Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union

Publication Data: New Haven, CT/London, United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2001
Format: softcover
Number of Pages: xviii + 424
Dimensions (l × w × h): 23.5 cm × 15.6 cm × 2.6 cm
ISBN: 978‒0‒300‒08705‒5

   
David Satter

A volume of Age of Delirium / Darkness at Dawn / It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway

“This book is intended to be a collective chronicle of the last fifteen years of the Soviet Union, a period during which the Soviet system began to rot and finally collapsed. [...]Although the Soviet Union is now fading into the mists of history, the Soviet experiment in total domination still needs to be understood. The Soviet Union was the product of a purely modern form of megalomania, the notion that human affairs can be ordered without the help of transcendent rules. This book can be taken as a record of the consequences of the application of this notion, as well as a description of human experience under extreme social conditions. In the latter respect, it has special relevance for people in the United States because, as their experiences demonstrate, Soviet people are not as far from us as we might hope.”
—“Preface”

CONTENTS

PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
1. THE COUP
2. THE IDEOLOGY
3. GORBACHEV AND THE PARTY
4. TRUTH SEEKERS
5. THE WORKERS
6. THE ECONOMY
7. THE BORDER
8. THE KGB
9. INTERNAL POLICY
10. GLASNOST
11. HOMO SOVIETICUS
12. THE ROOTS OF FANATICISM
13. UKRAINE
14. RELIGION
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS