For those of us in the democratic West, the rise of authoritarianism in countries like the USA and Hungary has come as a nasty surprise, one that is difficult to accept. Though if we were to look back over the history of dictatorship in the past hundred years, we should not be so astonished. In Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, both fellows of the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, tell the story of the demise of the USSR and the subsequent rise of Putin as a new tsar of a revived imperial Russia, harking back to its pre-communist past.