Nina L. Khrushcheva says the coming December will mark the 25th anniversary of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, allowing its former republics to claim statehood. What she finds ironic is the old saying: "you become what you hate." Having had a troubled relationship with the totalitarian Soviet regime, today Hungary and Poland are governed by politicians, who are "mimicking" Putin’s authoritarian style, "hollowing out independent democratic institutions and suppressing citizens’ fundamental freedoms."

In Poland, although Andrzej Duda is the president and Beata Szydlo the prime minister, it is Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the conservative, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party, who pulls the strings behind the scenes. Since the right-wing government came to power last year, it had tightened controls over the civil service, the judiciary and the media. Amendments have changed the way courts operate. Critics fear that the right to a fair trial before an independent court is compromised as well as the judiciary's ability to ensure that national legislation respects the European Convention on Human Rights. Reforms endanger not only the rule of law but also the functioning of the democratic system because they render an important factor of checks and balances ineffective. The government has condemned protests, saying they were "anti-patriotic and guided by foreign interests."

This has dealt a blow to Poland's image as a model for democracy. In January 1993, three years after the abolition of the Soviet-imposed Polish People’s Republic, Lech Wałęsa, chairman of Solidarity, the independent trade union, and his demonstrators negotiated communist Poland’s demise. Wałęsa was widely credited with initiating the chain of events that led to the fall of the Soviet Union and a peaceful resolution to the cold war.

Hungary had also played an important part in accelerating the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe when it opened its border with Austria in 1989, allowing thousands of East Germans to escape to the West, and leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The post-communist transition saw nearly half of the country's economic enterprises transferred to the private sector, and Hungary attraced much foreign investments.

However a high level of both private and state borrowing left the country particularly vulnerable to the credit crunch of 2008. Dissatisfaction with the centre-left coalition government's handling of the economy from 2002 to 2010 enabled the rise of right-wing nationalists, known for their anti-Semitic and anti-Gypsy rhetoric, and a move to the authoritarian right by Orban's Fidesz party, after parliamentary elections in 2010 and 2014.

Populist prime minister Viktor Orbán used his huge electoral majority to rewrite the rules, and not just for Hungary. riling many of his European colleagues with divisive domestic and cynical foreign policies, while imposing a conservative agenda on everything, from the media to the economy and religion. He has close ties with Russia, and he is Putin's Eurosceptic ally in Brussels, accusing the EU of treating his country as a colony.

It is apparent that both Hungary and Poland are ruled by illiberal "sovereign" autocrats, who seize power by capitalising on their citizens' grievances. What is strikingly similar between the two - which were once beacons of post-Soviet hope - was their inexperience with market economy as fledgling democracies. Exposed to external facotrs, they often have little know-how and patience to go through the painful trial-and-error process. Without experiments they have no way to try out different methods to solve a problem. It explains why they see the EU as a disappointment and want to turn the clock back.