“We cling to power as a flea clings to a collar,” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, my great-grandfather, declared in 1957. To make his point, he asked his audience of shocked Communist Party apparatchiks what the average retirement age was. “Mid-sixties,”…

When the Soviet Union collapsed and global communism retreated, many hoped the days of authoritarian leaders cultivating ‘cults of personality’ were over.  We had reached the ‘end of history’, and liberal democracy won.  Regular, peaceful transitions of power among democratically…