113th CONGRESS

2d Session 

Printed for the use of the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

FILM SCREENING OF ‘‘AGE OF 

DELIRIUM’’ 

JULY 23, 2013 

Briefing of the 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

Washington: 2015 


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Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

234 Ford House Office Building 

Washington, DC 20515 

202–225–1901 

csce@mail.house.gov 

http://www.csce.gov 

Legislative Branch Commissioners 

SENATE HOUSE 

BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, MARYLAND, 

Chairman 

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, RHODE ISLAND

TOM UDALL, NEW MEXICO

JEANNE SHAHEEN, NEW HAMPSHIRE

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, CONNECTICUT

ROGER WICKER, MISSISSIPPI

SAXBY CHAMBLISS, GEORGIA

JOHN BOOZMAN, ARKANSAS

CHRISTOPHER SMITH, NEW JERSEY, 

Co-Chairman 

JOSEPH PITTS, PENNSYLVANIA

ROBERT ADERHOLT, ALABAMA

PHIL GINGREY, GEORGIA

MICHAEL BURGESS, TEXAS

ALCEE HASTINGS, FLORIDA

LOUISE MCINTOSH SLAUGHTER, 

NEW YORK

MIKE MCINTYRE, NORTH CAROLINA

STEVE COHEN, TENNESSEE

(II)


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ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION FOR SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Helsinki process, formally titled the Conference on Security and Cooperation in 

Europe, traces its origin to the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in Finland on August 

1, 1975, by the leaders of 33 European countries, the United States and Canada. As of 

January 1, 1995, the Helsinki process was renamed the Organization for Security and 

Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The membership of the OSCE has expanded to 56 participating States, reflecting the breakup of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. 

The OSCE Secretariat is in Vienna, Austria, where weekly meetings of the participating States’ permanent representatives are held. In addition, specialized seminars and 

meetings are convened in various locations. Periodic consultations are held among Senior 

Officials, Ministers and Heads of State or Government. 

Although the OSCE continues to engage in standard setting in the fields of military 

security, economic and environmental cooperation, and human rights and humanitarian 

concerns, the Organization is primarily focused on initiatives designed to prevent, manage 

and resolve conflict within and among the participating States. The Organization deploys 

numerous missions and field activities located in Southeastern and Eastern Europe, the 

Caucasus, and Central Asia. The website of the OSCE is: <www.osce.org>. 

ABOUT THE COMMISSION ON SECURITY AND COOPERATION IN EUROPE 

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki 

Commission, is a U.S. Government agency created in 1976 to monitor and encourage 

compliance by the participating States with their OSCE commitments, with a particular 

emphasis on human rights. 

The Commission consists of nine members from the United States Senate, nine members from the House of Representatives, and one member each from the Departments 

of State, Defense and Commerce. The positions of Chair and Co-Chair rotate between 

the Senate and House every two years, when a new Congress convenes. A professional 

staff assists the Commissioners in their work. 

In fulfilling its mandate, the Commission gathers and disseminates relevant information to the U.S. Congress and the public by convening hearings, issuing reports that 

reflect the views of Members of the Commission and/or its staff, and providing details 

about the activities of the Helsinki process and developments in OSCE participating 

States. 

The Commission also contributes to the formulation and execution of U.S. policy 

regarding the OSCE, including through Member and staff participation on U.S. Delegations to OSCE meetings. Members of the Commission have regular contact with 

parliamentarians, government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations, and private individuals from participating States. The website of the Commission 

is: <www.csce.gov>. 

(III)


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FILM SCREENING OF ‘‘AGE OF DELIRIUM’’ 

—————— 

JULY 23, 2013 

WITNESSES 

Page 

David Satter, Filmmaker, ‘‘Age of Delirium’’ ............................................................................. 1 

Kevin Klose, President and CEO, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ....................................... 2 

PARTICIPANTS 

Kyle Parker, Policy Advisor, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe ................ 1 

Paul Carter, Senior State Department Adviser, Commission on Security and Cooperation 

in Europe ................................................................................................................................... 4 

(IV)


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(1) 

FILM SCREENING OF ‘‘AGE OF DELIRIUM’’ 

—————— 

July 23, 2013 

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

Washington, DC 

The briefing was held from 2:30 to 5:04 p.m. EDT in 210 Cannon House Office Building, Washington D.C., Kyle Parker, Policy Adviser, CSCE, presiding. 

Mr. PARKER. I’d like to welcome you all on behalf of Helsinki Commission Chairman 

Senator Cardin and Co-chairman Representative Chris Smith and all of our leadership 

to today’s screening of ‘‘Age of Delirium.’’ 

We have a full length film ahead so I want to jump in and get this going right quick. 

We are pleased to be joined not only by my good friend and renowned Russian scholar 

David Satter, the filmmaker, but as well by Kevin Klose, President and CEO of RFE/ 

RL, and my colleague Paul Carter from the Department of State. So we’ll hopefully have 

a rich discussion following the film. I encourage you all to participate. 

