Anne Applebaum says we have an outdated image of autocratic dictators. We think of them as cartoon villains, strongmen who exercise total control over their people and who keep an iron grip on power within their own borders.

In reality, she says, autocracies are run by sophisticated military, financial, and information networks. The people in these networks collaborate to hold power and wealth in one autocracy, and they connect with and support similar networks in other autocratic countries.  

The world’s autocracies – including Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Belarus, and others – have no unifying ideology or interests except retaining power. And undermining democracy. They collaborate with each other like corporations in a loose, shifting alliance that Applebaum calls, “Autocracy, Inc.”

In  Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Applebaum explores how modern autocracies operate, how they’ve often been aided by democracies, why autocrats think they’re winning, and how we can defeat them.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously wrote for the Washington Post as a columnist and editorial board member. She won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004 for her book Gulag: A History. She’s also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Autocracy, Inc.:
The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
By Anne Applebaum
Penguin Random House, New York, 2024

Applebaum provides detailed examples and case studies showing how autocracies support each other. Why is the fight against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine proving so difficult? Because we’re not just fighting Russia. We’re fighting Autocracy, Inc., she says. Iran provides Russia with drones, North Korea sends ammunition and missiles, China also supplies military hardware and buys Russian oil. Other Russian allies support it at the UN.  

This extensive support network means Russia and other autocracies no longer care how they’re perceived. They are not concerned with world opinion, and they no longer give even lip service to international norms and rules.

“Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity” [p. 5]

This was clearly evident in Russia’s brazen killing of Alexei Navalny in February 2024.

The most important parts of the book for me were about how autocracies use and misuse information. Applebaum explains how they do this to control their own people and to sow doubt and disunity throughout the world. This serves two purposes.

First, autocracies want a passive, compliant population. They use propaganda and disinformation on traditional and social media to destroy any hope for the possibility of change and any belief that people even have agency to bring about change. The sheer volume of propaganda overwhelms any dissenting individuals or groups.

“This tactic, the so-called ‘fire hose of falsehoods’ produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you can never know? If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world.” [p. 79] 

In the US this tactic is called “flooding the zone with shit,” a phase coined by Trump henchman and fellow convicted criminal Steve Bannon. Trump does this constantly.  

The lies dictators tell are often ludicrous, but they aren’t intended to be believable; they’re intended to overwhelm.

“Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.” [p. 78]

Masha Gessen calls them “power lies” in their book Surviving Autocracy.

Second, autocrats understand democracy as an existential threat. That’s because it inspires their people with a model, an existence proof, that there are alternatives to living under a corrupt, oppressive dictatorship. So, Applebaum explains, autocracies focus on discrediting the very ideas of democracy, transparency and accountability. Their propaganda is designed to make democratic societies appear chaotic, unstable, degenerate, impure, even satanic.

Autocracies spread disinformation and propaganda throughout the world. They often do this through intermediaries who publish in local languages on local websites in order to appear more credible. Applebaum calls this “information laundering” and the outlets that do this “information laundromats.”

“The goal is to spread the same narratives that autocrats use at home, to connect democracy with degeneracy and chaos, to undermine democratic institutions, to smear not just activists who promote democracy but the system itself.” [p. 85]

The West had high hopes for the benefits of economic integration after the fall of the Soviet Union. China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. A gas pipeline was built from Russia to Germany. But instead, Applebaum points out, integration has enabled corruption and dependence to metastasize.

“This case needs to be made more dramatically, for the democratic world’s dependence on China, Russia, and other autocracies for minerals, semiconductors, or energy supplies poses more than just an economic risk. Those business relationships are corrupting our own societies. Russia has been using its pipelines not, as the German chancellor Willy Brandt once hoped, to deepen commercial ties and help consolidate a lasting peace in Europe but to wield a weapon of blackmail, to influence European politics in Russia’s favor. Chinese businesses use their presence around the world to collect data and information that could eventually help them wage cyberwarfare. Russian, Chinese, and other oligarchic money in American and British real estate has distorted property markets in major cities and corrupted more than one politician. The fact that anonymous shell companies were purchasing condominiums in Trump-branded properties while Trump was president should have set off alarm bells. That it did not is evidence of how accustomed to kleptocratic corruption we have become.” [pp. 171-2]

Autocracy, Inc. operates with impunity. It evades Western sanctions. It launders money through complicit Western financial institutions. And its relentless propaganda has disrupted politics in Europe and America. No wonder the autocrats think they’re winning.

