Going Nowhere Fast.(Darkness at Dawn)(Book Review)

David Satter is profoundly disillusioned with post-Soviet Russia. Actually, that's putting it mildly; his new book, "Darkness at Dawn" (352 pages. Yale University Press), paints about as abject a picture as I've seen of the corruption, cronyism, lawlessness and incompetence that have flourished under Boris Yeltsin and his handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin. In one example, Satter, a former Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, takes us inside a police station on an ordinary workday to show how powerless Russians are against the law. He describes the case of V., a Muscovite thrown into the "monkey cage" for no other reason than to satisfy the arresting officer's desire to collect a bribe. "You resemble a wanted rapist," says the officer, "and we've got a wagonload of cooperative witnesses." V. refuses to pay the bribe and ends up spending the night, listening as other officers shake down detainees and conduct negotiations "about payoffs with the relatives of arrested persons."

Such anecdotes help Satter press his fundamental point: Russia has not found its freedom. Despite progress in setting up democratic institutions and implementing economic reform, the country remains crippled by social pathologies--in particular the lack of legal norms and the disregard for human life. Satter blames these ills on Yeltsin- era "reformers," who gave preference to privatization over establishing the legal framework for a market economy. He argues that they were explicitly tolerant of crime--an attitude that led directly to the creation of the tiny group of tycoons who, by one recent estimate, control 85 percent of Russia's private economy. The re-form process, he writes, "took place without moral values, and it bequeathed to Russia a moral vacuum." This is, needless to say, a tough case to make, since morality--unlike foreign-exchange reserves--is subjective and impossible to quantify.

But Satter offers up plenty of intriguing evidence. He tells the story of an Afghan-war veteran who dies in a fruitless hunger strike by Siberian teachers to collect their unpaid wages. We hear of a woman who dies during an operation when the electricity in the hospital is cut off for lack of payment by the local government. We learn about a man and his son who are boiled alive when they fall into a hole in a Moscow park formed by a burst heating pipe laid in ...