This is an on-the-record event and will produce a government transcript. And hopefully, following the film, there will be no shortage of topics to discuss. 

There’s handouts outside, bios and a few select articles. Our filmmaker, David, who 

I’ll turn it over to in a minute to introduce his work, is really one of the deepest thinkers 

on Russia, he gets beneath the surface; has worked Russia for decades, was FT’s correspondent—I think his seriousness comes across in the film. He’s also a scholar at the 

Hudson Institute and a consultant to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. David produces 

incredible scholarship on Russia. And there’s a piece out there from, I believe, 2008, called 

‘‘Obama and Russia.’’ I read it on the way over and it could have easily been written 

yesterday as well as the piece from today on the Navalny trial, which I assume an audience like this has read plenty about. 

Without any further chatter, let me turn it over to David. And David, if you could 

say a few words about the film, and then we’ll push play, and jump into the discussion 

following the movie. 

Mr. SATTER. Well, thank you, Kyle. 

The film is based on the first book I wrote about Russia, which is ‘‘Age of Delirium: 

The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union.’’ A copy of the book is outside on the table, 

if anyone wants to take a look at it. 

That book was the product of my six years as the Moscow correspondent to the London Financial Times, during which, by the way, I worked closely with another corVerDate Sep 11 2014 03:51 Sep 01, 2015 Jkt 095488 PO 00000 Frm 00005 Fmt 3191 Sfmt 3191 E:\HR\OC\A488.XXX A488

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respondent, my friend, Kevin Klose, who at that time was the Moscow correspondent of 

the Washington Post. After the book was written, there were people who read it and said 

that it should be a film. And through a very circuitous route, I managed to complete it. 

A friend of mine who works in opera said that in any production, the world has to 

come to an end three times before the production is complete. Well, with this, the world 

came to an end considerably more than three times. But we actually got it done. 

We also have here the person who more than anyone else was responsible for the 

fact that it didn’t end in a total disaster and was actually—became a finished film. That’s 

my friend, Nenad Pejic from Radio Liberty, who is sitting next to Kevin there and whose 

good judgment and support in a critical time—in fact, every would-be artist needs someone 

who has good judgment. And Nenad has good judgment and saved the whole thing by 

lending it his support. 

Well, I think that we should at this point watch the movie and not waste a lot of 

time on my talking to you, because after it’s over, I hope we can talk about the film and 

what it means about history and for history and its implications for the present day because Russia continues to be important. The countries of the former Soviet Union could 

. . . their fates continue to have an impact on us. So without further ado, perhaps we 

can start the film. 

Mr. PARKER. Enjoy the movie. 

(Movie plays.) 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you all. We’re going to rearrange here in just a minute, pull 

the podium out and begin our discussion. When we move to Q&A, since we are transcribing the event, I’ll ask you to state your name and be clear so we can get it into 

the record. 

Mr. SATTER. I think I’ll add that Kevin, unfortunately, has to leave for another engagement. So maybe he can say a few words first. 

Mr. PARKER. Of course. And as I mentioned at the outset, we’re honored to be joined 

by Kevin Klose. I didn’t go too much in depth into his long and impressive bio at the 

beginning, but he’s the present and past president of RFE/RL, a 25-year veteran of the 

Washington Post, former president of NPR, director of the International Broadcasting Bureau at the U.S. Information Agency. Kevin is also a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, a Russia scholar, author of ‘‘Russia and the Russians: Inside the Closed 

Society.’’ 

We are really pleased to have you here. It would be great if you could kick off our 

reaction, share your impressions, perhaps an anecdote from your days with David working 

the Soviet beat. 

Mr. KLOSE. Kyle, thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here, first of all with 

you all, here in this great hearing room. And it’s also a great honor for me to be here 

again with David Satter. 

We’ve known each other since we met completely by serendipity in the newsroom 

of the Washington Post in 1967. That’s quite a bit of time ago. We’ve had a lot of time 

together since then, and I’m very pleased to say he’s now a consultant to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as we work with the Russian Service and the 27 other language services to bring us firmly into the digital age, the age of multimedia. 


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This film of David’s to me is tremendously powerful, not just about the past but about 

what we face going forward in dealing with the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet 

Union, which is not, obviously, anywhere near its end. The radios that I’m now part of 

once again deal with these kinds of issues in the present day in the same way as we 

see it here today. 

There are millions upon millions of people in the former Soviet Union who know 

things about what had happened in the immediate past, that unless these realities are 

brought forward and others can hear them, unless they can be borne witness to across 

the societies in all their variations and cultures, the future is going to be very perilous 

for them. I believe for the national security interests of all the democracies. 

