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

Picture an autocrat, and you visualize some shady all-powerful figure controlling the police, banks and elections, making the people jump for them.

The reality today is more alarming, according to Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. A celebrated historian and journalist, she has won the Pulitzer Prize and divides her time between Britain, Poland and the IUS.

She observes that autocracies today are sophisticated networks that operate across multiple regimes, 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.

They do not serve the same political ‘cause’, but use common themes like the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, and the evil of America.

Instead of ideas, the 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.

These rulers long ago hardened themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen. The countries in the ”Autocracy, Inc.” club offer each other not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity.

They are absolutely willing to see their country enter the category of failed states, — accepting economic collapse, endemic violence, mass poverty, and international isolation - if that’s what it takes to stay in power.

They do have a common enemy. That enemy is us.

Applebaum does not say this out loud, but this is the reason that Donald Trump gets on so well with Putin and admires Xi in China and even Kim Jung Un in North Korea…they are cut from the same cloth. Trump no doubt longs to be in the Autocracy Inc. Club.

They all despise 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

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.

Putin thought that he would get away with the crime of his invasion of Ukraine and win quickly, both because he knew very little about modern Ukraine, which he believed would not defend itself, and because he expected the democracies to bow to his wishes.

It is a mistake that is spinal to autocrats. Shored up by the technologies and tactics they copy from one another, by their common economic interests, and above all by their determination not to give up power, the autocracies believe that they are winning. That belief — where it came from, why it persists, how the democratic world originally helped consolidate it, and how we can now defeat it – is what “Autocracy Inc.” is all about.

Those autocrats who succeeded did so thanks to favors granted by — or stolen from — the state. These were the true beneficiaries of this system: the oligarchs whose fortunes depended on their political connections. By 1992, Putin was already the executor and probably the prime beneficiary of a scheme designed to steal money from the city of St. Petersburg. His original swindle has now been investigated and described many times and it was relatively straightforward. In his role as deputy mayor, Putin issued export licenses for raw materials such as diesel fuel, cement, and fertilizer. These shipments, purchased at low state prices in Russia, were meant to be sold at higher prices abroad in order to purchase food. The goods were indeed sold, but the money disappeared, diverted into the bank accounts of an obscure group of companies owned by Putin’s friends and colleagues.

This obscures a story that is mentioned less frequently: the role of the legitimate Western institutions, companies, lawyers, and politicians who enabled his schemes, profited from them, or covered them up.

But although Russia was designed to look like a democracy, or at least enough like a democracy to fool foreign investors, there were no accidental victors in Russian elections, because there were no accidental candidates.

There are also no accidental investments. 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, by Russian oligarchs.

Ihor Kolomoisky was one of the most powerful oligarchs in Ukraine before his activities came to the attention of the new democracy’s security services. His path crossed that pf Chaim Schochet, of Miami, who was twenty-three when he started buying Cleveland real estate on behalf of Kolomoisky. Mordechai Korf, another Miami businessman, became the CEO of Optima Specialty Steel, the company that held industrial property in the United States purchased with Kolomoisky’s money. Both Korf and Schochet used the services of an American lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, who also represented Donald Trump during the investigation into his Russian links, among other legal battles. On their behalf, Kasowitz claimed that Korf and Schochet had no knowledge of wrongdoing by Kolomoisky. Their alleged scheme took a long time to uncover, partly because many of their investments make no sense to anyone who buys properties in order to manage them well and turn a profit.

All this makes sense only within the arcane world of international kleptocracy, an alternative universe whose rules are so clearly different from those of the everyday economy that observers have invented special names for it. The British journalist Oliver Bullough has called this universe ”Moneyland,”

It is an aspect that is not covered very well in Western media: the role of our own citizens in abetting the oligarchs.

Anonymously owned shell companies and funds based in offshore tax havens like Jersey and the Cayman Islands hide what could be as much as 10 percent of global GDP. New kinds of states have emerged, not just tax havens, but” bridging jurisdictions,” as a National Endowment for Democracy study calls them. These are hybrid states that are a legitimate part of the international financial system, that trade normally with the democratic world, that are sometimes part of democratic military alliances, but that are also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has in recent years made it much easier for foreigners, even those under sanctions, to become residents or even citizens and to buy property. As a result, Russian property purchases in the Emirates rose 100 percent after the invasion of Ukraine. Turkey has also created loopholes that make it easier not just for Russians but for anyone to transfer money into the country and to import cash and gold directly.

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. The mutual interest was clear. China got minerals: in September 2022, Chinese investors signed a $2.8 billion deal to build processing facilities for lithium, platinum, and nickel for export to Chinese battery factories. In exchange, Zimbabwe got broadband deals and Chinese surveillance technology. Zimbabwe turned over its telecommunications infrastructure to China. In return, China helped its ruler Mnangagwa stay in power. 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.

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.

A grateful Putin offered his new comrade the gift of a presidential helicopter. “This bird will soon be gracing our skies,” the Zimbabwean government spokesman proclaimed. He published a photograph of the octogenarian Mnangagwa sitting in the helicopter’s cabin beside a table laden with wine and fruits, and Mnangagwa’s statement to the Zimbabwean people and to the world. “The victims of sanctions must cooperate,” he said.

He probably had no idea of the irony…

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