David Satter is a leading commentator on Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is the author of five books on Russia and the creator of a documentary film on the fall of the Soviet Union. He has been affiliated with the Hudson Institute and the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is presently a member of the academic advisory board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
I wrote...
Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union
When David Satter arrived in the Soviet Union in June 1976 as the correspondent of the Financial Times of London, he entered a country that resembled a giant theater of the absurd. 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, 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. He was banned in 1982, allowed back during perestroika, and finally expelled from Russia in 2013 on the grounds that Russian intelligence regarded his presence as “undesirable.” He is the only American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War.
Tibor Szamuely was the nephew of a leading Hungarian communist who was killed in the purges. In this book, completed just before his death at 47, he traces the process through which Russians were enslaved by the state. Peasants were progressively bound to the land. The Russian church accepted the fusion of political and religious authority in the person of the Tsar. After the fall of Byzantium, the tsars, as the heads of the only surviving Orthodox state, treated Moscow as the ”Third Rome” and began to claim worldwide moral and political leadership. This claim was supported by the Russian people who saw in it justification for their miserable conditions. Communism was supposed to be entirely new but as Szamuely eloquently shows, it merely modernized the Russian state tradition.
This analysis of Russian history traces the essential features of Revolutionary Russia back to medieval times when authoritarian rule first became a prerequisite of survival and is intended as a contribution to our understanding of the Soviet Union.
In a vain effort to prevent the disaster they knew was coming, Russia’s leading religious philosophers in 1909 called on the increasingly radical Russian intelligentsia to return to religion as a means of grounding the individual. The philosopher, Nikolai Beryaev wrote that the intelligentsia sought a universal theory but was only ready to accept one that supported their social goals. They, therefore, denied man’s absolute significance. Bogdan Kistyakovsky wrote that the intelligentsia’s attraction to formalism and bureaucracy as well as its faith in the omnipotence of rules contained the seeds of a future police state. The authors of the various essays in this classic book, in fact, foresaw all of the characteristics of the future Soviet police state that arose out of the drive of Russian radicals to create “heaven on earth.”
A collection of essays first published in Moscow in 1909. Writing from various points of view, the authors reflect the diverse experiences of Russia's failed 1905 revolution. Condemned by Lenin and rediscoverd by dissidents, this translation has relevance for discussions on contemporary Russia.
In her classic study of totalitarianism, Arendt describes the contours of the fictitious world that existed in the Soviet Union. Like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union was engaged not only in a constant fight with invented enemies but with reality itself. The communist system was based on concentric circles of power with the inner circles characterized by their total contempt for reality. As Arendt explains, the object was to create and force people to act out a false version of reality that would conform to Marxist-Leninist ideology. This could only be achieved by force which is why the combination of ideology and terror was the essence of the Soviet Union.
Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism—an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history.
The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses…
In this multi-generational novel, Maximov showed what the Soviet system meant for ordinary people whose speech he had a rare gift for capturing. In his portrait of seven decades of the Lashkov family, he showed how the drive of the communists to control the lives of others on the basis of an ideology whose implications they themselves did not understand tore families apart. Pyotr Lashkov, the patriarch, became totally alienated from his alcoholic anti-communist brother. Vadim Lashkov, a member of the third generation, is put in a mental hospital. A fellow prisoner advises him: “If ever you think of trying to escape, the search will be thorough, very thorough. And they’ll find you… because you’ve found out a little more than ordinary mortals are supposed to know.”
Vladimir Voinovich was probably the greatest Russian satirical writer since Gogol. After the fall of the U.S.S.R., he was asked if it was still possible to write satire in Russia. He insisted that it was. “The Soviet Union was a giant mental hospital but it was organized,” he explained. “Now, the inmates have been told that they can do whatever they want. So Russia is funnier than ever.”
In this novel, published in 1986, Voinovich demonstrated his stunning ability to divine the future. He described a new Russian regime dominated by state security and based not on Marxism-Leninism but on the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Like Russia today, the regime of his novel tells its citizens that they are surrounded by “three rings of hostility.” The first is the former Soviet republics; the second, the former Soviet satellites, the third, the West – the former “capitalist enemy.” This makes it easier to impose the rule of a new leader, “Serafim the First, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias.”
In this satire that pokes fun at the future of communism, socialist life, and the Kremlin, an exiled Soviet writer enters a time warp and lands in Moscow in the year 2042.
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
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