Into the Russian night

Book: Darkness at Dawn

Author: David Satter

Price: Yale University Press, £22.50

Foreign criticism of Russia tends to produce a charge of anti-Russian bias. This did not apply, of course, when Solzhenitsyn wrote over ten years ago of Russia's "ugly new ulcers"-the "nascent capitalism, fraught with unproductive, savage and repulsive forms of behaviour, the plunder of the nation's wealth, the likes of which the west has not known." It is the savage aspects of Russia's deformed capitalism that constitute a large part of David Satter's gloomy indictment.

Satter paints his picture using personal testimonies of selected victims to illustrate the case that Russia has degenerated into a criminal state, and the result is so compellingly bleak that you wonder if he has overdone it. If you ask most Russians about their lives, they will say that the picture of criminal anomie is one they do not recognise, since their daily life is happy and normal, like life in other countries, and moreover Russia is a great country with a currently booming economy. They, no doubt, would accuse Satter of anti-Russian bias. But they have escaped dealings with the civil authorities, had not many...