How the Western exchange students used to puzzle us, their Soviet dormmates, back in the early eighties at Moscow State University. Many had arrived expecting to see tanks in the streets and police patrols with barking dogs. Instead, they found the very safe, if impossibly sprawling, imperial capital of the ussr; and seemed impressed to be able to buy Soviet shampoo or ballpoint pens—which we, frankly, would rather have exchanged for what we saw as their infinitely more elegant and reliable bics. And when it came to the end of their year-long stay in our cold climes, these exotic yet earnest creatures would infallibly moan, ‘Oh, how I hate the thought of going back to Princeton (Oxford, Tokyo, Uppsala)’. They had caught the bug.

But what bug? What fascination could there be in the Stalinist grannies with their red armbands, zealously checking passes at the University entrance, or the overboiled buckwheat gruel and sticky stroganoff in the student canteen? True, there was a lot of inventiveness in the many little subversive tricks one had to play on the system, in order to navigate its irrational innards. You could not just walk into the campus bookshop or library, as at Princeton, and pick up what you wanted to read. The good things were not readily available—either too much in demand, ‘ideologically suspect’, or both. To buy a volume of Fernand Braudel meant camping outside the shop, long before opening hours, on a tip-off from a friend with publishing connexions; and then snapping up not just one book but the whole crate, for friends back at the dorm or as exchange currency—to barter, say, for Ray Bradbury. (I got my copy of The Wretched of the Earth for an old Playboy.) Or you might befriend a young lady librarian at Spetskhran, the ‘special’ restricted-access collection of foreign material, and beg to borrow something illicit, like New Left Review, overnight, to binge read until the small hours. True, too, that whenever we got together, in the kitchens or on the stairwells, we would chain-smoke, drink and talk about whatever lay outside the stale official ideology: from Fellini’s Amarcord and Djilas’s New Class to Pink Floyd and the sexual revolution. In retrospect, there were many thrilling moments for us young intellectual smugglers; especially since the Soviet system had become too sclerotic to catch us, and adolescent fascination with breaking the rules was usually safe.

During perestroika, an encounter with a husband-and-wife team of co-practising Californian therapists provided a useful insight into why the young Slavic enthusiasts seemed so terribly earnest to us. This prosperous pair were early arrivals among the motley crew of missionaries who—earnestly, of course—sought to help improve the newly liberated Russia, after America’s own image. They had come to spread the word about a fashionable mental-wellness technique called neuro-linguistic programming, which involved the detection and evaluation of the interlocutor’s psychological defence mechanisms, before the therapist attempted to establish a rapport. Ranging from jokes to facial expressions, body language and eye movement, such mechanisms are—as they explained to me, their interpreter, over drinks on our last evening—to be found in all socially competent humans, serving to hide what one might feel like keeping to oneself. A ‘normal’ adult should have about eight such subconscious devices, used interchangeably; a reclusive personality might display a dozen; over twenty was clear cause for alarm. In the car from the airport and over our first dinner, the Californians had counted twenty-seven defence mechanisms in my behaviour; next morning at breakfast they detected a couple more. Within a few days, they realized that we, the natives, all possessed dozens of pre-rational tricks which we would casually wield in interactions with strangers, while remaining polite and intellectually engaged—if perhaps a little too cynical for American tastes. Their models, they came to understand, summarized not an abstract human norm but the mean measurements of their native Orange County. Young urban Soviets carried, on average, thrice thicker insulation.

These insulating layers, however, were worn situationally, like clothing; their thickness depended on the interaction’s setting. In the endless queues, or at official meetings, the therapists might have observed further defensive quirks of Soviet behaviour: we could go super-cynically chatty or, conversely, self-induce a deep trance state, which we regarded as simply falling asleep with our eyes open. But the carapace could also get much thinner, and then the clicks and sparks of human connexion could fly in every direction. In the informal circles of friends, and friends of friends—like-minded people, summarily referred to as vse svoi,‘all ours’—defences could be dropped altogether; and then what Saint-Exupéry, cult author for the educated Soviet generation of the sixties and seventies, termed the ‘sumptuousness of human interaction’ would freely flow. And here, most probably, lies the bug that so many Westerners catch. A visiting scholar from Berkeley, of all places, expressed it succinctly, if perhaps too sweepingly: ‘America is an emotional desert’.

Emotional variety and intensity of experience surely provide a better explanation than Slavophilic ruminations on spirituality to the question why, generation after generation, Russia continues to fascinate Westerners. The great sociologists, Goffman, Collins, Stinchcombe, might help us to understand not only the nature of the attraction but also its source: the persistent under-institutionalization of Russian life. No longer a Gemeinschaft community, bound and scripted by traditions—with the possible exception of places like Chechnya—nevertheless, Russia ever since Peter the Great has recurrently fallen short of the capitalist Gesellschaft where, in theory at least, a cold and formal rationality should govern the greater part of human interaction. In the Soviet Union, so the old joke went, a problem would be fixed with a sledgehammer and a lot of hearty swearing. The reason it could not be otherwise was that, for most of its history, Russia has been suspended in some kind of transition: never a finished ‘thing’, but always catching up or falling behind the West. This, incidentally, illuminates another advantage enjoyed by Western visitors in the eighties—the flattering boost to their personal status, in a country where all things Western were matters of great curiosity: desirable, exotic yet unattainable, and often forbidden. Lastly, one could feel another exhilarating emotion in the Soviet Union during its final years; one that Bakunin, describing Paris in 1848, had called the emotional inebriation of revolution. The subterranean roar of the coming earthquake was felt everywhere; but in burying the ussr, it left rubble in its wake.

Andrew Meier is one of those Western Slavists who, arriving in the last years of the Soviet Union, caught the bug and stayed on in Russia for too long to remain the same person; but also got beyond the early exuberance of initiation into Russian life. Taken on, after a while, as Time magazine’s Moscow correspondent, his book Black Earth is in part an account of experiences that his Washington editors did not want to run. Although Meier’s work has been compared to David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb (1993) and Resurrection (1997)—both authors have produced vast and complex canvases, veritable encyclopaedias of post-communist Russia, packed with evocative micro-pictures and colourfully drawn characters—the two depict quite different countries. Where Remnick saw ‘resurrection’, the misty dawn of something new and promising—and has been accused of Clintonite apologias for Yeltsin’s ‘reforms’—Meier paints a gloomier picture of the vast country, struggling to keep on track and find its place in the world; or, Russia as usual.

Meier’s title comes from Mandelstam: