Despots

"Gripping, terrifying, urgent, necessary." - Ian Rankin 

"Anyone who cares for democracy and freedom, and who fears for the future of both, should go and read this book." - Jonathan Dimbleby



Long Live the King.

Since his re-election as US president, Donald Trump has made good on things he only dreamed of accomplishing in his first term: he has smashed constitutional constraints, trampled on free speech, suborned the judiciary, demonised the media, crushed protests on the streets, secured the backing of America’s oligarchs and inflated his personal wealth. According to Martin Sixsmith, BBC’s Moscow Correspondent when Vladimir Putin came to power, it all looks eerily familiar from what Russia went through in the 2000s.

Despots is Sixsmith's exploration of two aspiring dictators who came to power in nominally electoral democracies, then dismantled the pillars of democracy from within, one of them following confidently in the footsteps of the other. As we see in our news every day, US foreign policy is no longer based on values but on greed, and at home the Trump administration has intervened in the almost every area of people’s daily lives, bringing the National Guard and ICE agents into America's cities, telling educators what schoolchildren should be taught and threatening universities when they beg to differ.

As in Putin’s Russia, so in Trump’s America: the US is fast-forwarding through what Russia endured in the first five years under Putin, and the parallels this time are much clearer, more overt, and increasingly terrifying.
 

Martin Sixsmith studied Russian at Oxford, Leningrad and the Sorbonne. He was a Slavics Tutor at Harvard and wrote his postgraduate thesis about Russian poetry. From 1980 to 1997 he was the BBC's correspondent in Moscow, Washington, Brussels and Warsaw. From 1997 to 2002 he worked for the British government as Director of Communications and Press Secretary to several cabinet ministers. He is now a writer, presenter and journalist. He is the author of non-fiction titles including Russia - the Wild East,Putin's Oil, The Litvinenko File and The War of Nerves. His bestselling 2009 book, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, was adapted for film and became the multiple Oscar-nominated Philomena, starring Steve Coogan and Judi Dench.
Having completed degrees in History and Russian Studies, Daniel Sixsmith worked as an archaeologist in Siberia and Kazakhstan before turning to historical research and writing. He contributed to the BBC Radio 4 series Russia: The Wild East, and co-authored The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind, which was named a Washington Post non-fiction book of the year in 2022, and Putin and the Return of History. He lives with his partner and daughter in London.