We are not immune to the issues that still need to be addressed in that part of the 

world. And there is no reason for us—no rational reason for any of us here today, drawn 

together to look at this film, which is a witnessing of the past, but the power of it is 

in the present. The moral of this tale is we must understand what has happened. We 

must dig deep, as deep as we can. 

As a friend of David’s and a great admirer of his work, I honor him for the work 

he’s done to bring this forward in such a powerful and irresistibly persuasive way. 

Those are the remarks I have. David, thank you. 

Mr. SATTER. Well, thank you, Kevin. Perhaps just before Kevin goes, does anyone 

want to ask maybe one question directed to him, because he actually has a crowded schedule and has to leave us—we’ll then I hope entertain questions from all—on all subjects, 

about the film, about the fall of the Soviet Union, about Russia today, anything you want 

to ask or anything you’re interested in. 

Mr. PARKER. We have a mic here if anyone has a question for Kevin Klose before 

he has to leave us. 

Mr. KLOSE. I’m sorry. I should footnote that I spend most of my time now in Prague, 

which is where Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is headquartered. My time in Washington is relatively short, and so I’m really apologetic for having agreed to be here with 

you and then finding that my schedule is not going to let me do that. I want to thank 

you all for coming and the questions you have. 

Mr. SATTER. There is a question in the back. Yes. 

Mr. PARKER. Please. 

QUESTIONER. Can I use the mic? 

Mr. PARKER. Sure. That would be great. 

QUESTIONER. Hi. I’m Shelly Han with the Helsinki Commission. 

Mr. SATTER. Hi. 

QUESTIONER. I was interested in hearing—please excuse my ignorance if this is something that’s obvious—but what is your agency doing to help document what happened 

and perhaps creating that record and sharing that record with the citizens? 

Mr. KLOSE. That’s a very good question. As you may know, we’re a private, nonprofit private corporation formed in the early 1950s. We’re a grantee of the U.S. government and we’re an independent source of uncensored news and information into the region 

of the former Soviet Union and parts of Eurasia. 


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First of all, prior to my return to the radio’s management in the immediate past, 

support the production of this documentary and we assisted David with a great deal of 

technical support and production support, which is also a matter of creativity and intellectual continuity to bring hundreds of hours of tape that he has of his interviews. 

For us, directly, I can tell you, for example, just in the past week, we were able to 

do live video from the courtroom where Navalny was first convicted and handcuffed and 

marched off to detention and the next day released in the same courtroom in Kirov, 1,000 

kilometers from Moscow where there were demonstrations—they weren’t huge but they 

were tense—on the streets of Moscow. We were there also with live video coverage, fully 

uncensored and fully made available to anyone who wished to use the content, which 

I will say to you was used in part by some independent minded Moscow television channels, which cut away to take live coverage and fully credit Liberty, Radio Liberty’s Russian 

service for bringing this to them. They were not covering it themselves. 

In addition more than a dozen services at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty also used 

live excerpts and produced excerpts afterwards to put out to their listeners, their viewers, 

their readers and their Internet interlocutors. 

I think that’s the wave of the future. This is attesting and bearing witness to history 

being made today. We do that very powerfully. Thank you. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Kevin, again for joining us today. And our hats are off to 

you and all your colleagues at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for covering this important 

part of the world so well. The coverage is superb. The coverage has been indispensable. 

And it’s something I look forward every morning, to the e-mails and the updates and 

the news stories that are posted on the site, really top-notch journalism. 

Mr. KLOSE. Thank you so much. It’s a delight to be here. And forgive me. I beg your 

pardon. 

Mr. PARKER. Thanks again. 

Mr. KLOSE. Thank you. David, congratulations. 

Mr. PARKER. Before moving on, jumping into questions, I’d like to introduce our lead 

discussant, Paul Carter, who is currently serving as senior State Department adviser at 

the U.S. Helsinki Commission. 

We’ll be losing Paul in just a few short days. He’ll be headed off to be the Director 

for Eurasia at the Assistance Office of the European Bureau at the Department of State. 

It’s been a great year with Paul, he’s really been an incredible asset to the commission. 

Paul has served in a number of interesting postings. 

Most relevant for our discussion today is his service at Embassy Moscow as well as 

at the Department’s Ukraine desk. And reaching back further into the past, in the mid- 

’80s, Paul was an exchange student, one of two American political scientists studying at 

Moscow’s State University in 1985 and ’86, where Paul began work that ended up as 

a book published on the ideology of Mikhail Suslov. So Paul is uniquely credentialed to 

help kick off our discussion today. Paul, will you take it from here? 

Mr. CARTER. Thank you very much, Kyle. It is really an honor to be here with David 

for the showing of his film. What year was the film made, David? 

Mr. SATTER. From 2006 until 2011, on and off. 

Mr. CARTER. OK. I think it’s a fascinating film. It really captures the sadness, the 

sometime horror and the always surreal quality of life in the Soviet Union. 


