When the Russian government tried to expel him in 1979 for “being a hooligan,” the American and British embassies threatened to oust two Soviet correspondents — read that, intelligence agents — from the West. David Satter got to stay, at least that time.
“I tried to give them every reason to regret that decision,” he later said.
Satter is Hillsdale College’s Pulliam Fellow this semester, chosen partly because of his career as a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times and partly because of the intrigue that comes with being the first American journalist banned from Russia since the Cold War.
He has written several op-eds about Russia for The Wall Street Journal, one of which caught the eye of Director of the Dow Journalism Program John Miller.
“You are here largely because of the thing you wrote in January,” Miller told Satter when the Chicago native visited a Hillsdale journalism class earlier this week.
Satter will deliver a public lecture about “Russia’s looming crisis” and his personal perspective of Putin’s regime today at 8 p.m. in Markel Auditorium.
During his graduate studies at Oxford University, the Rhodes scholar and aspiring journalist ventured to Russia. It was 1969 — more than two decades before the Soviet Union would fall — when he first set foot in the country that he would visit dozens of times during his life.
“The core difference there is in the attitude toward the individual,” he said. “For all our faults here in the U.S., the society and system is based on the notion that the individual has inherent value. In Russia, rights, personality, and fate are all subordinated to the state.”
Satter returned to the Red Empire in 1976, and worked in Moscow as a foreign correspondent until 1982. While most foreign correspondents change posts frequently, Satter stayed there on a long-term assignment, working with a linguist tutor every day.
“My mission was a little bit different. It was really to understand. I didn’t approach my job in a purely journalistic fashion,” he said. “I became fairly well-known among people, and I decided it was time to write a book.”
But before he could finish the novel — an insider view of totalitarian Russia — Satter’s mother-in-law passed away unexpectedly, and he moved to France.
Years later, Satter spent six days in the Library of Congress scouring five years’ worth of information, notes, and ideas for his book.
“I realized in that moment that the manuscripts were utterly unusable,” Satter said. “But that moment was the beginning of the creation of something that would work.”
Satter recast the book as an insider perspective on the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. He pitched his idea to Reader’s Digest, which accepted the proposal and sent him back to Russia, where he began working as an academic writer.
Since then, Satter has published three books — and is working on a fourth, “The Less You Know the Better You Sleep,” in Hillsdale College’s Mossey Library during his tenure as a visiting professor. Satter also teaches modern Russian history at Johns Hopkins University.
Hillsdale students in his class, a one-credit nonfiction-writing course, said that Satter shares stories about his unusual background and seems eager to give advice on how they can improve as writers. The class focuses on memoir writing, editorial journalism, and feature writing.
“I’m really enjoying the class…it’s really been interesting to read his pieces,” said senior Jenna Adamson, an English and French double major. “He really encourages us to think about writing an editorial about a politically-correct notion in the culture that everyone believes without questioning. That’s a good way to grab people’s attention as a young writer because it shows a level of sophistication.”
After finishing his fellowship at Hillsdale with the Dow Journalism Program, Satter plans to return to London and continue working on his book. And although the Russian government has made it clear that he’s not welcome in the country, Satter continues to believe that he will go back again someday.
“Right now I’m banned, but…I think the day will come [when I can] return to Russia,” Satter said quietly. “A moment comes when people get tired of authoritative leaders, especially when they’re corrupt and criminal. I’m attached to it in a crazy way — a big part of my life is there. Sooner or later, I’ll get back.”
