David A. Satter (born August 1, 1947) is an American journalist and historian[1] who writes about Russia and the Soviet Union. He has authored books and articles about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-Soviet Russia.

Satter was expelled from Russia by the government in 2013. He was the first researcher to advance the theory that Vladimir Putin and Russia's Federal Security Service were behind the 1999 Russian apartment bombings. He has often been critical of Putin's rise to the Russian presidency.[2]

Life and career

David Satter graduated from the University of Chicago and Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He worked for the Chicago Tribune and, from 1976 to 1982, as Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times. He then became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for the Wall Street Journal. He was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Jamestown Foundation, and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[3]

Satter published several books about Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. In an article in The Wall Street Journal Europe, April 2, 1997, he wrote: "When the Soviet Union fell… the moral impulse motivating the democratic movement had to become the basis of Russia’s political practices. The tragedy of the present situation is that Russian gangsters are cutting off this development before it has a chance to take root."[4]

Jack Matlock, the former U.S. ambassador in Moscow, writing in The Washington Post, said that Age of Delirium was "spellbinding" and gave "a visceral sense of what it felt like to be trapped in the communist system."[5] The Virginia Quarterly Review wrote, "The brilliance of this book lies in its eccentricity and in the author’s profound knowledge of and sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people under communism."[6] Martin Sieff, writing in the Canadian National Post, wrote that Darkness at Dawn was "Vivid, impeccably researched and truly frightening."[7] Angus Macqueen, writing in The Guardian, compared Darkness at Dawn to Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya.[8] Sieff wrote: "Both of these books underline the moral vacuum that the destruction of the Soviet Union has left."[7]

A documentary film about the fall of the Soviet Union based on Satter's book Age of Delirium was completed in 2011.[9] Satter also appears in the 2004 documentary Disbelief[10][11] about the Russian apartment bombings made by director Andrei Nekrasov.

In December 2013, the Russian government expelled Satter from the country for allegedly committing "multiple gross violations" of Russian migration law;[12] Satter said he followed the procedures the Russian Foreign Ministry set out for him[12] and said that the manner of his expulsion was a formula reserved for spies.[13][14] Luke Harding suggested that Satter's expulsion from the Russian Federation was part of a wider trend by the FSB that is, "increasingly rejecting visa applications from Western academics seeking to visit Russia if their publications are deemed hostile."[13]

Russian apartment bombings

In his book, Darkness at Dawn, Satter described bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999 that claimed nearly 300 lives and provided the justification for a second Chechen War. In his books he analyzed these bombings and related events, and was one of the first researchers who came to the conclusion that the bombings were perpetrated by Russian state security services to bring Vladimir Putin to power. During a testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives, Satter stated:

His books

References

  1. ↑ Skultans, Vieda (2015). "Afterword to the Issue". Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. 7 (1): 109. ISSN 2078-1938. Retrieved 26 June 2021.
  2. ↑ Satter, David (August 17, 2016). "The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power". National Review. Retrieved June 4, 2017.
  3. ↑ David Satter Biography Archived 2006-12-01 at the Wayback Machine, Hudson Institute.
  4. ↑ Satter, David (April 2, 1997). "Organized Crime Is Smothering Russian Civil Society". The Wall Street Journal (Online archive). Archived from the original on 2022-07-02. Retrieved 2022-07-02. When the Soviet Union fell, the deification of the state fell with it, opening up the possibility of a new future for Russia and the other successor republics. For this new departure to take place, however, Russia had to lose its underlying repressive psychology, which meant that the moral impulse motivating the democratic movement had to become the basis of Russia's political practices. The tragedy of the present situation is that Russian gangsters are cutting off this development before it has a chance to take root.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  5. ↑ Matlock, Jack F. (June 9, 1996). "The God That Deserved to Fail – review of 'Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union' by David Satter". The Washington Post Book World. ISSN 0190-8286.
  6. ↑ "Notes on Current Books". The Virginia Quarterly Review (Online archive). Winter 1997. Archived from the original on 2005-05-08.
  7. 1 2 Sieff, Martin (May 26, 2003). Mills, Don (ed.). "Russia's darkness is rising". The National Post. Ontario. p. A10.
  8. ↑ Macqueen, Angus (18 December 2004). "Nothing left but theft". The Guardian. Retrieved 2022-07-02.
  9. ↑ Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, "Film Screening of "Age of Delirium'" (2013) online
  10. ↑ Disbelief. The record in IMDB.
  11. ↑ "Google Video". Archived from the original on 2007-11-14. Retrieved 2007-01-18.
  12. 1 2 Lally, Kathy (January 14, 2014). "U.S. journalist David Satter, a Putin critic, is barred from returning to Russia". Washington Post.
  13. 1 2 Harding, Luke (January 13, 2014). "Russia expels US journalist David Satter without explanation". The Guardian.
  14. ↑ "American journalist David Satter kicked out of Russia". CNN. January 14, 2014.
  15. ↑ Satter House Testimony Archived 2011-09-27 at the Wayback Machine, 2007.
  16. ↑ "PUTIN'S ASYMMETRIC ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA AND EUROPE: IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY" (PDF). www.foreign.senate.gov. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-02-21. Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  17. ↑ How America Helped Make Vladimir Putin Dictator for Life Archived 18 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine by David Satter, 29 August 2017
  18. ↑ "The Mystery of Russia's 1999 Apartment Bombings Lingers — the CIA Could Clear It Up – National Review". National Review. 2 February 2017.
  19. ↑ The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin by David Satter, Reviewed by Giles Whittell, The Times
allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Satter