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As Kyle mentioned, I was an IREX exchange scholar in 1985–86; lived at Moscow 

State University, you know, the Stalin-scraper there in Moscow, and lived with the Soviet 

students and our other exchange scholars. 

I always thought that, in so many ways, if one never lived in the Soviet Union or 

in a communist country, it’s not something one can fully understand. It’s something one 

must live through to see what it’s about. 

Now, David’s film today, of course, offers a glimpse into that world—and the many 

people who testify and speak from the heart and from their own experience about what 

life was like, he captures it in so many different ways. 

What’s great for me is his approach to the ideology and to show it from so many 

different angles. My own academic work also was an approach at this but more from the 

top-down, as it were. 

We saw many times in the film people talking about the ideology. Marxism-Leninism 

was in many ways a form of an ersatz religion, and I think we see that captured here. 

The Soviet Union was what we might call an ‘‘ideocracy,’’ a system based on an ideology. 

We never really used to hear that much about the model of ideocracy back during the 

Soviet period when people were studying it in the West. A few scholars touched on this, 

but it wasn’t widely accepted. Partly that was due to the fact that leftist scholars, Marxists, didn’t want to accept the USSR as a legitimate version of Marxism. 

And for others, it was a question of their focus on the question, did they believe the 

ideology or not? Many people would answer, no, they didn’t believe it. 

The real question though isn’t really did they believe it or not because we don’t know 

what the leadership at the time believed. We don’t know what people like Brezhnev and 

Suslov, when they looked at the mirror at 3 o’clock in the morning, what did they really 

say to themselves? 

More important was the question what role did the ideology play? And people, whether they’ve had an emotional attachment to it or psychological, the fact is that they had 

to act as if they believed. 

In the end, the leadership lost the will to enforce that, to force people to act as if 

they believed. My own work, as Kyle said, was on Suslov, the chief ideologist of the party. 

Suslov died in January of 1982. Brezhnev died in November, eleven months later. I have 

argued that when Suslov died the ideology went with him. Suslov was the last enforcer 

who ensured people acted as if they believed in the ideology. After that, Gorbachev came 

in. 

Gorbachev began to change the perspective and came up with the idea of reformed 

communism. I think Gorbachev himself was very deeply affected by Chernobyl and the 

fact that he wasn’t getting information at the time. I was in Moscow when Chernobyl 

went up and we watched happy pictures on television of Ukrainian farmers plowing the 

fields and putting in the crop, you know, for a week, even though we were hearing on 

the short wave that the cloud of radiation was going all over the place. I think that Gorbachev himself was a victim of that big lie and didn’t get that information. That influenced 

him to introduce the idea of glasnost, after which began a freer flow of information. 

Then the system began to crumble. Molotov, one of Stalin’s men, once said that 

there’s a reformed communism and then there’s real communism. Indeed, there’s really 


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no such thing as a reformed communist. It can’t survive and it fell apart. And in the 

end, it did. It collapsed, as David showed so well in his film. 

Two takeaways from this that I see. One, as Kevin Klose talked about, was the overcoming of the Soviet legacy. Of all the things that the communists did to Russia, the 

terror, all the people that died, what they did to the economy, all these things, but the 

one lasting thing was the moral decay of the society. 

The communists taught that there was no God, there was no religion, there was no 

morality other than what the party said. And eventually, that deteriorated into every 

person must kill, lie, cheat, steal, whatever to get along. And that legacy is very hard 

to overcome. It survives for many, many years. And Russia has not had an accounting, 

of a laying bare of the Soviet past. We still see people today who praise Stalin or look 

back with nostalgia on the Soviet era without having a real accounting of what happened. 

But also, there is another lesson, not only for Russia itself, you know, to come to 

terms with these things, but also a lesson for the world. And that for me is the danger 

of ideology and ideological thinking. I really thought that when the Soviet Union collapsed 

that we would see the end of that kind of ideology and people being subject to that. 

I think we have in the sense of these grand systems, of Marxism, etc., but yet, even 

today, in our own society, oftentimes people fall into ideological thinking and are quick 

to rush to judgment on things. And so it’s always a lesson, the danger of that. The Russians were no different than anybody else in the end. And it could happen anywhere. 

So it’s something that we have to always be on guard against. 

And with that, I’m going to turn it back over and open it up to questions. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Paul. Let’s open it up wide. Everybody’s sat patiently, so 

please step right up with questions. Just identify yourself so we have it for the record. 

And also feel free to make a statement. We can be fairly loose on this and have some 

time to have a discussion. Katya, could you—— 

QUESTIONER. I’ll be loud. Is this loud enough? 

Mr. PARKER. You know, it might be loud enough. It’s just that our transcriber is 

listening through a mic so it’s better if you come up here. 

QUESTIONER. It’s a very different side of the room. Thank you. Very interesting briefing or screening. 

