Why subscribe?
I moved to Warsaw in 1988, and as a very junior journalist I observed, and described, the fall of the communist governments in Poland and elsewhere the following year, in 1989. Over the subsequent three decades, moving back and forth between Poland, the UK and the US, I wrote about democratization in central Europe and Russia as well as American, European and international politics. I worked for both British and American media: The Economist, The Spectator, The Sunday Telegraph, The Washington Post.
In an attempt to understand a regime that I thought was gone and would not return, I also wrote three books about Soviet and central European history. Gulag, a history of the Soviet concentration camps; Iron Curtain, a history of the Sovietization of central Europe; and Red Famine, a history of the Ukrainian famine.
Over those same three decades, old ideas became new again. Putin’s Russia brought back Soviet habits, Soviet imperialism and Soviet repression. Many Americans and Europeans turned against the liberal democratic world they had built with so much effort, from 1945 to 1989, and from 1989 into the present. The leaders of the autocratic world, meanwhile, began cooperating in order to promote their systems and to undermine ours. I wrote two short books describing these shifts, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy Inc.
But the story is not over. If you want to understand where it is heading, then please subscribe to this Substack. The war of ideas that characterizes our era, between autocratic and democratic thinking, is my main subect.
If you do subscribe, then gift links to all of my work at the Atlantic will be delivered to your inbox, along with links to podcasts, articles, books and maybe the odd painting. I am experimenting with a Kleptocracy Tracker, in order to keep track of most corrupt administration we have ever had. I will try to write, in a lighter vein, about things I see or hear while traveling. No doubt the formula will evolve, along with my readers. I look forward to hearing from you.
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