Three of today’s finest writers and commentators on Russian history and politics discuss the parallels between then and now – Stalin’s era and Putin’s – drawing on the paradox that, as revelations about Stalin’s atrocities continue to shock, his reputation is gaining strength in Russia. Is Putin, one of the most powerful and feared men in the world, Stalin’s heir? Do the ghosts of Russia’s autocratic past retain their stranglehold on the present?

Anne Applebaum’s previous books include Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the Duff Cooper Prize, as well as Iron Curtain, which in 2014 won the Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature and the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature. She is Professor of Practice at the LSE’s Institute of Global Affairs and a columnist for the Washington Post. She divides her time between Britain and Poland.

Arkady Ostrovsky is Russia Editor of The Economist and author of The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News, winner of the 2016 Orwell Prize.

Shaun Walker has worked as a journalist in Moscow for more than a decade. He is the Moscow correspondent for the Guardian and was previously correspondent for the Independent. In The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past, he provides a deeply reported, bottom-up explanation of Russia’s resurgence under Putin.