I’m sorry, My name is Katya Migacheva. I’m the lead fellow on the Tom Lantos 

Human Rights Commission. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m also originally from Russia. Watching the film, I realized I’m very lucky to have been born in 1980 so I was of 

conscious age when the changes happened. And I had a good time in one system and 

good time in another system, meaning that I had time to be educated in one and time 

to be educated in another, and then, immigration to the United States, so all kinds of 

worlds. So I felt fortunate. I also felt very emotional watching the film. I greatly appreciate 

your efforts to dig deeper. 

I have a question for you. You’ve lived in Russia, it sounds like, for a while. You 

studied Russia for a while—and both of you and also the previous speaker as well. In 

terms of your remarks about overcoming this heritage and moving forward despite it or 

with it. 

What challenges do you think Russia has because of these challenges . . . in addition 

or besides the mentality that you have to cheat and lie that you just mentioned, which 


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is a whole other piece of propaganda, social propaganda when not only the survival piece 

where you have to cheat and lie and tell on your neighbor but also the piece when we 

are all contributing to the society. And that was—that was the one that was clearly 

taught. That was the one—that was the clear, clean message, not the hidden one. So 

that part we’re losing as well with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. 

How do we move forward with the grief of the lost system, because for many people, 

as you know, it’s a huge loss? Even those who lost their parents and grandparents to 

the Stalinist regime, they still remember the system with nostalgia. I guess this is one 

of your points, we need to reveal these things, but also the idea that we need a strong 

grip. We need a strong fist to be able to survive in our society. 

So I’m rambling a little bit, but putting all these things together, how do you see 

Russia moving forward? And how should we from the United States, what patience should 

we have? When should we expect results and what type of pressure should we apply reasonably? 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Katya. David. 

Mr. SATTER. Thank you, Katya. Actually, the answer is not so complicated. The problem with Russia, in my view, after many years of being there, is that the individual has 

no value, and particularly compared to the goals of the state. 

Under those circumstances, the idealization of state power creates a situation in 

which individuals are treated as raw material for the achievement of political ends. That’s 

the reason why everyone cheats and lies because they’ve been taught that their individual 

identity counts for nothing. 

Into those circumstances, they don’t feel a sense of individual obligation, of individual 

conscience, of individual identity. They don’t believe that their personality is important, 

that they’re in some way different, that they’re in some respects inviolable. 

So, after all, there’s no logical reason not to just grab. That mentality can only be 

changed under conditions in which Russians and other people who lived in the Soviet 

Union realistically assess their history and abandon myths about the past and understand 

what they’ve come out of. 

As for the U.S. or for the other countries in the West, we can be helpful to the degree 

that we help to clarify this problem, but the difficulty is that very few people in the West 

understand it either. I mean, they don’t understand Russia because it’s hard to extend 

themselves—it’s hard for us, members of a pragmatic and a problem-solving society, to 

understand a society like Russia, in which millions of people are subordinated to some 

type of political ideal they don’t understand. 

So in effect, there’s a certain amount of intellectual work that has to be done in both 

places. Most of all, of course, it’s the responsibility of the Russians themselves to understand who they are and what it is. Russians don’t understand the root of their problem. 

This is the difficulty. They understand that things are bad, but they don’t understand 

why they’re bad. And the best way to help them is to try to show them why things are 

bad. And the best way they can help themselves is to restore the position of the individual. 

And you can only do that if you really honor those who were victims of the regime and 

you face realistically the story of the past. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, David. We have another question over here. 


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QUESTIONER. Thank you. My name is Tanel Sepp, I’m from the Embassy of Estonia. 

And I’m going to say you have organized this event on a really historic day because 73 

years ago then acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles made the declaration of not recognizing the occupation of the Baltic States. So congratulations on this. 

I have a fairly simple question. In your view, what could be then the goal of the 

present Russian leadership? I mean, there are so many different variables there. And 

one thing that I absolutely agree with you is this—how we see it is a need to overcome 

the Soviet legacy, but at the same time, sometimes this is especially used in ideological 

terms. 

Mr. SATTER. So what is the goal of the Russian leadership? What are they after? 

QUESTIONER. Yes. 

Mr. SATTER. That’s actually a very easy question to answer. They’re after—— 

Mr. PARKER. Or what should it be. 

Mr. SATTER. Or what should it be is a different story; what it is and what it should 

be. They’re after preserving their monopoly on power and wealth, and the entire foreign 

policy of Russia is organized on that basis. And they don’t have any other goals. 

All of their efforts to, you know, resurrect the myth of the great Russian state or 

resurrect the idea of the great Russian state is only because they fear that their selfishness and their greed will be exposed and they need something to convince people that 

something else is at stake and to distract them from the way in which they’re misruled. 

Mr. PARKER. Please. 

