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

by Anne Applebaum

In November, operatives whom the French government believes are linked to Doppelganger even spray-painted Stars of David around Paris, photographing them, and posting them on social media, hoping to amplify French divisions over the Gaza war.

After the Biden administration proposed a large bill to fund military aid to Ukraine, Russian strategists instructed their employees to create social media posts “in the name of a resident of a suburb of a major city.”

The obscure website that first promoted the story turned out to be affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.

Russian efforts, by contrast, felt more haphazard, as if a few computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at a wall, just to see which crazy story stuck.

In 2023, following the devastating wildfire in Maui, Chinese trolls used artificial intelligence to create photographs that supposedly proved the fires were created by a secret American “weather weapon.”

Mexico’s relationships with the United States became more difficult, and that, surely, was part of the point.

In neither case did the Russian and Venezuelan networks invent anything new.

They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself. In seeking to create chaos, these new propagandists, like their leaders, will reach for whatever ideology, whatever technology, and whatever emotions might be useful.

Only the purpose never changes: Autocracy, Inc., hopes to rewrite the rules of the international system itself.

In 1946, during the early, still-optimistic days of the postwar world, the brand-new United Nations created the Commission on Human Rights.

Remarkably, they were united by the belief that there really could be such a thing as universal human rights, a set of principles common to all cultures and political systems.

Among many other principles, the declaration asserted that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person”; that no one should be subjected to “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”; and that torture and slavery should be banned.

The Helsinki Final Act, the treaty that recognized the inviolability of borders in Europe and formally ended World War II, states that signatories “will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and other rights and freedoms, all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” The Charter of the Organization of American States declares that “representative democracy is an indispensable condition for the stability, peace, and development of the region.” In practice, these documents and treaties, sometimes collectively known as the rules-based order, have always described how the world ought to work, not how it actually works.

Nevertheless, these documents have influenced behavior in the real world, and they still do.

Instead of human rights, which are monitored by outside organizations and independent agencies and can be measured against international standards, China wants to prioritize the right to development, which is something that can be defined and measured only by governments. China also relies heavily on the word sovereignty, which has many connotations, some of them positive.

Instead of “political rights” or “human rights,” the Chinese want the UN and other international organizations to talk about win-win cooperation—by which they mean that everyone will benefit if each country maintains its own political system. They also want everyone to popularize mutual respect—by which they mean that no one should criticize anyone else.

If win-win sounds nice, then multipolarity, the word that Russian information networks now prefer, could have an even greater appeal.

Surely their own political systems will protect anyone who lives in them from the lawlessness that prevails in Russia or Cuba; surely there are some rules and regulations that the international community will always share—the laws of the sea, for example, or the norms governing the conduct of air traffic controllers.

The human rights organization Freedom House calls this practice “transnational repression” and has compiled more than six hundred examples.

Some are threatened over the telephone or online.

Old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet, presumably just to let the activists know that someone was there.

Even from a distance an eloquent critic can nowadays have an impact, whether through a YouTube channel, through a WhatsApp group, or just because he remains true to his beliefs, despite the regime’s efforts, and because he becomes a symbol of hope. Transnational repression also degrades the rule of law in the countries where the crimes take place.

“De-escalation” is a euphemism: it’s what happens when diplomats can’t stop a war but are trying to save people’s lives anyway.

Over the course of the next several years, Russian, Syrian, and Iranian troops jointly went out of their way to break every possible norm, every element of international law that they possibly could.

But instead of protecting them, the Russians and Syrian pilots used the UN coordinates to guide missiles to the hospitals. After a series of direct hits, medical teams on the ground stopped sharing information with the UN.

When the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Palestine was found to be harboring Hamas fighters, no one was surprised: the UN, unable to stop a member of the Security Council from violating its rules, was no longer capable of preventing employees of its own agencies from engaging in lawless violence either.

The Russian campaign against the White Helmets reached millions of people, not least because Russian propagandists learned to game algorithms even before social media companies understood what had happened.

The White Helmets created feelings of solidarity, humanity, and hope. To win the war, Russia and Iran needed ordinary Syrians to feel despair and apathy, and the rest of the world to feel helpless.

From the start, Wagner was funded and supplied by the Russian state, both directly and through government contracts arranged with Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s de facto CEO. Because Wagner advertised itself as “private,” the Russian state could distance itself from its activities and from the people involved.

Unlike regular soldiers, Wagner commanders could also do business deals in the places where they operated, arranging mining concessions or the export of minerals and other goods, both for personal profit and to pay for their equipment and ammunition.

Democratic activists who use force against an autocratic regime usually lose, he argued. They have less firepower and fewer resources than the state. They are rarely able to create armies.

Protesters often adopted these kinds of tactics not because of anything Sharp had done or said but because they had already been used elsewhere, and because they were perceived to be effective.

Rather, he has placed the sign in the window to demonstrate his symbolic loyalty to the regime, knowing that if he does not do so, there could be trouble. He won’t go to prison or lose his job. But “he could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty.” He does it, Havel writes, “because these things must be done if one is to get along in life.”

The display of symbols—badges, flowers, logos, colors—to force people to take sides is only one of many tactics that spread from one democratic movement to another in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first from the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan to the post-Soviet world to the Middle East—the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Green Movement in Iran, the Arab Spring—and beyond. The deliberate creation of links between different social groups and social classes is another such tactic.

Nobody needs to smuggle From Dictatorship to Democracy or “The Power of the Powerless” over a border in an era of encrypted messaging services. VPNs—virtual private networks—and other tools can be used to access blocked information on the internet; messages can spread on social media, on the dark web, through custom-made apps. Funding a movement is easier when activists can transfer money to one another using bitcoin, avoiding both the banking system and the secret police.

They used apps to track police movements, painted their faces to fool video surveillance cameras, and called upon one another to “be like water”—to stay flexible, to change tactics hour by hour if need be.

They used banners and posters to reach the public in a society where much of the internet is controlled by the state.

Many of those who remain in Hong Kong are working in menial jobs.

Instead of merely trumpeting propaganda about the greatness of the leader as a twentieth-century dictator might have done, the regime launched a campaign designed to undermine Mawarire himself: his authenticity, his spontaneity, and especially his patriotism—the very qualities that had galvanized Zimbabweans.

To do so, they often frame their language—words like “democracy,” “justice,” “rule of law”—not as evidence of a genuine, popular, organic desire for change but as evidence of “treason,” “foreign links,” and of course foreign money.

The allegation that “George Soros” is organizing demonstrations—the name Soros being a stand-in for “international Jewish conspiracy”—has been used over and over again to smear activists, first by Hungary’s autocratic ruling party, then in the United States, Europe, and even Israel.

The public smear campaign was coupled with financial harassment, controls on his movement, and physical violence, though not murder: the point was to scare him and to intimidate his followers, not to make him disappear altogether. Freedom House has called these kinds of campaigns “civil death.” In Zimbabwe, as in so many other places, they are designed to make it impossible to live a productive life.

He sent his family out of the country and then quietly slipped over the border himself. But instead of diminishing, the campaign against him gained traction. Mawarire presumed people would understand why he had left and would be pleased that he was safe. Zimbabwe’s legendary anticolonial revolutionary leaders, Mugabe and Mnangagwa, had spent time in exile too. Instead, some of Mawarire’s own supporters began echoing the words of Jonathan Moyo and the mocking, jeering regime media. See, we told you he was a traitor. See, he’s going to live abroad, supported by his paymasters. “The same social media that built us up,” Mawarire told me, “they took us down.”

He worked to organize people; he set up another general strike, all the while suffering repeated attacks on his integrity, his finances, his intentions. Gradually, it became clear to him that his efforts were in vain.

Eventually, they offered Mawarire his passport back, and he took the hint. He and his family now live abroad.

When a state apparatus combines the prosecution service, the courts, the police, state-controlled media, and social media in order to frame someone in a particular way—to tell a particular story about their life and their beliefs, to accuse them of treason, fraud, or crime, and sometimes to arrest or torture them as a result of those fake accusations—some fragment of odium always attaches itself to the victim. In an earlier era, autocratic regimes often solved the problem of dissent simply by murdering dissenters, and some still do.

Modern dictators have learned that the mass violence of the twentieth century is no longer necessary: targeted violence is often enough to keep ordinary people away from politics altogether, convincing them that it’s a contest they can never win. But most of the time, modern autocracies prefer to silence critics without creating corpses.

The more sophisticated autocracies now prepare the legal as well as the propaganda basis for these campaigns in advance, creating traps designed to catch democracy activists even before they gain credibility or popularity. Starting in the first decade of the twenty-first century, autocracies and some illiberal democracies began passing laws, often very similar to one another, designed to monitor and control civic organizations, including apolitical and charitable organizations, often by labeling them terrorist, extremist, or treasonous.

Most of these measures serve as a false nod to the rule of law, helping justify what comes next, which is often not a political accusation but a false allegation of corruption. Regimes that are themselves profoundly corrupt reverse the charges, blurring the distinction between themselves and their opponents.

When something “secret” is revealed about an activist or political figure, perhaps through publication of a taped conversation or a hacked email—a tactic deployed in Russia since the 1990s, in Poland in 2014, and in the U.S. elections, through the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, in 2016—it creates an impression that the person is dishonest and has something to hide, even when the tape or the hacked email contains no evidence of wrongdoing.