BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians up’ the agreement between British prime minister to ensure that critical domestic voices are removed Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler that resulted in from Russian history. This explains the near total ab- Germany's seizure of parts and eventually all of Czecho- sence of Andrey Sakharov from any discussion of the slovakia. This clearly falsified the historical record. Far Soviet past or Russia's future course. from suppressing Chamberlain's actions, historians and politicians alike have held up the Munich agreement Today Sakharov is recalled abroad as a dissident and as a symbol of all that went wrong due to the European Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In Russia, however, he democracies’ appeasement of Hitler.’ has been relegated to the status of nonperson. Putin and other leaders never refer to him, his legacy, or Putin has also justified the Hitler-Stalin pact on the his views. The organizations that were launched to grounds that it kept the Soviet Union out of war for a promote his principles are harassed and placed on the time and was in keeping with the amoral power politics “foreign agents’ list.’° In an age of flourishing digital practiced in that era. As for the divvying up of Eastern media, Russians are ironically less likely to know what Europe, he repeated the hoary lie that the record was Sakharov stood for than was the case under Soviet unclear as to whether the pact's secret protocols—in censorship, when underground samizdat literature which the two parties agreed on which territories each was reproduced on manual typewriters to reach an would subsequently control—were genuine.’ Predict- audience of a few hundred." ably, Putin did not go into the unwritten parts of the agreement that caused Stalin to forcibly repatriate a In fact, Sakharov was an imposing global presence group of German dissidents, mostly Communists, who from the micd-1960s until his death in 1989. His sta