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

by Anne Applebaum

After he was named president, Putin did indeed drive the country in a new direction. Like the liberal economists, he wanted to reform the Soviet economic system, and hoped that Russia could become rich. But he remained nostalgic for the Soviet Empire, whose collapse he described as a “geopolitical disaster,” and he certainly did not want to regenerate Soviet society on a new moral foundation. Karen Dawisha, author of one of the first books to describe Putin’s political project in detail, observed that many mistakenly described Russia in the 1990s as “an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice.” The real story of that decade was very different: “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.” The state that finally emerged in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century was no longer a superpower. But Russia remained influential, more so than many understood at the time, as the model and inspiration for many other modern dictatorships. 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.

To stay in power, modern autocrats need to be able to take money and hide it without being bothered by political institutions that encourage transparency, accountability, or public debate. The money, in turn, helps them shore up the instruments of repression. That, along with his historical fever dreams, is why Putin so hated Ukrainian democracy activism, and why he was so enraged by the 2014 Ukrainian revolution: if a similar movement ever won power in Russia, he would be the first to go to jail.

The ruling party had a long-standing relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, dating back to the days when they shared Maoist slogans and talked of peasant rebellion. The Chinese had provided weapons, training, and advice to Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party back when they were still fighting for independence, and later during the struggle against a rival liberation party backed by the Soviet Union. After independence, China slowly became the largest investor in Zimbabwe, the largest source of imports, and an important destination for exports. By 2022, Chinese aid had contributed to a wide range of projects, from a national pharmaceutical warehouse to Zimbabwe’s new parliament building. During the pandemic, China gave Zimbabwe a million doses of its Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine.

Although there is no deep, historic link between Harare and Moscow, Mnangagwa and Putin eventually discovered they had much in common too. Both men stay in power not through elections or constitutions but through propaganda, corruption, and selective violence. Both need to show audiences at home and in the democratic world how little they care about their criticism, their human rights laws, their talk of democracy. In order to demonstrate solidarity with Russian kleptocracy, Zimbabwe became one of eleven countries to vote at the United Nations in favor of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, along with North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela. That same year, Zimbabwe handed Russia a platinum-mining concession and obtained several MiG-35 fighter jets in exchange. In 2019, Putin welcomed Mnangagwa to Moscow a week after Mnangagwa’s police had fired on protesters in Harare. They signed agreements on Russian investment in Zimbabwe’s diamond industry. In 2023, their relationship reached a new plateau when Mnangagwa, the former leader of an anticolonial independence movement, offered his support for Putin’s brutal war of colonial domination in Ukraine. Zimbabwe, he declared at a Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, “is in solidarity with the Russian Federation in your country’s special military operation in Ukraine.” A grateful Putin offered his new comrade the gift of a presidential helicopter. “This bird will soon be gracing our skies,” the Zimbabwean government spok...

Syria was an active war zone, convulsed by violence since 2011. In that year the Syrian dictator had turned against peaceful demonstrators who were hoping to end his brutal regime. Assad might well have lost the civil war that followed, had the Iranian government not sent fighters, advisers, intelligence, and weapons and had the Russian military, in 2015, not entered the conflict on the side of the Syrian regime. If the dictators of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Belarus have been propped up by propaganda, surveillance technology, and economic aid from the autocratic world, Assad was saved in a less subtle manner, by Russian and Iranian bullets. The two armies had different motives. Iran needed access to Syrian territory because Iran sends weapons and fighters to Iranian proxies nearby, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and other small groups in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria itself. Syria’s hostility to Israel suited the Iranians too. Even if he wasn’t completely aligned with the Islamic Republic’s religious war, Assad was an extra lever, an extra threat, and an extra ally in the region. Putin’s logic was surely broader. He probably intervened because the Arab Spring that preceded the Syrian uprising scared him, because it looked too much like the “color revolution” he fears in Russia, and because he wanted to show Russians that political mobilization and political protest will end in bloody tragedy. He also wanted to preserve Russia’s long-standing ties to Syria and prove that he could ...