In an article in The Wall Street Journal Europe, April 2, 1997, he wrote: "When the Soviet Union fell… the moral impulse motivating the democratic movement had to become the basis of Russia’s political practices.

"[4] Jack Matlock, the former U.S. ambassador in Moscow, writing in The Washington Post, said that Age of Delirium was "spellbinding" and gave "a visceral sense of what it felt like to be trapped in the communist system.

"[5] The Virginia Quarterly Review wrote, "The brilliance of this book lies in its eccentricity and in the author’s profound knowledge of and sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people under communism.

[13][14] Luke Harding suggested that Satter's expulsion from the Russian Federation was part of a wider trend by the FSB that is, "increasingly rejecting visa applications from Western academics seeking to visit Russia if their publications are deemed hostile.

"[13] In his book, Darkness at Dawn, Satter described bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999 that claimed nearly 300 lives and provided the justification for a second Chechen War.

"[17] On 14 July 2016, David Satter filed a request to obtain official assessment of who was responsible for the bombings from the State Department, the CIA and the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act.

Moreover, the CIA refused even to acknowledge the existence of any relevant records because doing so would reveal "very specific aspects of the Agency's intelligence interest, or lack thereof, in the Russian bombings.