Quotes from Anne Applebaum

In Belarus, the government is a kind of presidential monarchy with no checks, no balances, and no rule of law.

Trump is no good at deals and never has been.

We now expect Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to police the Internet for dangerous and illegal material - violent, terrorist, criminal - and some democratic governments require them to do so. But what if they did decide to repress material for political reasons? How would we know?

Romney was an excellent businessman with a strong record as a public servant - whereas Trump inherited wealth, went bankrupt more than once, created nothing of value, and had no governing record at all.

There's no checklist of how democracies fail because they fail in different ways. Some of them fail because they break up and civil war breaks out... Often they fail because someone is elected to power who doesn't respect the rules of the democracy.

False stories can be promulgated more easily when the people trying to tell true stories have been discredited - or when they are battered by rubber bullets.

Modern democratic institutions, built for an era with very different information technology, provide little comfort for those who are angered by the dissonance. Voting, campaigning, the formation of coalitions—all of this seems retrograde in a world where other things happen so quickly.

the intellectuals and ideologues behind these new movements have now found a set of issues they can unite around—issues that work across borders and are easy to sell online. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, both real and imagined, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative, religious worldview is another. Sometimes, opposition to the EU, or to international institutions more generally, is a third.

Law and Justice took over the state public broadcaster—also in violation of the constitution—firing popular presenters and experienced reporters. Their replacements, recruited from the far-right extremes of the online media, began running straightforward ruling-party propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers' expense.

Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts.

Stalin's policies that autumn led inexorably to famine all across the grain-growing regions of the USSR. But in November and December 1932 he twisted the knife further in Ukraine, deliberately creating a deeper crisis. Step by step, using bureaucratic language and dull legal terminology, the Soviet leadership, aided by their cowed Ukrainian counterparts, launched a famine within the famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.

it is true that both the Red Army and the secret police traditionally gave vodka to soldiers who were being asked to do dirty work: empty bottles are almost always found inside mass graves.

But in every country occupied by the Red Army, the definition of "fascist" eventually grew broader, expanding to include not only Nazi collaborators but anybody whom the Soviet occupiers and their local allies disliked. In time, the word "fascist," in true Orwellian fashion, was eventually used to describe antifascists who also happened to be anticommunists. And every time the definition was expanded, arrests followed.

the plan was not being fulfilled, it was not poor organization or malnutrition that were to blame, not stupidly cruel work policies or the lack of felt boots—but insufficient propaganda.

Moscow. In the early 1930s, however, such glasnost

One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism.

the worst kind of one-party state "invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, justice, the good of the people Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Lies, by their very nature partial and ephemeral, are revealed as lies when confronted with language's striving for truth. But here all the means of disclosure had been permanently confiscated by the police. —Aleksander Wat, My Century

In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided.

The founders themselves were not so certain: their beloved classical authors taught them that history was circular, that human nature was flawed, and that special measures were needed to prevent democracy from sliding back into tyranny.

When people have rejected aristocracy, no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth, no longer assume that the ruling class is endorsed by God, the argument about who gets to rule—who is the elite—is never over.

Most of the time, however, the cruelty of Soviet camp guards was unthinking, stupid, lazy cruelty, of the sort that might be shown to cattle or sheep.

early development of the region's secret police. Through both reading and conversations, I sought to understand how ordinary people learned to cope with the new regimes; how they collaborated, willingly or reluctantly; how and why they joined the party and other state institutions; how they resisted, actively or passively; how they came to make terrible choices that most of us in the West, nowadays, never have to face.

The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth.