David Satter

Senior Fellow

Photo of David Satter David Satter, an FPRI Senior Fellow, is a former Moscow correspondent and a long time observer of Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Satter graduated from the University of Chicago and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a B.Litt degree in political philosophy. He worked for four years as a police reporter for the Chicago Tribune and in 1976 was named Moscow correspondent of the London Financial Times . He worked in Moscow for six years, from 1976-82, during which time he sought out Soviet citizens with the intention of preserving their accounts of the Soviet totalitarian system for posterity.

After completing his term in Moscow, Satter became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for the Wall Street Journal , contributing to the paper’s editorial page. In 1990, he was named a Thornton Hooper fellow at FPRI in Philadelphia and then a senior fellow at the Institute. From 2003-08, he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2008, he was also a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches a course on contemporary Russian history at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced Academic Programs.

Satter has written two books about Russia, Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Knopf, 1996) and Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale 2003). His books have been translated into Russian, Estonian, Latvian, Czech, Portuguese and Vietnamese. Age of Delirium is also being made into a documentary film by the Russian director Andrei Nekrasov in a U.S.-German-Ukrainian joint production. He is presently working on a new book about the Russian attitude toward the communist past.

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On November 15th at the FPRI annual dinner Fouad Ajami was presented with the Seventh Annual Benjamin Franklin Public Service Award. The event was attended by over 360 people.
Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. was dinner chairman.

FPRI 2011 Annual Dinner

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Reflections on the Arab Spring
Fouad Ajami

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Al Qaeda and Jihadi Movements After Bin Laden
Christopher Swift

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The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaeda
Peter Bergen

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