Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union [Paperback]

David Satter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

The first state in history to be based explicitly on atheism, the Soviet Union endowed itself with the attributes of God. In this book, David Satter shows through individual stories what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea, how people were forced to act out this fictitious reality, and the tragic human cost of the Soviet attempt to remake reality by force. "I had almost given up hope that any American could depict the true face of Russia and Soviet rule. In David Satter's Age of Delirium, the world has received a chronicle of the calvary of the Russian people under communism that will last for generations."-Vladimir Voinovich, author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin "Spellbinding. . . . Gives one a visceral feel for what it was like to be trapped by the communist system."-Jack Matlock, Washington Post "Satter deserves our gratitude. . . . He is an astute observer of people, with an eye for essential detail and for human behavior in a universe wholly different from his own experience in America."-Walter Laqueur, Wall Street Journal "Every page of this splendid and eloquent and impassioned book reflects an extraordinarily acute understanding of the Soviet system."-Jacob Heilbrunn, Washington Times

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The collapse of the Soviet Union figures among the important events of the latter half of the century. David Satter, a reporter in Moscow for the Financial Times of London from 1976 to 1982, recorded with great detail the failings of the Soviet Union during the time and has cast those failings into a telling postmortem on the Communist state. The bulk of his material comes in the form of vignettes from people who suffered through the iron rule and the oppression and bleakness it fostered. Their stories provide personal insights as to why the empire collapsed. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Drawing on two decades of reporting from the Soviet Union for the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times of London, Satter's riveting montage takes us inside KGB interrogation cells, factories sabotaged by theft, collective farms awash in vodka, labor camps where a prisoner's slightest protest brings slow starvation in an isolation cell, psychiatric hospitals stuffed with political dissenters who are force-fed psychoactive drugs and tortured. By jump-cutting between historic events-the abortive 1991 coup against Gorbachev; the breakaway by the Baltic republics and Ukraine; the coal miners' strike of 1989-1990; the storming of the Russian parliament by Yeltsin's troops in 1993, which left 150 dead-and the struggles of ordinary Soviet citizens to survive in a society built on official lies and illusions, Satter provides an astonishingly intimate look at the unraveling of the Soviet system on a personal as well as a political level. We meet daring illegal border-crossers, refuseniks who won't rat on Anatoly Shcharansky for the KGB, fanatic right-wing nationalists and whistle-blowers with grievances against their workers' collectives who are thwarted by a kafkaesque maze of Moscow agencies that sidetrack their complaints. Satter also chronicles Russia's religious revival and the alarming rise of extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 444 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300087055
• ISBN-13: 978-0300087055
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #590,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, but there's a better choice to read. February 15, 2009

By Dalton C. Rocha

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I read this good book, here in Brazil.The book "Down With the Big Brother", by Michael Dobbs is better, than this book and talks about the same subject.I must tell you that this book follows a unlinear way.The Epilogue and afterword are really about late soviet fall.
In fact, the first chapter "The Coup" is about the soviet coup of 1991.The best chapter of this book is the number six "The Economy".The description of a soviet colletive farm makes me remeber, the also calamitous collective farms of MST,here in Brazil.
About Ukraine, there's desciption of apparition of Virgin Mary.
Among the best parts of this book:

a)Page 151:"Recently, there was a program on Soviet television called 'Rural America' that showed conditions on American farms.We saw veterinarians riding out in medical vans to give injections to pigs with disposable syringes.In Novokuznetsk, we don't even have disposable syringes for human beings".

b)Page 188:"To support their private plots, farmers engaged in constant stealing.Adults stole, as did their children.It was possible to stand in a collective farmer's house surrounded by wire, hammer, nails, wheels, machine oil, and lumber, only to realize that not a single item had been purchased."

c)Page 265:"The other pole of unseen world was the psychiatric hospitals where political prisoners were destroied with the help ofdrugs.The most commonly employed drugs were the halopelidol, wich turned off part of the brain; aminazine, wich reduced the victim to a half-stupor; majeptil, wich led to acute psychological distress; and sulfazine, wich , injected intramuscularly, usually in the buttocks, caused a sharp rise in body temperature and excruciating pain."

d)Page 335:"During my first years in the Soviet Union, I often wondered why atheistic communism triumphed in Russia, which was onceregarded as perhaps the most religious country in Europe.But the longer I lived there, the more I became convinced that it was not an irony, but a historical inevitability that a people who had long ceased to value the moral judgment of the individual , would one day throw off its mental bondage to a messianic religion in favor of a messianic ideology."

e)Page 371:"BY THE FALL OF 1990, the power of Communist establishment in Ukraine appeared to be crumbling under the twin blows of glasnost and a worsening economic crisis.On september 14, Lvov became the sixteenth city in Western Ukraine to take down a monument of Lenin,, and throughout the republic, food disappeared from the stores and the lines for gas were half a mile long."

About the Fall of Soviet Union, the book is good, but Michael Dobbs' book is a better choice than this book.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Literally Hell On Earth April 30, 2004

By R. W. Rasband VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

David Satter's stunning book is one of the most vivid accounts I've ever read about the day-to-day reality of life in the old Soviet Union. He was a reporter in and out for the last 18 years of the regime and interviewed many, many inhabitants, dozens of whose stories he tells in this riveting, horrifying book. It turns out that Orwell's "1984", which is fiction for most of us, was documentary reality for these poor people. It's a chronicle of wasted lives and blasted hopes. Satter tells of a total lack of human freedom in the smallest aspects of human life (typified by the internal passport, a document which dictates where you live, what your job is, and even who you can marry.) The most basic concepts of compassion and even common courtesy were swept away, and many people admit that behaving like animals was standard practice in relating to other people. Add to this the grinding poverty, the bullying by local authorities (because you have no rights as an individual, you are at the mercy of "the good of the collective"), and the atmosphere of the total lie in newspapers, television, and even conversation with your "friends" who may be informers. Satter diagnoses that the basic problem of the Communist experiment was it attempted to do away with the idea of transcendent morality. Becuase matter is all that is, you can do anything you want to it--thus producing the mass slaughter of the Stalin years (which only came to light in Russia during Gorbachev's ill-fated glasnost. The new knowledge destroyed the remaining moral authority of the regime.) After finishing the book, you will be shaken enough to admit that the phrase "evil empire" was totally appropriate. Satter closes with a few stories of people trying to rebuild from the ruins; a local party secretary becomes a priest, a convicted murderer helps build a new church on the site of a Stalinist mass grave. One can only wish the Russian people good luck after seventy years of catastrophe.

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a history, storytelling. October 2, 2012

By J. Kelly-Moore

Format:Paperback

David Satter is not a historian and this book is not a history nor does it claim to be. David is a journalist who lived and worked in Russia for 18 years, speaks Russian as well. I think his purpose is to attempt to convey, through individual stories of great depth and poignancy, the effects of 80 years of Soviet, atheist, bureaucratic, "state as Parent/God" mentality on individual human beings. Russia is a huge piece of property with many resources and a complex history. It is imperative that we in the West come to understand the emotional trauma and consequent character traits of Russian peoples as a result of various forms of oppression from Communism back to the Tsars. Storytelling is an ancient art, and one of the best ways to convey a mood or capture an emotion. These stories are almost like a kaleidoscope in their variations; they are windows into a human world we will never see. David has interviewed the individuals he speaks about, so these are retellings. For an even more chilling account read David's most recent book; It Was A Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway. The images are unforgettable.