The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep

Atruly terrifying book- is how The Washington Post escribes David Satter’s recent book ‘The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin’.

David Satter, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, was the Moscow-based correspondent of the Financial Times from 1976 to 1982, and then special correspondent on Soviet Affairs for the Wall Street Journal. He was expelled from Russia nearly three years ago. “The inspiration for my book was my expulsion from Russia in December 2013,” he tells his audience at the D.C. based Hudson Institute hosting his book presentation.

“‘Competent organs, which is a code word for the FSB, the successor organization of the KGB, have determined that your presence on the territory of the Russian Federation is undesirable and you are banned from entering the country,’” Satter remembers being told.

In The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings, Boris Yeltsin’s role presiding over the criminalization of Russia, and Putin’s rise to power.

Satter describes how and why Vladimir Putin was chosen as the next successor. Additionally, Satter argues that the bombings of the apartment buildings were actually carried out by the FSB security police, rather than Chechen forces.

For Satter, the 1999 apartment bombings were “the combination of the criminalization of Russia under Yeltsin, they were the foundation of the dictatorship that was established under Putin, they were the identifying marks of a leadership that, to this day, has absolutely no respect for human life, the lives of its own citizens or the lives of others.”

The book brings a unique perspective on Putin and the Russian regime.

Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy, says the 1990s were a precursor to Putin and to everything that has happened since.

“We have to understand what Russia is today, what happened and what was done in the 90s which led to the takeover by Putin and creation of a criminal regime. As Satter further maintains, “Yeltsin was not prepared to come to terms with the past; and he was not prepared to have a moral accounting. He engaged in the privatization of property and industry without the rule of law, which led to the creation of a vast criminal system. He destroyed the parliament, and eventually, brought Vladimir Putin to power to get immunity from prosecution.”

As Satter writes in his book, to grasp the reality of Russia, it is necessary to believe that the Russian leaders really are capable of blowing up hundreds of their own people in order to preserve their hold on power. “When one accepts that the impossible is actually possible, the degradation of the Yeltsin years and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power make perfect sense.”

Nana Sajaia, Voice of America Georgian Service