David Satter was born in Chicago in 1947 and educated at the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. From 1972 to 1976, he was a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He then became Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times serving from 1976 to 1982 at the height of Soviet power. In 1982, he became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for The Wall Street Journal, contributing to the paper’s editorial page. In September, 2013, he was accredited as a Radio Liberty correspondent in Moscow and then expelled, becoming the first U.S. correspondent to be barred from Russia since the Cold War.
David Satter is the author of five books. His first book is Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which was published in 1996. It was later turned into a documentary film, “Age of Delirium,” which was awarded the 2013 Van Gogh Grand Jury Award at the Amsterdam Film Festival. He is also the author of Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003), It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (2011), and The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin (2016). His most recent work, Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union (2020), is a collection of more than 40 years of journalism from Russia. His books have been translated into eight languages.
David Satter continues to write about Russia 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, CNN.com, The Daily Beast, 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. He also has testified on Russia before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the House Committee on Financial Services.
David Satter has been a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, a fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and an associate of the Henry Jackson Society in London. He has also taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.