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 . " 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 . " Martin Sieff , writing in the Canadian '' National Post '' , wrote that '' Darkness at Dawn '' was " Vivid , impeccably researched and truly frightening . " Angus Macqueen , writing in '' The Guardian '' , compared '' Darkness at Dawn '' to '' Putin ’s Russia '' by Anna Politkovskaya . Sieff wrote : " Both of these books underline the moral vacuum that the destruction of the Soviet Union has left . " In his book , '' Darkness at Dawn '' , Satter charged that the Russian Federal Security Service ( FSB ) was responsible for the bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999 that claimed nearly 300 lives and provided the justification for a second Chechen War . He argued that this was part of a conspiracy to bring Putin to power as Boris Yeltsin was fading . During testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives , Satter stated : 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 . He received response that all documents were classified by US government because " that information had the potential ... to cause serious damage to the relationship with the Russian government " . 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 . " According to a cable on the Ryazan incident from the U.S. embassy in Moscow , on 24 March 2000 , cited by Satter , " a former Russian intelligence officer , apparently one of the embassy 's principal informants , said that the real story about the Ryazan incident could never be known because it " would destroy the country . " The informant said the FSB had " a specially trained team of men " whose mission was " to carry out this type of urban warfare " and Viktor Cherkesov , the FSB 's first deputy director and an interrogator of Soviet dissidents was " exactly the right person to order and carry out such actions . "
bombings of Russian apartment buildings
Russian apartment bombings
David Satter