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

by Anne Applebaum

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.

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 brutally pragmatic approach to wealth. Unlike the fascist and communist leaders of the past, who had party machines behind them and did not showcase their greed, the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. 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.

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. Above all, they were fighting against rulers who long ago hardened themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity.

Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy. That enemy is us. 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. Autocrats hate these principles because they threaten their power. 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. Their enmity toward the democratic world is not merely some form of traditional geopolitical competition, as “realists” and so many international relations strategists still believe.

This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, the first full-scale kinetic battle in the struggle between Autocracy, Inc., and what might loosely be described as the democratic world. Russia plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo. The invasion was planned in that spirit. Putin hoped not only to acquire territory, but also to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer hold.

Xi Jinping had signaled his support for Russia’s illegal invasion before it began, issuing a joint statement with the Russian president on February 4, less than three weeks before the first bombs fell on Kyiv. 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.” Although Xi never shared the Russian leader’s obsession with the destruction of Ukraine, and although the Chinese seemed eager to avoid nuclear escalation, they refused to criticize Russia directly as the war dragged on. Instead, they profited from the new situation, bought Russian oil and gas at low prices, and quietly sold defense technology to Russia too. They were not alone. As the war progressed, Iran exported thousands of lethal drones to Russia. North Korea supplied ammunition and missiles. Russian client states and friends in Africa, including Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Mali, and the Central African Republic, backed Russia at the UN and elsewhere. From the very early days of the war, Belarus allowed Russian troops to use its territory, including roads, railway lines, and military bases. 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...

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.

Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. 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. In the late 1980s, during the explosion of public conversation and debate known as glasnost, many Russians believed that Russia could change.

“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.

By the time Putin became president, he was well acquainted with the double standards of Western democracies, which preached liberal values at home but were very happy to help build illiberal regimes everywhere else. In his first decade in office, he did the same, using the slogans of democracy, even as he built what eventually became a dictatorship. In an address to the nation in 2000, he declared that “only a democratic state is capable of ensuring a balance of interests of the individual and society, combining private initiative with national goals.” In 2002, he said that a democratic state must have “rule of law, free elections, and the priority of human rights.”

The semblance of choice was carefully preserved through the emergence of regime-sanctioned opponents who never challenged the status quo. Meanwhile, genuine opponents of the Kremlin were beaten up at demonstrations, jailed, harassed, and insulted. In 2013, Alexei Navalny, who eventually became Putin’s most effective critic, was allowed to run for mayor of Moscow in order to give a veneer of legitimacy to the race, but he attracted too much support. During that campaign he was convicted on fake charges of corruption; immediately afterward, he was placed under house arrest.

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. One in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings is owned anonymously, just to take one relevant example. Perhaps not all these mystery owners are money launderers, but if they were, we would never know. 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. Yet even while he was president of the United States, companies with mystery owners were still buying property in Trump’s buildings; if that was a form of campaign contribution, we will never know.

Russians hear even less about what happens in their own towns or cities. Instead, they are told constantly about the decline of places they don’t know and have mostly never visited: America, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland, countries apparently filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and Russophobia. A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state controlled, an average of eighteen times a day. Some of the stories were obviously invented (European governments are stealing children from straight families and giving them to gay couples!), but even true stories were cherry-picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, that Europeans are weak and immoral, and that the European Union is either dictatorial and interventionist or, alternatively, about to fall apart. The goal is clear: to prevent Russians from identifying with Europe, as Russians once did.

But this is also Putin’s way of building alliances between his domestic audiences and his supporters in Europe and North America, where he has a following on the authoritarian far right, having convinced some naive conservatives that Russia is a “white Christian state.” In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The

Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.

Regimes that are themselves profoundly corrupt reverse the charges, blurring the distinction between themselves and their opponents.

Corruption accusations against dissidents also deflect attention away from the corruption of the ruling party.

To 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.

In 2023, Trump began talking about using the Department of Justice to arrest his enemies, not because they are guilty of something, but because, if he returns to the presidency, he wants “retribution.” If he ever succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete.

There are powerful and important democracy movements in Venezuela and Iran. There are significant autocratic political movements and politicians in the United States as well as Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, and France. At the same time, the world economy is far more complex than it was in the twentieth century, and it is pointless to pretend that there are no conflicts of interest. Global cooperation will be needed to mitigate climate change and other environmental challenges. The United States and Europe trade intensively with China, and it is neither easy nor desirable to end those trading links abruptly.

For all those reasons, no single politician, party, or country can reform this system alone. Instead, an international coalition will have to change the laws, end secretive practices, and restore transparency to the international financial system. An anti-kleptocracy network could include those Treasury and finance ministry officials from across Europe, Asia, and North America who have begun to understand how much damage money laundering and dark money have done to their own economies. They could work with community leaders from London, Vancouver, Miami, and other cities whose landscapes, property markets, and economies have been distorted by Russians, Angolans, Venezuelans, and Chinese buying property that they use as a means of storing wealth.

themes across different platforms. During the three decades that have passed since the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies imagined that they had no need to compete in this sphere, because good information would somehow win the battle in the “marketplace of ideas.” But there isn’t a marketplace of ideas, or in any case not a free market of ideas. Instead, some ideas have been turbocharged by disinformation campaigns, by heavy spending by the social media companies whose algorithms promote emotional and divisive content, and perhaps, in some cases, by algorithms designed to promote Russian or Chinese narratives in a similar manner.

the Chinese government subsidizes its largest companies to help them compete. Her call to “rebalance this relationship on the basis of transparency, predictability, and reciprocity” was a polite way of saying that we need tariffs, bans, and export controls to ensure China cannot undercut our industries using government funds.

Isolationism is an instinctive and even understandable reaction to the ugliness of the modern interconnected world. For some politicians in democracies, it will continue to offer a successful path to power. The campaign for Brexit succeeded by using the metaphor “take back control,” and no wonder: everyone wants more control in a world where events on the other side of the planet can affect jobs and prices in our local towns and villages. But did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world? Did it prevent foreign money from shaping U.K. politics? Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.