QUESTIONER. Gerald Chandler. I’d like you to follow on that. How long will it last? 

Will it last one election, two elections, 25 years? 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you, Gerald. 

QUESTIONER. I will repeat the question. I’ll state my opinion. People get tired of a 

government. We have Navalny there now representing some small fraction of the population who are tired of the government. Is it a fraction that is bigger than it appears, 

because there’s many, many people who don’t want to speak up, or how big is it? And 

how many years will it take until another Gorbachev comes along and the whole thing 

collapses? 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. 

Mr. SATTER. I don’t know—it won’t last forever, but it, you know—because all of the 

tendencies toward disintegration. The regime is becoming more corrupt, not less. The ruling circle has become narrower—is becoming narrower. Positions of privilege and power 

are being passed on to the children of those who have them now rather than being opened 

up for general competition. 

The atmosphere in the country is becoming more stifling. The level of political repression is becoming greater. At the same time, the country is becoming more educated, has 

more experience of the outside world. And a generation has grown up that is more capable 

of functioning in a democratic society than possibly any previous Russian generation. 

So under those circumstances, an eventual collision is inevitable. When it will happen 

and under what circumstances is hard to predict. It will depend on many factors. But 

this regime, by virtue of its sheer greed and the many, many crimes and secrets that 

it conceals, cannot last indefinitely, and those people in power would like to rule forever, 

but they won’t be able to. 


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Mr. PARKER. Please jump in, Paul. 

Mr. CARTER. Yeah. If we can borrow a term from the Marxists—a question of contradictions here. We saw how the Soviet regime took a nation of essentially illiterate peasants and created an educated cadre of people, scientists and engineers and so on. And 

eventually, those people came to see that the ideology was just simply illogical and that 

created the rot at the core of the system. 

Today, what we see is the growth of the Russian economy, a lot of it built on energy 

and so on, but other industries as well, and a new middle class is being created. But 

that middle class, at some point, as David says, they’ll become fed up with the corruption 

at the top. And that’s what Navalny and others are all about. 

This is a very interesting phenomenon to see in the last two, three years or so. Before 

that, if you talked about opinion in Russia, you were talking about what’s the Kremlin 

thinking about? But in the last two or three years, you’ve seen suddenly this—the streets 

of Moscow with all these people turning out and saying no. They aren’t the ones that 

talk. That’s not the only opinion. This is our opinion. And they’re becoming disgusted 

with it. 

Nobody knows how long change will take. That’s the lesson of the Arab Spring, of 

course, that, you know, there’s just these flash points and then things just spread. 

Now we don’t know whether that will happen in Russia. People before the Orange 

Revolution in Ukraine always said that the Ukrainians were a lot of sheep. They’ll never 

do anything. And then, of course, that just took off. So you never know how these things 

will go. But at some point, the contradictions will catch up with them. 

Mr. PARKER. Please. 

QUESTIONER. First off, thank you very much for organizing this event. My name is 

Ali Down. I’m just a simple intern with the Office of Congressman Robert Brady. My 

question today is what if any aspects of Soviet society or Soviet era mentality continue 

to exist in modern day Russia? 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. 

Mr. SATTER. Well, you know, I have a friend in Moscow by the name of Vladimir 

Voinovich. Maybe you’ve heard of him some of you. He’s a writer, a satirical writer. He 

said there’s nothing left of the Soviet Union except the Soviet man. And the problem— 

there’s been tremendous change. I mean, Russia today is incomparably freer than the 

Soviet Union was. 

But the same disregard for the individual, the same notion that the fate of a person 

is really unimportant compared to greater goals, the goals of the state, the goals of society, 

or even the goals of those in power who are anxious to accumulate wealth, and that’s 

the same as it’s always been. Until that changes, Russia will never really be free. 

Mr. PARKER. Please. 

QUESTIONER. Again, thank you all very much for this. It’s absolutely fascinating. I’m 

Peter Hickman. I’m a former USIA Foreign Service officer, although I was never in the 

Soviet Union and that part of the world. But my question is hard to ask because I think 

it has a lot of answers but you’ve all touched on it in your answers. Putin made this 

famous statement when Soviet Union collapsed, something to the effect that it is the 

greatest socio-political disaster—— 

Mr. SATTER. Geopolitical. Geopolitical. 


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QUESTIONER. Geopolitical. And people in response to that said, no, the greatest geopolitical disaster was the creation of the Soviet Union. (Laughter.) But my question is 

and I think you’ve all answered it in parts, and Mr. Klose as well, what was the reaction 

to that statement at the time in the Soviet Union, and how is it today? 

Mr. SATTER. In Russia—in Russia, no more Soviet Union—— 

QUESTIONER. Well, that’s right. I mean, but—— 

Mr. SATTER. Soviet Union is gone. 

QUESTIONER. Well, are you sure? 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. 

