In her new book, "Autocracy Inc.," journalist Anne Applebaum argues that many of today's dictators collaborate to help keep one another in power. She joins the show to discuss this phenomenon.
Bottom left: Vladimir Putin, Russia; top left: Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus; center: Hun Sen, Cambodia; top right: Xi Jinping, China; bottom right: Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, Egypt. (Illustration by Mark Harris for The Washington Post; photos by Getty Images)
Bottom left: Vladimir Putin, Russia; top left: Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus; center: Hun Sen, Cambodia; top right: Xi Jinping, China; bottom right: Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, Egypt. (Illustration by Mark Harris for The Washington Post; photos by Getty Images)In the spring of 2012, Vladimir Putin was feeling the pressure.
In July 2023, Mr. Putin signed legislation — rushed through parliament in just two weeks — to give the government a strong hand over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which he suspected were behind the protests. He had long been apprehensive about independent activism, especially by groups that were financed from abroad. Under the new law, any group that received money from overseas and engaged in “political activity” was required to register as a “foreign agent” with the Justice Ministry or face heavy fines.
This editorial looks at how autocracies are reinforcing themselves by swapping methods and tactics.
The dictators want most of all to survive. They are succeeding.
A cascade of restrictions
The Russian “foreign agent” law hung an albatross around the neck of NGOs and, later, independent journalists and bloggers — anyone who received any money from abroad, even payment for a single freelance article.A secret school — or ‘mad scientists’?
According to Mr. Hall, authoritarian regimes must constantly maintain the illusion of steadfast control. Relax for a minute, and the illusion could vanish. “Protest is like a run on the bank,” Mr. Hall told us. “The protesters only have to get it right once.” For autocracies, protest and dissent are an existential threat.“They’ve all seen what happens to autocrats generally — the Gaddafi moment, being dragged through the streets and beaten to death with a lead pipe. … They seem to know that if one country becomes democratic in a region, the rest will almost certainly follow. … And the best way to ensure that survival is to learn, to cooperate and to share best practices because you constantly have to stay one step ahead.”
The digital censors
A glimpse of how it works was provided recently in a trove of internal documents, emails and audio recordings disclosed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an April 5 report by Daniil Belovodyev, Andrei Soshnikov and Reid Standish. The materials depict Russia and China working closely to help each other more tightly control the internet in two high-level meetings in 2017 and 2019.The dictators have clung to power
In the latest Freedom in the World report shows a decline in freedom for the 17th year in a row. Many autocrats are proving resilient. In the nearly 11 years since Mr. Putin signed the “foreign agent” law, most of the world’s leading dictators have held on. Rarely have they been toppled by popular protests. They are building new means of repression along with the old. In China, tech companies have invented an electronic surveillance system that can automatically recognize a protest banner and demonstrators’ faces — and alert the police“Authoritarian regimes are much more brazen than before,” said William J. Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and author of “The Dictator’s Learning Curve,” published in 2012. “They are not sitting still.”