U.S. journalist David Satter, who was expelled from Russia in 2013, presented the Ukrainian version of his recent book “The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin” on Sept. 22 in Kyiv.
The book, published in English in May this
year, is to be released in the Russian language in New York in a few weeks.
During the book’s presentation at Kyiv Mohyla
Academy, which included a lecture given by Satter to first-year political
science students, the author said the main reason for writing his fourth book
was to create a truthful chronicle of key events in post-Soviet Russia – Boris
Yeltsin’s presidency and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.
Satter is still banned from entering Russia
after his expulsion without explanation in December 2013. He was the first U.S.
journalist to be declared persona non grata in Russia since the Cold War.
“After I went back to London, I thought that
it made sense to summarize my experience in post-Soviet Russia and retrace how
Russia had become an aggressor, because in the early 1990s it was not obvious.
On the contrary, it was a period of great optimism,” Satter said.
He said that the Russian authorities had
reason to view foreign journalists as a threat. In a 2014 article for the Wall
Street Journal following his expulsion, he wrote: “President Putin and a small
group of his longtime cronies exercise not only unchallenged political power in
Russia, they also control the country’s most valuable economic assets.”
Like Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist
murdered in 2006, Satter had investigated Putin’s regime and high-profile
crimes that have been linked to it. He is among those that have claimed that
the Russian security services, or FSB, carried out the apartment bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk
in September 1999 in order to justify Russia’s second war in Chechnya.
In writer’s opinion, Russia used the same
strategy to justify its invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
“The war in
Ukraine was an attempt to distract the Russian people’s attention from the real
success of the EuroMaidan (protests) and replace it with chauvinistic euphoria.
Modern Russia represents a brainwashed population, an absence of opposition,
and a desire to control neighboring countries,” said Satter.
“The Less You
Know, The Better You Sleep” is the first book written in English covering two key
periods of Russia’s modern history. It is the story of how Russia went from
high hopes in early post-Soviet times, to criminalization under Yeltsin, and
finally to dictatorship under Putin. It is available on Amazon.
