Despotism

After staging a failed coup and going to prison, the Venezuelan army officer Hugo Chavez ran to be president in 1998, campaigning against corruption and offering revolutionary change. His nation was seen as a prosperous beacon of stability, built on its great oil wealth, envied by many people elsewhere in the region. He won by promising to tackle the inequality that scarred it so badly and take on the oligarchs enriching themselves through favours and nepotism. Western celebrities, journalists and politicians, from Sean Penn through to Jeremy Corbyn, started flocking to South America to hail their new progressive hero supposedly fighting for social justice. As Venezuela slid to ruin, Russian

In September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, waited at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC World Service. Feeling a sting in his right thigh, he looked round to see the man behind him picking up his apparently fallen umbrella. The man apologised in a foreign accent and hastily crossed the road where he hailed a taxi. Markov felt feverish that night, was admitted to hospital and within four days was dead. ‘The bastards poisoned me,’ he told doctors, as they struggled to identify what was wrong with him. ‘The bastards poisoned me,’ Markov told doctors, as they struggled to identify

Why should we want to read yet another thumping great book about the collapse of the Soviet empire? Sergey Radchenko attempts an answer in his well-constructed new work. Based on recently opened Soviet archives and on extensive work in the Chinese archives, it places particular weight on China’s role in Soviet policy-making. The details are colourful. It is fun to know that Mao Tse-Tung sent Stalin a present of spices, and that the mouse on which the Russians tested it promptly died. But the new material forces no major revision of previous interpretations. Perhaps the book is best seen as a meditation on the limitations of political power. Stalin and

To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature of autocracy – and the West’s relationship to it. We kicked things off by trying to realise the Trotskyite dream of ushering in global democracy through the barrel of a gun. We wanted to bring an end to the world’s tyrants – or the ones of relevance to us at any rate. We got Iraq. But if we failed to end tyrants, we played our part in helping to mould them. As Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman observe in their intelligent, important book Spin Dictators, throughout this time something far