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

by Anne Applebaum

Dead heroes can become martyrs.

The Russian regime was so desperate to avoid a public funeral for Navalny that they tried to blackmail his mother, threatening to let her son’s corpse rot unless she promised to bury him in secret; later they refused the family a hearse and restricted entrance to the cemetery. People came anyway, risking arrest, and left mountains of flowers.

control civic organizations, including apolitical and charitable organizations, often by labeling them terrorist, extremist, or treasonous. So-called anti-extremism legislation in Russia has been used to block anyone who expressed political opposition.

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.

However fantastical or hypocritical they may be, corruption allegations also deepen the natural cynicism that autocracies cultivate in their citizens, reinforcing the public’s conviction that all politics is dirty, including opposition politics, and that all politicians, even dissident politicians, should be treated with suspicion.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China, workplaces and schools were encouraged to identify class enemies and conduct struggle sessions, during which the enemies were accused of real or imagined thought crimes, humiliated, and sometimes beaten and tortured by their colleagues and classmates. But Maoist struggle sessions took place in a single room. The internet now makes it possible for anyone to join, even anonymously.

Sometimes the state organizes the campaign, and others follow voluntarily. Sometimes participants are paid.

The sense of power and connection that people once got from joining crowds can now be experienced at home, at a laptop, or on a phone, behind closed doors.

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.”

In Brussels, Warsaw, and Prague, a multinational investigation revealed a broad Russian influence-buying campaign, including payments to members of the European parliament and attempts to shape European elections.

Europe 2024

think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition with specific autocratic states, and certainly not as “war with China,” but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States. Toward this end, we need networks of lawyers and public officials to fight corruption inside our own countries and around the world,

We need military and intelligence coalitions that can anticipate and halt lawless violence. We need economic warriors in multiple countries who can track the impact of sanctions in real time, understand who is breaking them, and take steps to stop them. We need people willing to organize online and coordinate campaigns to identify and debunk dehumanizing propaganda. The autocracies want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder. We can stop them.

We could, for example, require all real estate transactions, everywhere in the United States and Europe, to be totally transparent. We could require all companies to be registered in the name of their actual owners, and all trusts to reveal the names of their beneficiaries. We could ban our own citizens from keeping money in jurisdictions that promote

secrecy, and we could ban lawyers and accountants from engaging with them.

We could close loopholes that allow anonymity in the private-equity and hed...

block. Ihor Kolomoisky, the Ukrainian oligarch who hid his money in property schemes all over the American Midwest, reportedly sought to preserve his empire by angling for influence in the Trump administration, including by offering the president “dirt” on Joe and Hunter Biden, some of which was passed to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.

We can begin to fight back, first, by understanding that we are facing an epidemic of information laundering and by exposing it when we can.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) marshaled intelligence and information collected by the rest of the government and began to expose a series of planned Russian campaigns before they took place, a tactic that James Rubin, who has run the GEC since 2022, calls “pre-bunking.”

I wonder how many of them still have jobs?

Of course the problem runs deeper: none of these campaigns would have any chance of success if the social media platforms that host them were not so easy to game.

Customers of the social media platforms should be able to own their own data and determine what is done with it. They should also be able to influence, directly, the algorithms that determine what they see.

hold companies liable if the algorithms they use promote content tied to acts of terrorism.

The risks of overdependence on trade with Russia, China, or other autocracies aren’t just economic. They are existential.

This case needs to be made more dramatically, for the democratic world’s dependence on China, Russia, and other autocracies for minerals, semiconductors, or energy supplies poses more than just an economic risk. Those business relationships are corrupting our own societies.

The fact that anonymous shell companies were purchasing condominiums in Trump-branded properties while Trump was president should have set off alarm bells. That it did not is evidence of how accustomed to kleptocratic corruption we have become.

the Chinese government subsidizes its largest companies to help them compete.

we need tariffs, bans, and export controls to ensure China cannot undercut our industries using government funds.

Failure to regulate AI before it distorts political conversations, just to take one obvious example, could have a catastrophic impact over time.