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The ghosts of Communist repression haunt Putin’s carceral system. Its more than 869 penal colonies, 8 prisons and 315 remand centers bring the “Gulag Archipelago” mapped by writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into the twenty-first century.
Poisoning is Putin’s signature mode of violence. The Russian leader has relied on this bloodless method that often kills on a time delay. Poisonings abroad are for Putin what shootings were for Gaddafi: advertisements of the state’s ability to reach enemies anywhere.
“Putin is a serial killer. Western leaders should know that when they shake hands with Putin, they shake hands with a murderer”
Trump is not among those who see that as a problem. Two weeks into his presidency and days after Kara-Murza’s second poisoning, Trump expressed his respect for Putin on Fox News. When host Bill O’Reilly reminded him that Putin was “a killer,” Trump replied: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?” The relativizing reasoning previewed Trump’s own application of the authoritarian playbook, which presents the leader’s measures against his enemies as necessary and justified.
“when they come for one of us, they come for us all,” based on a poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, who spent years in Nazi concentration camps, reflects the need for solidarity in resisting authoritarians.63
THE AUTHORITARIAN PLAYBOOK has no chapter on failure. It does not foresee the leader’s own people turning against him, from military men he trained to young people he indoctrinated to women he rewarded for having babies. It has no pages on how to deal with becoming a national disgrace, someone who is pelted with tomatoes and eggs when he appears in public after leaving office, like Pinochet, or forced into exile, like Amin. Its discussions of how to control minds and exploit bodies do not extend to the deterioration of the leader’s own. Aging and the ebbing of virile powers is difficult for
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It’s not surprising that most authoritarians leave office involuntarily. They are supremely ill equipped to handle the downward arc of leadership and life. They have trouble abandoning personal traits like hubris, aggression, and greed that served them to stay in power, even when these become self-defeating. Their theft of national revenue and resources may leave them unable to continue to fund the spoils system that kept elites loyal to them, leading to their loss of legitimacy. Believing propaganda about their infallibility can also be lethal. “I follow my instincts, and I am never wrong,”
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Democratic heads of state often see their departures from office as an opportunity to build on their leadership legacy. The authoritarian regards the end of being adulated by followers and controlling everything and everyone as an existential threat. Laura Fermi observed that without his audiences, Mussolini was merely an empty “shell.” This is true of every ruler in this book, including those in power today. Strongmen will do
anything to stay in office, even starting wars or deepening involvement in doomed conflicts, as when Mussolini sent troops to the Eastern Front in 1942. Political scientists call this phenomenon “gambling for resurrection,” and almost all autocrats lose the wager.
TO COUNTER AUTHORITARIANISM, we must prioritize accountability and transparency in government. At the heart of strongman rule is the claim that he and his agents are above the law, above judgment, and not beholden to the truth. Accountability also matters as a measure of open societies because the old yardstick—elections—is less reliable. New authoritarian states often simulate democracy, and nominal democracies governed by personalist rulers often act like autocracies.
An economic downturn, a losing war, exhaustion from state thievery and violence, or a mishandled public health crisis can make evidence of the strongman’s malfeasance and incompetence difficult to ignore. No other type of ruler is so transparent about prioritizing self-preservation over the public good and so lacking in the human qualities that define ethical leadership—the ability to feel empathy for others and act on their behalf. As one country after another has discovered, the strongman is at his worst as a leader when he is most needed by his country.
There are two paths people can take when faced with the proliferation of polarization and hatred in their societies. They can dig their trenches
deeper, or they can reach across the lines to stop a new cycle of destruction, knowing that solidarity, love, and dialogue are what the strongman most fears. History shows the importance of keeping hope and faith in humanity and of supporting those who struggle for freedom in our own time. We can carry with us the stories of those who lived and died over ...
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Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men. Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (New York: Public Affairs, 2016),
David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (London: Profile Books, 2018),
Frank Dikötter, How to Be a Dictator. The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019);
Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs, 76, no. 6 (1997): 22–43, and his The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Paul Lendval, Orbán: Hungary’s Strongman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Erica Frantz, Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018);
Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
Barbara Geddes, How Dictatorships Work. Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018);
Fathali M. Moghaddam, Threat to Democracy: The Appeal of Authoritarianism in an Age of Uncertainty (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2019);
Brian D. Taylor, The Code of Putinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 2; Dean Hancock, Tyrannical Minds. Psychological Profiling, Narcissism, and Dictatorship (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019); Jerrold Post, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World. The Psychology of Political Behavior (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
David Enrich, Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction (New York: Custom House, 2020); Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations. The Scourge of Tax Havens, trans. Teresa Laven-der Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Brian
Klaas, The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Press, 1958) and her Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1964).
Laura
Fermi, Mussolini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961);
Richard Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Bloomsbury, 2011),
Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005),
Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices. An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013),
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Picador, 2001), 189–288; H. James Burgwyn, The Legend of the Mutilated Victory. Italy, the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference, 1915–1919 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993).
Naumihal Singh, Seizing Power. The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014),
Yascha Mounk, ‘How Authoritarians Manipulate Elections,” Atlantic, May 8, 2019; Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas, How to Rig an Election (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
Putin, in Masha Gessen, The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), 68; Hill and Gaddy, Putin, 181–
Singh, Seizing Power, 195–221; Gessen, Man without a Face, 101–29.
Joke in David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills (New York: Basic Books, 2013),
Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 13–35.
Amy Knight, Orders to Kill. The Putin Regime and Political Murder (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017), 79–99; David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 63–71.
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), on how the process unfolded.
