Age of Delirium
The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
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
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.
