AUTOCRACY INC.

In November 2021, the year that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested in Russia after returning from his hospitalization in Germany, Anne Applebaum published the article ‘The Bad Guys are Winning’ in The Atlantic magazine. In this piece, she describes how the nature of autocracies has changed since the 1990s. As she explains, ‘Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.’

These modern autocracies share complex and clandestine ‘kleptocratic’ deals and financial structures, conducting business internationally between corrupt state-owned or controlled companies. They also share sophisticated and repressive security services, including surveillance technologies, weapons, training, and well-oiled propaganda machines that ‘pound home the same message about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America’. Applebaum’s book, Autocracy Inc.: Dictators Who Want to Rule the World, published in 2023, amplifies her critique.

Notably, Autocracy Inc. was published only five months after Navalny was murdered in his Russian prison cell. The fate of Navalny and the timing of Applebaum’s cautionary work are intertwined, for both speak to the grave implications of what is taking place. If we fail to heed Applebaum’s message, we are all in danger of losing our democratic freedoms and even livelihoods, a reality that recent political and economic events in the United States bring starkly into focus.

Written in Applebaum’s characteristic laser-like style, with penetrating and well-documented analyses, Autocracy Inc. details how democratic movements of the 21st century, in countries such as Belarus and Venezuela, have been crushed by joint efforts among other autocratic governments, typically involving Russian weaponry, secret police, and propaganda, Chinese surveillance systems, the replacement of professionals who have fled the country or been arrested with doctors, nurses and teachers from other autocracies, the supplying of oil from Iran, and sanctioned goods from Turkey and India. Applebaum includes Ukraine as a victim of this multi-national ‘agglomeration’, arguing that Ukraine was invaded primarily because it was becoming a thriving democracy and, in doing so, both defied and threatened Putin’s expansionist plans.

Autocracy, Inc., which came out in the US prior to the 2024 elections, shows how autocratic leaders follow the blueprint that Putin has rolled out in Russia over the past twenty years. Key steps in this process involve taking over the judiciary and using the law against the society it is meant to protect, making loyalty to the leader the principal criteria for governmental posts and employment, clamping down on the free press, ramping up propagandistic rhetoric, intimidating the opposition, arresting people without due process, ignoring court orders, and gutting the country’s wealth for the self-enrichment of kleptocratic elites and sycophantic loyalists – tactics the current US Administration has clearly set out to implement in its first one-hundred days!

Admittedly, as Applebaum acknowledges and Putin has also argued, one could rightfully point out that autocrats have taken many of their lessons from the playbooks of covert operations sponsored by the US government’s Central Intelligence Agency and the US military. Additionally, the byzantine financial structures of Western financial services have not only facilitated the corrupt economic practices of autocracies through the provision of anonymised shell companies and tax havens but also have massively profited from them, enriching the West. Heavy, long-term and ineffective sanctions have also contributed to this corruption, as autocracies seek to evade trade and monetary restrictions.

However, Applebaum emphasises that solely focusing on the parallels between democracies and autocracies overlooks the existential differences that characterise them, particularly in relation to the rule of law, the respect of national sovereignty and the values of human rights. Adopting a cynical perspective on the failings of democracies, rather than learning from them, distracts us from protecting our own democratic institutions and the laws undergirding those rights.

Applebaum’s education and professional background has made her uniquely placed to write Autocracy Inc. In 1987, after having studied history and literature with an emphasis on Soviet History at Yale University as an undergraduate, she received her master’s in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Upon graduation, she accepted a position based in Warsaw with The Economist.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, she reported on the event, and since then, has focused her prolific writings on inter-related themes such as the Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe between 1944-1956 (2013), Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (2017), Red Famine: Stalin’s War Against Ukraine (2018) and Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends (2021).

Her penetrating insights and analyses over the past twenty years have proven to be prophetic. I first learned of Applebaum’s work when I was living in Poland, having gone there in 1990 with the United States Peace Corps to set up a Teacher Training College. Like Anne Applebaum, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked a turning point in my life and led me to settle in Europe. Subsequently, I have long admired her incisive investigative reporting.

For many years, it seemed that she was a voice crying out in the wilderness, fated to be unheeded. For example, in 2008, she was already warning Western governments about the duplicity and depravity of ‘Putinism’, and before Trump’s first election in 2016, she warned that Putin saw in Trump a chance to undermine Western democracies. Accordingly, she advised Western leaders to counteract these developments. To their peril – and our own, -- the Western world did not take decisive action.

Now that many of Applebaum’s political predictions have come to pass, her political insights are gaining traction. The ‘autocracy contagion’ afflicting the modern world has become an existential issue, for the ratio between democratic and autocratic systems has now reached a tipping point.

As the first 100 days of the Trump presidency have unfolded in the country of my birth, it has been painful to see the new American oligarchy brutally wielding power unconstitutionally. From my vantage point, I can only wish that the US congress had dealt with “Trumpism” decisively in December 2019 after Trump’s failed attempt to blackmail the then newly elected President Zelensky. Now, nearly six years on, we see Trump compulsively apply his ‘leverage’ to extortion on a global scale.

I take some comfort in knowing that Applebaum, however, remains undeterred. She recently published an article in The Atlantic entitled ‘Kleptocracy Inc.’ about the political conflicts of interest in which Trump, his family, and associates are unashamedly involved (April 2025). Furthermore, despite having been put on Putin’s 2022 list of 200 US citizens who have been sanctioned by Russia and despite being on the receiving end of Trump’s threats against journalists working for The Atlantic, she continues undaunted to speak truth to power. Autocracy Inc. testifies to her courage. Published in the US prior to the November 2023 presidential election, the book was intended to alert American voters to the new autocratic reality and to inspire the public to take action to preserve the integrity of the American electoral system.

Readers may be aware that since April 2024, in response to Trump’s multiple Executive Orders issued under the pretext of a National Emergency, grassroots protests involving over 1200 towns and cities in the US and more than a million people, have already taken place. Organisations such as ‘Hands-off’ have provided online platforms for people to coordinate protests locally, for instance, in front of town halls, state capitol buildings, and county courts. To date, these non-violent, demonstrations have occurred without incident, even drawing crowds in traditionally ‘Trump territory’.

Now that these protests have drawn more media attention, Elon Musk has declared that the protestors have been paid by fraudulent sources to take part! If the protests grow in numbers, might Trump sign an Executive Order to outlaw and/or deport protestors as enemies of the State? Would he go as far as to declare Martial Law? If so, would the US military obey? Sadly, all these seemingly impossible scenarios are conceivable. By the time this review is published, we may know the answers to these questions.

As Applebaum has forewarned, the fate of American democracy hangs in the balance and the outcome will be visited on us all. Her clear-sighted vision, so courageously and coherently expressed in Autocracy Inc., clarifies the challenge we face. Although Applebaum’s aim in this book is to reframe our understanding of modern autocracies, she also offers practical strategies for reform by dismantling the mechanisms that make ‘transnational kleptocracy’ possible while restoring democratic values and, thereby, our humanity.