In 1992, Vladimir Putin— who at the time was deputy mayor of the Russian port city of St. Petersburg— commissioned a film about himself called “Vlast,” a Russian word meaning power.
In it, he argued passionately for the West to invest in Russian industry.
After he became Russia’s president in 2012, he continued to project an image of a leader who “wanted to reform the Soviet economic system, and hoped that Russia could become rich,” writes historian and journalist Anne Applebaum in her new book, “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World” (Doubleday, out now).
But he was also crafting something unprecedented, a new type of authoritarianism that would become “the model and inspiration for many other modern dictatorships.”
Putin’s Russia wasn’t an old-fashioned totalitarian state.
Instead, “it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders,” writes Applebaum.
Autocracies haven’t just made a comeback in recent decades, they’re more prevalent than ever.
According to data from the V-Dem Institute, 72% of the world’s population, or 5.7 billion people, live in countries run by authoritarian regimes.
That’s up from 871 million just 40 years ago.
But today’s autocracies aren’t run by “a bad man at the top,” writes Applebaum.
The strongman who controls the army and police and threatens his people with violence is a musty stereotype that doesn’t capture the spirit of modern autocracies.
Instead, they’re run by “sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services, and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation,” writes Applebaum.
One of the most distinctive features of today’s autocracies is their fervor for attaining wealth by any means.
“Unlike the fascist and communist leaders of the past, who had party machines behind them and did not showcase their greed, the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures,” writes Applebaum.
These corrupt countries work less like a bloc — the unofficial coalition of communist states during the Cold War, for instance — and more like an “agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power.”
The evolution can be traced back to 1963, when German politician Egon Bahr introduced the concept of “Wandel durch Annäherung” (“change through rapprochement”).
His argument was that if the West could “offer trade instead of boycotts, then a ‘loosening of the borders’ might be possible,” writes Applebaum.
The idea blossomed in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, when reformers believed that industry not ideology would “create a new political as well as a new economic order,” writes Applebaum.
But while Putin’s Russia was designed to look like a democracy, it was hardly run like one.
“There were no accidental victors in Russian elections, because there were no accidental candidates,” writes Applebaum. “The semblance of choice was carefully preserved through the emergence of regime sanctioned opponents who never challenged the status quo.”
Similarly, the banks appear to function like typical banks, but they are usually just a front for money-laundering operations.
Other dictators learned from Putin’s lead, like Venezuela President Hugo Chávez.
During his fourteen years in power, from 199 to 2013, “Venezuela took in nearly $800 billion in oil-export revenues,” writes Applebaum.
And roughly $300 billion of that, according to Chávez’s own minister of economy and finance, was stolen, making its way into secret bank accounts around the world.
Most disturbingly, autocracies have learned to “work together to stay in power, promote their system, and damage democracies,” writes Applebaum.
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Just consider what happened during the autumn of 2023, when Iranian-backed Houthi militants began firing on cargo ships in the Red Sea just weeks after Iranian-backed Hamas militants launched a brutal attack on Israel with support from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Meanwhile, the Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev used the global distraction to capture and drive out 100,000 Armenians.
The timing was coincidental, Applebaum argues, but entirely intentional.
“This multifaceted, interconnected, self-reinforcing poly-crisis was not coordinated by a single mastermind, and it is not evidence of a secret conspiracy,” writes Applebaum.
These separate but connected moments of bedlam are being carried out by autocratic alliances that are largely transactional, which can shift and change, and often do.
We aren’t living through a new Cold War, Applebaum insists, but a “Cold War 2.0,” where there are no Berlin Walls marking neat geographic divides.
What can be done about it? Applebaum suggests that the best way to stop modern autocracies is by beating them at their own game.
“We need military and intelligence coalitions that can anticipate and halt lawless violence,” she writes. “We need economic warriors in multiple countries who can track the impact of sanctions in real time. We need people willing to organize online and coordinate campaigns to identify and debunk dehumanizing propaganda.”
