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| | Amazon.com: Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall: Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18) |
 | | Located a thousand miles south of Moscow between the Black and Caspian Seas, this Connecticut-sized area of 6,000 square miles is one of the so-called small nations that lie within Russia's borders, once romanticized by Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov in military epics starring "swarthy mountaineers with bejeweled daggers and mysterious fl-eyed" women. |
 | | Black Earth also helped me better understand the rise of Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB official now turned Russian "strongman." In the current international climate, following elections in Iraq and Palestine, it seems as though Russia has regressed from nascent experimentation with freedom and democracy, to its more familiar form of autocratic rule. |
 | | After reading Black Earth, however, my picture of Russia and its relationship to Putin has undergone a change; while the evolution of Russia into "Putinism" may not be positive, his popularity is certainly understandable. |
| www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393051781?v=glance (3763 words) |
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