David Satter, "The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep"

In 1999 Satter reported in his book Darkness at Dawn that a series of bombings in three Russian cities was not the act of Chechen terrorists, as the Russian government claimed, but the work of the country’s security police. Such courage led to Satter’s expulsion from Russia in 2013—the first American journalist to be so treated since the Cold War. In his fourth book, Satter, former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times and special Soviet affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and currently a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, deepens his account of the 1999 events, detailing Yeltsin’s role in the violence, the subsequent rise of crime, Putin’s ascent to power, and his repression of political opposition.

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