David Satter
Research Fellow

Expertise: Russia, former Soviet Union

David Satter is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. A former Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London, he has written on Russia and the former Soviet Union for three decades. He is also a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Satter has written two books about Russia, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996; paperback, Yale) and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale, 2003). His books have been translated into Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Portugese, and Vietnamese. Age of Delirium is also being made into a documentary film by the Russian director Andrei Nekrasov in a U.S.-German-Ukrainian joint production. The film is expected to be ready in 2008. He is presently working on a new book about the Russian attitude toward the communist past.

Satter began his career as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In 1976, he was named Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the nature of Soviet society for posterity.

After completing his term in Moscow, Satter became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for the Wall Street Journal, contributing frequently to the paper's editorial page. In 1990, he was named a Thornton Hooper Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and then a senior fellow at the Institute.

Satter continues to write on Russia and the former Soviet Union for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. His articles and op-ed pieces have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Interest, National Review, National Review Online, New Republic, New York Sun, New York Review of Books, Reader's Digest, the Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard . He is frequently interviewed in both Russian and English by Radio Liberty, the Voice of America and the BBC and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, CNN International, C-Span, the Charlie Rose Show, the Russian first channel (ORT), and the Russian television network (RTR).

Satter was born in Chicago in 1947 and graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a B.Litt degree in political philosophy.