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.