Ghosts of dictatorships past • Andrew Bonnell

Ghosts of dictatorships past • Andrew Bonnell

The world seemed simpler in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events it came to symbolise: the collapse of Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and their replacement by multi-party democracies, the unravelling of the Soviet Union itself, and the end of the cold war. Many believed the ideological conflicts that had made the twentieth century an “age of extremes” were over, and liberal democracy had won. Leaving a…