Category: Dictatorships

Political survival beats economic logic as Cuba’s ‘reform drive hits the sand’

     

The anniversary of the Russian Revolution is a timely reminder that Marxist ideology, once entrenched in countries that controlled a third of the world’s population, survives today as an operable… Read more »

Why Europe’s last dictator’s crackdown will only further radicalize Belarusians

     

A rare and large-scale protest took place in Belarus on Saturday, when hundreds took to the streets to protest a tax — the so-called “tax on parasites” — against the under-employed,… Read more »

Why Europe’s ‘last dictator’ is allowing Belarus protests

     

Where the Soviet system was rigid, today’s autocrats are flexible and pragmatic, writes Freedom House analyst Arch Puddington: Where the older generation of communists were bureaucratic and slothful, today’s dictators… Read more »

Cuba’s economy flat-lines: revolution is over, but dictatorship lives on

     

Cuba’s insular socialist paradise supposedly offers a social safety-net, cradle to grave. But it is full of holes, The Economist reports: Medical care is free, but most medicine is not…. Read more »

The subtleties – and limits – of China’s soft power

     

The Chinese government has been trying to sell the country itself as a brand—one that has the ability to attract people from other countries in the way that America does… Read more »

North Korea’s Solzhenitsyn

     

It was a dog-eared manuscript, 743 pages bound in string. But for Do Hee-youn, an activist campaigning for human rights in North Korea, it was nothing less than stunning, The… Read more »

Reality check: life in a Cuban jail

     

Stephen Purvis loved Cuba and his job as development director with one of several small foreign firms that were setting up as the country sought international partners following the collapse… Read more »

How Egypt’s activists became ‘Generation Jail’

     

Six years after the Arab Spring, Egypt’s democracy activists live under constant threat of prison — or worse, notes analyst Joshua Hammer. It was just six years ago that Ahmed… Read more »

Boris Nemtsov: The Man Who Was Too Free

     

In the shadow of the red brick Kremlin walls, an informal shrine marks the spot and the memory of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critic,… Read more »