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

by Anne Applebaum

Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals but through deals—deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.

Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.

“From the beginning, Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”

Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic. Nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.

One in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings is owned anonymously, just to take one relevant example.

The consortium’s investigation also showed, for the first time in such an accessible manner, how Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming—nice, normal American states, full of nice, normal Americans—have created financial instruments that nameless investors can use to hide their money from the world.

Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.

Doppelganger’s efforts, run by a clutch of companies in Russia (including some of the same companies linked to Pressenza) have varied widely, and seem to have included a fake fact-checking website as well as fake NATO press releases, with the same fonts and design as the genuine releases, “revealing” that NATO leaders were planning to deploy Ukrainian paramilitary troops to France to quell pension protests. 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.

The Syrian civil war also created another kind of precedent. For the first time, one side in a conflict deliberately made international institutions and humanitarian aid workers a central focus of their war propaganda. The fire hose of falsehoods, Kremlin-backed writers disguised as journalists, and thousands of social media accounts familiar from other campaigns were repeatedly used to discredit the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was investigating the Syrian use of sarin gas and other chemicals, in order to claim that film or evidence of those attacks was fake or staged.

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. In April 2018, I typed “White

Helmets” into a YouTube search engine and found that seven of the first ten results were links to videos produced by RT. They sowed doubt about whether chemical weapons had ever been used at all, and even if they had, they argued that the Syrian opposition, not the government, was responsible. The sheer quantity of contradictory material was also meant, again, to convince people that the truth was impossible to know. But something else was at stake as well. 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. They succeeded.

smear campaigns work. 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.

the inhabitants of most modern democracies, the stories of López and Mawarire may sound horrific and cruel. At the same time, descriptions of online mobs, targeted smear campaigns, and the creation of fake charges and false narratives might also sound familiar. Technologies built in Silicon Valley and public relations tactics invented on Madison Avenue long ago meshed with dictatorial behavior to create coordinated online harassment campaigns that are widely used not just by amateur online activists, and not just in “cancellation” campaigns or online pile-ons, but by democratically elected governments and leaders around the world. Indeed, they are often a flashing signal of democratic decline.

The autocracies want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder. We can stop them.

Putin’s vulgar Black Sea residence, as well as the vineyard, the helicopter pad, and the oyster farm—and because they linked these stories to the poverty of Russian teachers, doctors, and civil servants. You have bad roads and bad health care, Navalny told Russians, because they have vineyards and oyster farms.

Jeffrey Goldberg and Scott Stossel commissioned and edited the original Atlantic article, “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” which became the introduction to this book. Dante Ramos edited most of the dozen-odd other Atlantic articles that I drew upon when writing this book as well.