Never Speak to Strangers and other writing from Russia and the Soviet Union

About the book: David Satter arrived in the Soviet Union in June, 1976 as the correspondent of the Financial Times of London and entered a country that was a giant theater of the absurd. After 1982, he was banned from the Soviet Union but allowed back in 1990, and finally expelled in 2013 on the grounds that the secret police regarded his presence as “undesirable.” From 1976 to the present, he saw four different Russias, which differed from each other radically while remaining essentially the same. From 1976 to 1982, the Soviet Union was at the height of its world power and its people were in thrall to an absurd ideology. With the advent of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet population was liberated from the ideology and the state hurtled to its inevitable collapse. When independent Russia emerged from the wreckage, the failure to replace the missing ideology with genuine moral values led to Russia’s complete criminalization.

The articles in this unique collection are a chronicle of Russia from the day David Satter arrived in the Soviet Union until the present. Emigres from the states of the former Soviet Union often despair of their inability to convey the true character of their experiences to the West. Penetrating the veil of Russian mystification requires effort and the ability to understand that seeing is not always believing. The Russians have created an entire false world for our benefit. This collection reflects David Satter’s 40-year attempt to see them as they are.

About the speaker: David Satter is the author of five books on Russia, including “Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union,” which was released in April, 2020 by ibidem-Verlag/Columbia University Press. A former Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London (1976-82), he has followed Russian events for more than four decades. In September, 2013, he was accredited as a Radio Liberty correspondent in Moscow. Three months later, he was expelled from Russia becoming the first U.S. correspondent to be barred from Russia since the Cold War.

David Satter is affiliated with the Hudson Institute and Johns Hopkins University. His other books are The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, which was published in 2016. His first book, Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, was published in 1996. A film based on the book, “Age of Delirium,” won the 2013 Van Gogh Grand Jury Prize at the Amsterdam Film Festival. In addition, David Satter has written Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003) and It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (2011). His books have been translated into eight languages.

David Satter is a frequent commentator on Russian affairs. He writes on Russia for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. His articles and op-ed pieces have also appeared in the National Review, CNN.com, The Daily Beast, National Review Online, and other publications. He is also regularly interviewed in both Russian and English by Radio Liberty, the Voice of America and the BBC.