Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State

Anticipating a new dawn of freedom and democracy after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russians could hardly have foreseen the reality of their future a decade later: a country mired in poverty and controlled at every level by organized crime. This compelling book tells the story of reform in Russia through the real experiences of individual citizens. Describing in details the birth of a new era of repression, David Satter analyzes the changes that have swept Russia and their effect on Russia's age-old way of thinking. Through the stories of people at all levels of Russian society, Satter shows the contrast during the reform period between the desperation of the many and the insatiability of the few. Wish insights derived from more than twenty years of writing and reporting on Russia, he considers why the individual human being there has historically counted for so little. And he offers an illuminating analysis of how Russia's post-Soviet fate was decided when a new morality failed to fill the vast moral vacuum that communism left in its wake.