The Dictator's Learning Curve - Inside the Global Battle for Democracy

Zusatztext 52225155 Informationen zum Autor William J. Dobson is politics and foreign affairs editor for Slate . He has been an editor at Foreign Affairs , Newsweek International , and Foreign Policy . During his tenure at Foreign Policy , the magazine was nominated for the coveted National Magazine Award for General Excellence each year and won top honors in 2007 and 2009. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post , and The Wall Street Journal , and he has provided analysis for ABC, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, and NPR. He lives in Washington, DC. Klappentext In this riveting anatomy of authoritarianism! acclaimed journalist William Dobson takes us inside the battle between dictators and those who would challenge their rule. Recent history has seen an incredible moment in the war between dictators and democracy-with waves of protests sweeping Syria and Yemen! and despots falling in Egypt! Tunisia! and Libya. But the Arab Spring is only the latest front in a global battle between freedom and repression! a battle that! until recently! dictators have been winning hands-down. The problem is that today's authoritarians are not like the frozen-in-time! ready-to-crack regimes of Burma and North Korea. They are ever-morphing! technologically savvy! and internationally connected! and have replaced more brutal forms of intimidation with subtle coercion. The Dictator's Learning Curve explains this historic moment and provides crucial insight into the fight for democracy. Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition Chapter 1 The Czar As a KGB officer, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin had one foreign assignment. In 1985, at the age of thirty-­two, Putin was stationed in Dresden, East Germany. He moved there with his wife and his one-­year-­old daughter, Masha; soon after they arrived, his second daughter, Katya, was born. The Putins lived in a drab apartment building. Most of their neighbors were members of the Stasi, the East German intelligence agency. But the location was convenient, putting Putin a short five-­minute walk from the KGB’s headquarters at 4 Angelikastrasse. As a case officer, the young Putin recruited sources, ran agents, gathered the latest scuttlebutt on East German leaders, and cabled his analysis back to Moscow. For a Soviet spy, it was fairly unremarkable stuff. What was more remarkable were the years that he lived there. Putin remained in Dresden, on the edge of the Soviet Empire, from 1985 until January 1990. He was, in other words, a witness to the collapse of a dictatorship, and of the Soviet system that followed soon thereafter. The German Democratic Republic was a postcard of a twentieth-­century totalitarian state. The Stasi had infiltrated all parts of life. It kept secret files on more than six million East Germans; in Dresden alone, the files the secret police compiled would stretch almost seven miles. According to the regime’s own records, the East German government employed 97,000 people and had another 173,000 working as informants. Nearly one in every 60 citizens was somehow tied to the state’s security apparatus. Even as a KGB officer, Putin was shocked at how “totally invasive” the government’s surveillance was of its own citizens. He later described his time in East Germany as “a real eye-­opener for me.” “I thought I was going to an Eastern European country, to the center of Europe,” he told a Russian interviewer. But it wasn’t that. “It was a harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union, only 30 years earlier.” As a Soviet intelligence officer working in a client state, Putin very likely saw signs of East Germany’s rot before others. He likely would have read the Stasi reports—­many of which were sent unfiltered to Moscow—­that painted an increasingly dark picture. These report...

Product details

• Authors: William J. Dobson
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.03.2013
• EAN: 9780307477552
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47755-2
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 203 mm x 17 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education