Age of delirium : the decline and fall of the Soviet Union

Resource Information

The work Age of delirium : the decline and fall of the Soviet Union represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-St. Louis Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Age of delirium : the decline and fall of the Soviet Union

Title remainder

the decline and fall of the Soviet Union

Statement of responsibility

David Satter

Title variation

Decline and fall of the Soviet Union

Creator

• Satter, David, 1947-

Author

• Satter, David, 1947-

Subject

• Electronic books
• HISTORY -- Europe -- Russia & the Former Soviet Union
• History
• Soviet Union
• Sowjetunion
• Soviet Union -- History
• Auflösung

Genre

• History
• Electronic books

Language

eng

Summary

Annotation

Member of

• EBSCO eBook Public Library Collection-North America

Cataloging source

JSTOR

Dewey number

947.084

Index

no index present

LC call number

DK266

LC item number

.S267 2001eb

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Summary expansion

Feared and respected as one of the world's two great superpowers, the Soviet Union throughout the final twenty years of its life was a model of state-organized delusion. As David Satter shows in powerful detail, the leaders of the Kremlin found that when their carefully constricted facade fell apart in the late 1980s, there was nothing to prop up the crumbling ruins. Satter's book demonstrates compellingly how the Soviet people were forced to live a gigantic lie. During nearly two decades of reporting for the Financial Times and Reader's Digest, he interviewed Soviet citizens all across the vast country, not just the dissidents and party apparatchiks in Moscow but ordinary men and women. Traveling with him from coal mines and farms to bureaucratic reception halls to the nightmarish wards of punitive psychiatric hospitals to railroad stations where victims of the Communist system set up camp, the reader witnesses how an entire state was constituted on the basis of a fraudulent version of reality. In the Soviet Union, lying - at the grocery and the factory as well as the government office - was universal and obligatory, and Westerners were seldom able to penetrate the perplexing mosaic of wishful thinking and denial that camouflaged a brutal regime