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

by Anne Applebaum

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.

In his role as deputy mayor, Putin issued export licenses for raw materials such as diesel fuel, cement, and fertilizer. These shipments, purchased at low state prices in Russia, were meant to be sold at higher prices abroad in order to purchase food. The goods were indeed sold, but the money disappeared, diverted into the bank accounts of an obscure group of companies owned by Putin’s friends and colleagues.

The political system that eventually became Putinist Russia was the product of two worlds: the milieu of the KGB, on the one hand, with its long expertise in money laundering, gained from years of funding terrorists and sleeper agents, and the equally cynical, amoral world of international finance, on the other.

At least thirteen people with proven or alleged links to the Russian mafia are known to have owned or done business in condos in Trump-branded properties.

In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed in part by elements of sharia law and has arrested and killed gay men in the name of Islamic purity. The Russian state harasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestants.

On russian 'traditional values'.

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, an illiberal hybrid state, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war. He has adopted the pretense that ongoing tension between his government and the U.S. government concerns religion and gender, when in fact the poor relationship was created by Orbán’s deep financial and political ties to Russia and China.