This book tells of the events which led, in September 1949, to the integration of the Princely State of Hyderabad the largest and the richest of the Princely States into the Indian Union. The author questions the nature and popularity of the annexation of Hyderabad and attempts to answer sensitive questions through a detailed study of the crucial decade of 1938 48.

“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

This book explores human polity with respect to its nature, context, and evolution. Specifically, it examines how individual wills translate into political ideologies, investigates what social forces converge to shape governmental operations, and probes whether human polity progresses in focus from individual wills to group interests to social integrations. The book entertains five hypotheses. The first is commonsensical: where there are people there is politics. The second is analogous: humans govern themselves socially in a way that is comparable to how a body regulates itself physically. The third is rational: humans set rules, organize activities, and establish institutions upon facts, following reasons, for the purpose of effectiveness and efficiency. The fourth is random: human affairs take place haphazardly under specific circumstances while they overall exhibit general patterns and trends. The final hypothesis is inevitable: human governance evolves from autocracy to democracy to technocracy. The book presents systematic information about human polity, its form, content, operation, impact, and evolution. It sheds light on multivariate interactions among human wills, rights, and obligations, political thoughts, actions, and mechanisms, and social structures, processes, and order maintenances. Pragmatically, it offers invaluable insights into individuals as agents, groupings as agencies, and polity as structuration across the human sphere.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document ... is Applebaum's answer." —Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian explains, with electrifying clarity, why elites in democracies around the world are turning toward nationalism and authoritarianism. From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.

Bringing together literatures on the external influences of democratization, the post-Soviet space and support for autocracy Obydenkova and Libman provide a comprehensive overview of the interaction of domestic and international politics during times of regime transition. Demonstrating the interplay of these forces the book explores the rich variation in motives and channels of autocratic and democratic influences. International scholars consider two channels of external influence on regime transition; the role of supranational organizations established by non-democracies and the role of non-governmental organizations and through a set of carefully chosen case studies offer a new theoretical discussion on the phenomenon of multi-level regime transition.

Corruption, fake news, and the "informational autocracy" sustaining Putin in power After fading into the background for many years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia suddenly has emerged as a new threat—at least in the minds of many Westerners. But Western assumptions about Russia, and in particular about political decision-making in Russia, tend to be out of date or just plain wrong. Under the leadership of Vladimir Putin since 2000, Russia is neither a somewhat reduced version of the Soviet Union nor a classic police state. Corruption is prevalent at all levels of government and business, but Russia's leaders pursue broader and more complex goals than one would expect in a typical kleptocracy, such as those in many developing countries. Nor does Russia fit the standard political science model of a "competitive authoritarian" regime; its parliament, political parties, and other political bodies are neither fakes to fool the West nor forums for bargaining among the elites. The result of a two-year collaboration between top Russian experts and Western political scholars, Autocracy explores the complex roles of Russia's presidency, security services, parliament, media and other actors. The authors argue that Putin has created an “informational autocracy,” which relies more on media manipulation than on the comprehensive repression of traditional dictatorships. The fake news, hackers, and trolls that featured in Russia’s foreign policy during the 2016 U.S. presidential election are also favored tools of Putin’s domestic regime—along with internet restrictions, state television, and copious in-house surveys. While these tactics have been successful in the short run, the regime that depends on them already shows signs of age: over-centralization, a narrowing of information flows, and a reliance on informal fixers to bypass the bureaucracy. The regime's challenge will be to continue to block social modernization without undermining the leadership’s own capabilities.