David Satter's "The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep"

David Satter has written about Russia for almost four decades. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Satter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin, and reported the following:

The book deals on page 99 with the Nord-Ost theater siege in 2002 in Moscow in which nearly a thousand theater goers were suddenly taken hostage by Chechen terrorists. The page, itself, describes the beginning of the siege which ended when Russian special forces flooded the theater with lethal gas killing at least 129 of the hostages. Page 99 is representative of the book because there is evidence of official involvement in the seizure of the theater and the book in its entirety deals with the major provocations that have characterized Russia since the fall of the U.S.S.R. and have been crucial to keeping the ruling group in power. These include the Ostankino Television tower massacre in 1993, the Russian apartment bombings in 1999, Nord-Ost, the Beslan school massacre in 2004 and, of course, the invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Turning by chance to the Nord-Ost theater siege and its chilling beginning, the reader is given a very good idea of all of the other chilling episodes that are described in the book and finds hints of the conclusions that will soon be drawn.

Learn more about The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway.

--Marshal Zeringue