I once spent an exasperating week showing a Russian friend around London. He insisted on seeing everything and admiring nothing. Museums, monuments, shops – all compared unfavourably with St Petersburg and Moscow. This got tiresome after a few days, so I asked my friend if there was anything at all about Britain that impressed him. “The stability,” he said without hesitation. “You can feel the stability.”

That was a different world; the late 1990s. I don’t remember the year, but I remember knowing what my friend was talking about because I had felt the same culture shock in reverse when first visiting Russia.

It was the decade of degenerate democracy under Boris Yeltsin. The Soviet Union had collapsed. It was not obvious where the unravelling would stop. Criminal violence was endemic. The drunk president was propped up by a lawless oligarchy, pillaging state assets and calling it privatisation. No one who witnessed Russia’s trauma in that period was surprised that it engendered nostalgia for the pre-democratic era. Soviet power was unaccountable but at least predictable.

Vladimir Putin is as crooked as everyone else who rose to the top in Yeltsin’s entourage. But he restored order and national self-esteem, which mattered more to most Russians than the slow suffocation of political freedom.

It is not a familiar dilemma to British voters because democracy and stability have not seemed mutually exclusive. Our multiparty system allows peaceful rivalry between different political and economic interests. The opposition can become the government without bloodshed. The defeated regime yields without fear of retribution. Under conditions of rules-based competition, democracies can accommodate dissent before it turns to revolution. That makes them innovative and resilient. It is how free societies outperformed tyrannies and won the 20th century. Vengeful dictatorship wants a rematch. Putin thinks he can turn the west’s strength into its greatest vulnerability.

An authoritarian megalomaniac sees merit in a political system if it raises no obstacle to the leader’s will. He therefore sees liberal democracy as stupid and weak. It submits its rulers to the contradictory caprices of dumb voters. It follows that the way to accelerate democracy’s failure is to amplify those contradictions, nurture division, accelerate polarisation, shrink the available space for compromise so that........

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