Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.

Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc. Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them. They also share a brutall...

In 2020, when Belarusian journalists rebelled and refused to report a false election result, Russia sent Russian journalists to replace them.

If their only enemies had been the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime or the brutal, ugly Belarusian regime, these protest movements might have won. But they were not fighting autocrats only at home; they were fighting autocrats around the world who control state companies in multiple countries and who can use them to make investment decisions worth billions of dollars. They were fighting regimes that can buy security cameras from China or bots from St. Petersburg.

The conviction, common among the most committed autocrats, that the outside world cannot touch them—that the views of other nations don’t matter and that no court of public opinion will ever judge them—is relatively recent.

They at least paid lip service to the aspirational system of norms and treaties set up after World War II, with its language about universal human rights, the laws of war, and the rule of law more generally.

The leaders of China and Russia have spent a decade disputing the human rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many around the world that the treaties and conventions on war and genocide—and concepts such as “civil liberties” and “the rule of law”—embody Western ideas that don’t apply to them. Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats feel no shame about the use of open brutality.

These kinds of regimes can be hard for the inhabitants of democracies to understand, because their primary goal is not to create prosperity or enhance the well-being of citizens.

In the twentieth century, the autocratic world was no more unified than it is today. Communists and fascists went to war with each other. Sometimes communists fought communists too. But they did have common views about the political system that Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, referred to sneeringly as “bourgeois democracy,” which he called “restricted, truncated, false, and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.” “Pure democracy” he wrote, was “the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers.” As the leader of what was originally a tiny political faction, Lenin was, unsurprisingly, dismissive of the idea of free elections too: “Only scoundrels and simpletons can think that the proletariat must first win a majority in elections carried out under the yoke of the bourgeoisie…. This is the height of stupidity.”

Mussolini, the Italian leader whose movement coined the words “fascism” and “totalitarianism,” mocked liberal societies as weak and degenerate.

Hitler’s critique of liberalism followed the same pattern. He wrote in Mein Kampf that parliamentary democracy is “one of the most serious signs of decay in mankind” and declared that it is not “individual freedom which is a sign of a higher level of culture but the restriction of individual freedom,” if carried out by a racially pure organization. As early as 1929, Mao Zedong, who later became the dictator of the People’s Republic of China, also warned against what he called “ultra-democracy,” because “these ideas are utterly incompatible with the fighting tasks of the proletariat”—a statement later reproduced in his Little Red Book.

Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual founders of modern radical Islam, borrowed both the communist belief in a universal revolution and the fascist belief in the liberating power of violence.

To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own, internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them. These include the notion that the law is a neutral force, not subject to the whims of politics; that courts and judges should be independent; that political opposition is legitimate; that the rights to speech and assembly can be guaranteed; and that there can be independent journalists and writers and thinkers who are capable of being critical of the ruling party or leader while at the same time remaining loyal to the state.

If judges and juries are independent, then they can hold rulers to account. If there is a genuinely free press, journalists can expose high-level theft and corruption. If the political system empowers citizens to influence the government, then citizens can eventually change the regime.

Western constitutional democracy led the list, followed by “universal values,” media independence and civic participation, as well as “nihilist” criticism of the Communist Party.

Public discontent in Russia, like public discontent in China, simply had nowhere to express itself except through street protest.

The protests that led to democratic transitions in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, Myanmar, and Mexico; the “people’s revolutions” that washed across central and Eastern Europe in 1989; the Arab Spring in 2011; and the Hong Kong protests of 2019–20 were all begun by people who had experienced injustice at the hands of the state.

Putin hoped not only to acquire territory, but also to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer hold.

Occupying forces stole and exported Ukrainian grain and “nationalized” Ukrainian factories and mines, handing them over to Russian businessmen close to Putin, making a mockery of international property law as well.

They were part of a conscious plan to undermine the network of ideas, rules, and treaties that had been built into international law since 1945, to destroy the European order created after 1989, and, most important, to damage the influence and reputation of the United States and its democratic allies.

He assumed that the deep political divisions in the United States and Europe, some of which he had actively encouraged, would incapacitate the leaders. He reckoned that the European business community, some of which he had long courted, would demand a resumption of Russian trade.

Like the democracy activists of Venezuela or Belarus, they slowly learned that they were not merely fighting Russia in Ukraine. They were fighting Autocracy, Inc.

Anticipating American and European outrage, the two leaders declared in advance their intention to ignore any criticism of Russian actions, and especially anything that resembled “interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”

As the war progressed, Iran exported thousands of lethal drones to Russia.

Turkey, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, all illiberal states with transactional ties to the autocratic world, helped the Russian defense industry evade sanctions and import machine tools and electronics.

