David Satter is a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute at SAIS. He is also a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and is serving as an adviser to Radio Liberty. A former Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London (1976-82), he has written on Russia and the former Soviet Union for more than three decades.
David Satter is the author of three books on Russia and the director of a documentary film. His first book was Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which was published in 1996. The film he made on the basis of this book, Age of Delirium, won the 2013 Van Gogh Grand Jury Prize at the Amsterdam Film Festival. In addition to Age of Delirium, David Satter has written two other books about Russia, Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State(2003) and It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (2011). His books have been translated into six languages.
David Satter began his career in 1972 as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In 1976, he became Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times. He worked in Moscow for six years. He then became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for The Wall Street Journal, contributing frequently to the paper’s editorial page. He has been a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a visiting professor at the University of Illinois. He also teaches a course on Russian politics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Academic Programs.
David 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, The National Interest, National Review, National Review Online, The New Republic, The New York Sun, The New York Review of Books, Reader’s Digest and The Washington Times. 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, C-Span, the Charlie Rose Show and other television programs.
David 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.