Mr. SATTER. Well, nobody reacted much, but the Russian leaders love the word ‘‘geopolitical.’’ They remind me of certain people in our country who also love the word ‘‘geopolitical.’’ They use it constantly about everything, even though it has no relationship 

to anything. They love the word because as soon as they start talking about geopolitical, 

then the word ‘‘moral,’’ ‘‘ethical,’’ ‘‘legal,’’ all those other words drop out because we’re 

talking about geopolitical—something real, not all this namby-pamby stuff about obeying 

the law, respecting people, you know, not assassinating them, not torturing them, all of 

which is certainly, has nothing to do with the geopolitical interests of this or that. 

And for that reason, when Putin said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of this country, he was being completely consistent and all of the 

listeners and the foreign policy apparatus of Russia, at least those who don’t think much 

or at least who were, you know, anxious to make their careers, and all of their counterparts over here thought that, well, that maybe is a reasonable statement or maybe there’s 

something to it. Of course, it’s absolute nonsense. 

But you know, in a sense Putin reflects what happened in the Soviet Union. When 

in a nation in which no one counts for anything, the only way in which people are distinguished from each other is their level of power. And once a person acquires power—first 

of all, he’ll do anything to get it. 

Second of all, once he acquires power, he won’t recognize any limits on his acquisitiveness. Either his material greed, the tactics he’s willing to use in order to stay in power, 

and all of this comes from the fact that, you know, a degraded individual really can’t 

develop an ethical framework for himself, a sense of personal identity and conscience. 

And that’s because that was the process to which millions of people were subjected in 

the Soviet Union. 

You know, it’s not surprising that if someone like Putin becomes president and he 

acts in a manner that is typical of someone who has no moral orientation at all, is just 

pursuing wealth, power, and self-preservation. And if we criticize him, we have to recognize the fact that there’re millions of other people in his place who would—who—in the 

Soviet Union, who have gone through this, who would act in exactly the same way. 

I think that there are nonetheless some encouraging things. Mostly the fact that despite all of these pressures, there are some people who didn’t succumb to them, and there’s 

a growing number of people in the Soviet Union, in Russia, other countries of the former 

Soviet Union who, nonetheless, despite all this pressure, have developed a moral sense 

and are willing to support and fight for decent values. And I’ve argued in what I’ve written 

that it ought to be a principle of American foreign policy in dealing with that part of 

the world to support them. 


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Mr. PARKER. Thank you, David. Your moral clarity is always refreshing and sometimes even entertaining. 

Mr. SATTER. I try. 

Mr. PARKER. Especially your exegesis on the empty word geopolitical. I couldn’t agree 

more. 

If I may just share a few reactions. This is my second or third time watching the 

film and a few different things stand out. For me, it starts somewhat nostalgic as I see 

these pictures of the ’70s because, you know, I married into the Soviet family, and so 

some of those photos of camping and the beach during the Brezhnev era, they almost 

evoke a pleasant feeling for a past I only know through pictures and stories. 

Then there’s this stark, just gruesome, fearful image of this 11-year-old boy on the 

roof eating weeds in famine-stricken Ukraine, millions dead. Or as Paul mentioned the 

legacy of Stalin and sort of the glorification of him now in certain quarters, and even, 

perhaps most disturbingly among the youth. I guess this runs a little counterintuitive 

to those who naively thought that the Internet or the iPhone or whatever modern gadget 

would somehow bring morality. 

But what to me is even more disturbing, that moment in the film when Shatravka— 

when he confronts the nurse. It’s two Russias staring each other in the face and looking 

completely past each other. And to me this is all the more disturbing for its insidiousness. 

It’s hidden. This nurse doesn’t even understand what he’s talking about. She can’t grasp 

the depth of pain in Shatravka who’s essentially confronting the killer of his brother, a 

woman who might be a neighbor who is free, just walking around. Again, David, your 

commentary in the end about how are these people to be held to account, about what 

is appropriate, just. 

I remember my own confusion up in Arctic Russia where I spent some time in 

Vorkuta, in Ukhta, which was essentially a big prison camp. And I asked questions, again, 

to people like that nurse, and they couldn’t even understand. Others, of course, were 

happy to tell about the rehabilitation of their relatives and share their files. But those 

people who didn’t understand, who remembered, but weren’t moved—I guess for me it’s 

confusing. 

So David, this is my question to you, the truth is available in Russia and it is not 

the 1930s. And yet, it isn’t—in some areas, it really isn’t very good and in some areas 

you can even attempt to draw certain moral comparisons. I think back to the 1999 apartment bombings, which many and serious people believe were orchestrated by the regime 

as the pretext to start the second Chechen war, the rise of Putin, the underpinnings of 

the modern Russian state, which was most recently our reset partner, though I guess 

we don’t use the term. We do seem to have stuck largely to the policy though. 

We’re talking here about deliberate murder of hundreds of Russians in their sleep. 

