Shelf Life: Back from the USSR?

“FOR the first time in this century, God has smiled on Russia.” With these words, literary critic Yuri Karyakin greeted the fall of Soviet despotism in 1991. But the era of optimism was not to last long. In a stark and sobering new book, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale, 314 pp., $29.95), longtime Moscow correspondent David Satter depicts post-Soviet Russia as a nightmare world of poverty, corruption, and violence.

Satter covered Russia for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and has a reporter’s eye for detail. His book is good journalism, but it could also be used as a textbook in courses on political philosophy; it describes, more compellingly than any abstract theorist could, the consequences of nominal freedom without rule of law. Classical political philosophers say that, in principle, anarchy is the enemy of freedom, because there is no way one can exercise freedom unless one is supported by some sort of order. Satter’s book shows the truth of this contention, in dramatic fashion: The Russia he depicts is close to the dystopia of A Clockwork Orange, in which any freedoms people enjoy are not “rights” based on abstract justice, but merely the temporary fruits of irregular power.

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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“FOR the first time in this century, God has smiled on Russia.” With these words, literary critic Yuri Karyakin greeted the fall of Soviet despotism in 1991. But the era of optimism was not to last long. In a stark and sobering new book, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale, 314 pp., $29.95), longtime Moscow correspondent David Satter depicts post-Soviet Russia as a nightmare world of poverty, corruption, and violence.

Satter covered Russia for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and has a reporter’s eye for detail. His book is good journalism, but it could also be used as a textbook in courses on political philosophy; it describes, more compellingly than any abstract theorist could, the consequences of nominal freedom without rule of law. Classical political philosophers say that, in principle, anarchy is the enemy of freedom, because there is no way one can exercise freedom unless one is supported by some sort of order. Satter’s book shows the truth of this contention, in dramatic fashion: The Russia he depicts is close to the dystopia of A Clockwork Orange, in which any freedoms people enjoy are not “rights” based on abstract justice, but merely the temporary fruits of irregular power.