Donald Rayfield

Chilling Tales

It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past

By

Yale University Press 383pp £25 order from our bookshop

David Satter is one of the minority of historians of Soviet Russia not to be deceived into false optimism by its collapse. His three earlier works were provoked by the gangsterism of Yeltsin’s oligarchs and by the Hitlerian cynicism of Putin, blowing up his own citizens to give himself a pretext for bombing Chechnya to smithereens. This book, its title deliberately inviting a loud shout of ‘No!’, is more vehement than his previous studies of post-Soviet Russia, but just as impeccably argued.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us