What should we do?

Applebaum concludes Autocracy, Inc. with some recommendations:

• Eliminate “transactional kleptocracy” by tightening up the global financial system and requiring greater disclosure. For example, real estate transactions should be transparent, and corporations should be registered in the name of their real owners.
• Democracies must directly engage with the global “marketplace of ideas” because today we’re leaving the field free for autocrats to influence and distort. It’s impossible to refute or fact-check each and every lie. Instead it’s more effective to expose information laundromats and disinformation campaigns, ideally before they even start.
• De-risk our economic relationships with autocracies. Diversify supply chains, for example, so we’re not dependent on one autocratic country for critical minerals or resources.

Above all, we must recognize that we’re not dealing with individual countries or individual issues, but an international system of autocratic behaviors. This requires a global response.

“I believe the citizens of the United States, and the citizens of the democracies of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, should start thinking of themselves as linked to one another and to the people who share their values inside autocracies too. They need one another, now more than ever, because their democracies are not safe. Nobody’s democracy is safe.” [pp. 173-4]

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Autocracy, Inc. expands on a 2021 article that Applebaum wrote for The Atlantic called “The Bad Guys Are Winning.” The book is just 176 pages, but it’s packed with detailed information about how autocracies work and support each other.  

More importantly the book provides a framework for understanding complex parts of our troubled world.

I’d encountered some of Applebaum’s ideas in works by other authors like Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy which I mentioned earlier. Peter Pomerantsev’s book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible explores the pervasive corruption in Putin’s Russia. And Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom delves into the reasons why Russia tries to portray the West as decadent and impure. All of them are worth reading.

For me, Applebaum’s main contribution in Autocracy, Inc. is to reveal how autocracies systematically collaborate with and support each other to hold on to power and wealth despite having no underlying ideology in common.

The urgent corollary is that democracies must stand together to defeat them.

I worry that the strategies Applebaum suggests in Autocracy, Inc., while helpful, don’t seem enough for the enormity of the task.

Update (Oct. 20, 2024): Anne Applebaum was awarded the 2024 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Here’s the full text of her acceptance speech, titled Against Pessimism, arguing against pacifism in the face of autocratic aggression, particularly the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here’s an audio recording.

Update (July 6, 2025): The failure of either Russia or China to come to the aid of Iran in its recent war with Israel and America seems to show that collaboration among autocratic regimes has significant limitations. See this New York Times article for more details.

Thanks for reading.

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Related Links

Klein, Ezra and Applebaum, Anne. “Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails.” The Ezra Klein Show, 19 Nov. 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-anne-applebaum.html. Interview with Anne Applebaum about autocracy and authoritarianism in a second Trump term on The Ezra Klein Show podcast.

Applebaum, Anne and Peter Pomerantsev. “Autocracy in America.” Atlantic Audio, 6 Sep. 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/autocracy-in-america/. A five-part podcast exploring authoritarian tactics already in use in the United States. Also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, PocketCasts, and YouTube.

Mosley, Tonya. “Expert on dictators warns: Don’t lose hope — that’s what they want.” Fresh Air, NPR, 23 Jul. 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/07/23/nx-s1-5049021/expert-on-dictators-warns-dont-lose-hope-thats-what-they-want. Interview with Anne Applebaum on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Applebaum, Anne. “The Bad Guys Are Winning.” The Atlantic, 15 Nov. 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-autocrats-are-winning/620526/.

Illing, Sean. “’Flood the zone with shit’: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy.” Vox, 6 Feb. 2020, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/16/20991816/impeachment-trial-trump-bannon-misinformation.

Frank, Thomas. “Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers.” Buzzfeed News, 12 Jan. 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/thomasfrank/secret-money-how-trump-made-millions-selling-condos-to.