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.