Finally, there is Chechnya. The author, though travelling in the area with pro-Moscow Chechens, is excoriating in his criticism of Russia's policy and the actions of its armed forces in the rebel region. In a dust-cover blurb Zbigniew Brzezinski writes: "If President Bush were to read only the chapters on Chechnya . . . he would gain a priceless education about Putin's Russia."
But Brzezinski would say that, wouldn't he?
Seamus Martin is an author and journalist. He has worked as Moscow correspondent and International Editor of The Irish Times
Black Earth: Russia after the Fall. By Andrew Meier, Harper Collins, 509pp. £25