They began to discuss the creation of a Eurasian digital currency, perhaps based on blockchain technology, to replace the dollar and diminish American economic influence around the world. They also planned to deepen their relationship with China, to share research into artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

There had to be long-term contracts, and these contracts had to be enveloped within a set of predictable political relationships.

His reasoning was mostly political: he believed that a mutually dependent economic relationship would make a future military conflict unthinkable.

If the West could tone down the confrontation, engage with the East German regime, and offer trade instead of boycotts, he argued, then a “loosening of the borders” might be possible.

Richard Nixon always believed that the Soviet Union’s true purpose in trading and talking with Brandt and Bahr was, as Nixon put it, “to detach Germany from NATO.”

Nixon, Carter, and Reagan were motivated by neither spite nor pure commercial self-interest, but rather by questions about the political consequences of trade with an autocracy.

Underlying this conversation lay a deeper moral and political question: Did East–West trade enrich and empower the Soviet state and its empire?

Nevertheless, gas kept flowing west and hard currency flowed east, providing Moscow with funding that helped sustain the same Red Army that NATO had to be prepared to fight and the same KGB that Western security services competed against.

While the Soviet Union existed, this paradox of U.S. and European policy was never really resolved, and it remained unresolved after the U.S.S.R. broke apart.

This was the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History?,” the 1989 National Interest essay that was widely misread as a statement of naive, everything-is-for-the-best-in-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds good cheer. Liberal democracy is victorious, sooner or later everyone will want it, and no special effort is required to promote it; just be patient, and the beneficial effects of trade and globalization will work their magic. Fukuyama’s actual argument was more subtle than that, but the simplified version became popular because people wanted it to be true.

Trade among the postwar democracies in Western Europe, in the form of the increasingly integrated common market, really had produced peace and prosperity.

So much confidence was placed in the efficacy of trade that some quickly forgot the harder-edged policies that also contributed to European reunification.

Violence, soldiers, armies, and above all nuclear weapons had been written out of the story. The Germans believed that trade and diplomacy had reunited their country. They also believed that trade and diplomacy would, eventually, help normalize relations between Russia and Europe. At the same time, and for similar reasons, many Americans and Europeans came to believe that trade would also bring harmony to the Pacific, by integrating China into the democratic world. They too had grounds for hope: different factions were jockeying for power in China, including some that wanted liberal reforms.

More than a decade later, Bill Clinton, a president of a different generation and a different political persuasion, declared that “growing interdependence would have a liberalizing effect in China…. Computers and the Internet, fax machines and photo-copiers, modems and satellites all increase the exposure to people, ideas, and the world beyond China’s borders.” In 2000, when arguing for China to be admitted to the World Trade Organization, he stated this case even more emphatically. “I believe the choice between economic rights and human rights, between economic security and national security, is a false one,” he told an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The transcript records the audience reactions: Now there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. (Chuckles.) Good luck! (Laughter.) That’s sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall. (Laughter.) Clinton’s optimism, in retrospect, was extraordinary. “In the knowledge economy,” he said, “economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.”

Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy. Political systems do change.

Even as Western political leaders spoke about “democracy” and “rule of law” in Russia, Western companies and financial institutions were helping build autocracy and lawlessness, and not only in Russia.

For decades, American real estate agents were not required to examine the source of their clients’ funding the way that bankers and other businessmen do. It has long been possible, in the United States as in many European countries, to buy property anonymously, through shell companies.

But few of the people living or working in these properties would have had any idea who he was, or that the money originally came from PrivatBank, because money for the purchases flowed into the Midwest via shell companies in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and Delaware, with the assistance of the American arm of Deutsche Bank, traveling the same kind of route that Russian money, Kazakh money, Azeri money, Chinese money, Angolan money, or Venezuelan money also follows on its way out of kleptocratic autocracies and into markets and financial institutions in North America and Europe.

On the contrary, when Americans condemn Russian, Ukrainian, or post-Soviet corruption, they rarely reckon with the role their fellow citizens have played, or are still playing, in enabling it.

Their scheme, like Trump’s sales to mystery clients, makes sense only within the arcane world of international kleptocracy, an alternative universe whose rules are so clearly different from those of the everyday economy that observers have invented special names for it.

To stay in power, modern autocrats need to be able to take money and hide it without being bothered by political institutions that encourage transparency, accountability, or public debate.

No one forced him to turn Venezuela into a kleptocracy, and even his own intelligence chief was surprised when he did. Nor was he somehow compelled to accept kleptocratic practices because of culture, history, or the weight of precedent.

The truly well connected worked out how to claim tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to import spare parts, medical supplies, telecommunications equipment, chemicals, computers.

These admirers were attracted by the anti-Americanism, the neo-Marxism, and the flamboyant, strongman populism of Chávez, the images created by propaganda.