And I’m not prepared to say it happened that way, but I know there are very serious 

people who’ve examined the evidence and the fact is it remains a big open question. Does 

this not approach something of the morality of the 1930s and the willingness to commit 

such crimes. 

My question is why wasn’t this truth that is out there if you looked for it more powerful? You can find books and you can read these things, and it almost seems to have lost 

its power. Why wasn’t it the cleansing wave that washed everything away and made everything anew? 


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Mr. SATTER. Yeah. Well, first of all because it was partial and it was basically used— 

the truth in Russia was used for political purposes. In the late ’80s, people were fascinated 

by history and anxious to learn the truth about history when it could be used as a weapon 

against the old regime, which was the communist regime. 

Once that regime fell, independent interest in commemorating the victims or investigating the past almost disappeared. In the late 1980s, there were pedestals and plinths 

established all over Russia, in Russian cities, saying on this site there will be a memorial 

to the victims of Stalinism, the victims of communism. Now there’s nothing left, just the 

pedestals, just the plinths. The memorials were never built. 

As far as the apartment bombings are concerned, I’m one of those who, as you may 

or may not know, who has argued that, in fact—and I believe the evidence in reality 

is overwhelming, that it was through an act of terror that Putin came to power. And 

that’s not the only act of terror. What about the decision to open fire with heavy weapons 

on the children who were the hostages in Beslan in 2004, or the decision to pump a theater 

with 1,000 hostages full of lethal gas without making any effort really to prepare to rescue 

the victims? 

It all stems from the same thing, that the individual just doesn’t count for anything. 

And in particular—and he is particularly insignificant compared to the goals of the regime. So therefore, if it’s necessary—of course, we are not dealing with a situation such 

as that, which existed in 1937, nearly a million people were shot straight out, and another—well, it was 700,000 and then another equal—were shot—and roughly the same 

number were arrested and sent to labor camps, where they quickly died. 

It’s not that scale, but the situation could, given that mentality, become very bad 

in the future. Right now, the regime is not seriously threatened, but as the situation deteriorates, given that mentality, anything is possible. 

Mr. PARKER. Thank you. I certainly don’t mean to draw a direct comparison to the 

sheer numbers of murder victims of the 1930s. I guess to me, though, to avoid the danger 

of proportionalism, the notion that a person who kills 1,000 is much worse than the person 

who’s prepared to kill 100—certainly, in terms of the sheer volume of human suffering 

visited on the people. But the willingness to cross those lines, the notion that the person 

is not important enough, a means not an end that can be sacrificed for other goals. 

I’ve mentioned just how profound—and it’s on great display here today—David gets 

on Russia. You know, when I’m not reading David’s work or maybe Leon Aron’s work, 

I often find myself reading our very own Librarian of Congress, Jim Billington, himself 

a renowned Russia historian and scholar. I brought along his book from—I don’t know, 

maybe it’s already about a decade ago, ‘‘Russia in Search of Itself.’’ 

This passage comes to mind as relevant to our discussion. I’ll read it into the transcript as perhaps an appropriate way to end, maybe on a dark note, an acknowledgement 

that there’s no easy answer. Dr. Billington’s talking here about denial and this painful 

history. ‘‘The only part’’—he says, and I quote—‘‘the only part that has been fully acknowledged and honored by public monuments is the suffering caused by foreign foes. Yet just 

as much suffering was inflicted on them by themselves, and over a longer period of time. 

‘‘This condition of denial impacts on a society in ways that can never be understood, 

let alone remedied, by roundtable discussions—even those that may someday be convened 

after all the mass graves and buried documents have been unearthed. Words alone will 

never provide a roadmap into a happy future for those who once thought they stood on 


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a mountain. They now know there is no easy way out of their valley and that the shadow 

of massive, innocent death still hangs over it.’’ End quote. 

These are haunting words and capture the difficulty of this moment where the people 

of Russia find themselves and how to deal with this shameful, ugly, confusing and not 

even fully known past. And so we add yet another roundtable discussion, as it were, to 

this attempt. 

It’s 5 o’clock comrades, and everybody looks a little tired. So I think I’ll wrap it up. 

Again, I want to thank you all for coming and participating. I want to especially 

thank Jackie Cahan, who helped David and I to put this event together. I also suggest 

to all of you to keep an eye on our website. We have other interesting events coming 

up. We’ll take a little bit of break in August, as it’s customary up here on the Hill, but 

should have a robust program in the fall, particularly on Russia. 

I hope we’ll finally have a serious Russia hearing and as well other briefings. One 

we have planned is a survey of U.S.-Russian relations over the centuries. This should 

provide an interesting perspective here in Congress on the hills and valleys and understand what we’ve seen before and where we’ve been before in this important relationship 

with Russia. 

With that, I close the record and thank you all for coming. 

Æ 


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