Anne Applebaum: ‘Russia is playing a special role in aggressively seeking to upend the status quo’

There is no historical arc. There is no rule that democracy will survive or that it will collapse. It’s down to us.”

That is the rallying cry of Anne Applebaum, the award-winning author, about the increased threat posed by autocrats within and without Western societies.

An American by origin, she divides her time between her homeland and two other countries that have spent several miserable years battling a rise in right-wing populism. For her latest book, Autocracy Inc., she wanted to examine the current generation of dictators around the world driven less by ideology, more by self-enrichment.

In order to achieve that, they need to undermine civil society, remove checks and balances and most of all, foment chaos wherever they can. For autocrats to thrive they need two sets of accomplices – populist politicians and an army of international accountants, financiers and real estate agents who help them launder tens of billions of dollars.

“The globalisation of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago,” Applebaum writes.

Everywhere you look, she says, you can see the malign hand of Vladimir Putin. “Russia plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo,” she notes.

In any conversation about democracy versus authoritarianism, it is worth beginning with a situation report. Over the past month, Ukraine has embarked on a startling incursion into Russian territory; Britain is recovering from riots; after a brief Olympics