Sliding towards autocracy

Thirty months into Vladimir Putin’s planned three-day takeover of Ukraine, the Russian president summoned his top security officials to an urgent meeting at his residence on the outskirts of Moscow. It was not good news. Six days earlier, on August 6, Ukrainian forces had stormed across the border into the southwestern Kursk region, and they were still advancing. For the first time since the Second World War, Russia had been invaded. Putin glared at his subordinates as they delivered the latest situation reports. He drummed his fingers on the enormous conference table in front of him. When the acting governor of Kursk began listing the towns and villages under Ukrainian control, he abruptly cut him off. “The West is fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians”, Putin seethed. “The enemy will certainly get the response he deserves.”

In the popular imagining of Putin’s rule, this is where all hell breaks loose. He hands down decisive orders to destroy Russia’s enemies at all costs, and his quaking officials snap to attention and carry out his will. He demands to know who is responsible and dispatches the unfortunate culprits. If they are lucky they will only be fired. He has played up to this strongman archetype over his two decades in power. This is why he poses for bare-chested, tiger-wrangling publicity stunts. It is why he spends a lot of time around men with guns. And it is why meetings like these are filmed, so that he can be shown later on television taking personal command as the modern incarnation of a Russian tsar.

The reality is more banal. As Anne Applebaum explains in Autocracy, Inc., twenty-first-century dictatorships are run “not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services … and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation”. Contrary to the stereotype, Putin relies on more than just violence and repression to stay in power. He also presides over a vast, wildly dysfunctional bureaucracy and what Applebaum calls a “full-blown autocratic kleptocracy”, which he and a trusted cabal of spies, lawyers and shady businessmen erected from the ruins of the Soviet Union “entirely for the purpose of enriching its leadership”.

His success in achieving this did not come about because his countrymen somehow yearn for a tyrannical leader on account of the “Russian soul”. In fact, a survey carried out in 1989 found that nine out of ten people said it was important to be able to “express themselves freely”. The glasnost era ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev saw an explosion of new media outlets and an insatiable demand to uncover the truth about Soviet history. As the sociologists Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov wrote at the time, “Soviet society resemble[d] a man who was walking backwards into the future, fixated on his past”. But what the new Russian state that followed lacked, along with a functioning economy, was the necessary components, such as an independent judiciary, to build a resilient democracy, and the transition from Soviet rule was defined for many citizens by humiliating shortages of basic goods, surging crime and poverty. When Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin as president at the turn of the millennium, following a mediocre career in the KGB and a decidedly questionable tenure as the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, where he was accused of defrauding the city of millions of dollars, he clothed his ambitions in the language of democracy, pretending to be saving the state even as he and his closest advisers were plundering it.

“Russia was designed to look like a democracy, or at least enough like a democracy to fool foreign investors”, writes Applebaum. While real opponents of the regime such as the late anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny were harassed and in some cases killed, the political technologists at the Kremlin cultivated a “systemic opposition” comprised of toothless opponents who would not meaningfully challenge the status quo, as part of what became known as “managed democracy.”

Banks looked like banks, but they were not banks; they were just as often money-laundering operations. Companies looked like companies, but they too could be facades, vehicles for the very wealthy to siphon assets away from the state … If the Kremlin decided to destroy a company, it could, and sometimes did.

Putin’s nascent kleptocracy relied on the dubious expertise of his former KGB colleagues, with their knowledge of money-laundering and illicit operations, but it was also enabled by the greed of numerous western lawyers and financiers, who proved more than willing to profit from the influx of new Russian money with few questions asked. This experience is hardly unique to Russia. Applebaum documents the precipitous descent into autocracy across a range of former democracies such as Venezuela, where the former ruler Hugo Chávez transformed the state into something more like a “criminal syndicate”, with the ruling elite acting like a “parasite stripping resources off its host” according to an implicit bargain: “If you are loyal, you can steal”. This approach does not lead to a well-functioning economy or an effective military – with no apparent irony, Putin complained in February that the scourge of corruption was “stealing the money we need for the defence of the country” – but it does help to keep contemporary autocrats in power. Like Putin, Chávez bet “that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones, and he was right”.

“It’s no coincidence that many of the world’s most vicious regimes have had access to oil, gas or diamonds”, explains Marcel Dirsus in How Tyrants Fall, which could just as well be called “How Tyrants Endure”. Oil, in particular, remains such a valuable commodity that there will for the immediate future always be foreign demand, even if, as in Putin’s case, the regime is subject to extensive international sanctions because it has just invaded a neighbouring state. As Dirsus puts it: “Oil and dictatorship go hand in hand”.

But marshalling the resources to reward the regime elite is just one element of running a durable autocracy. Prospective dictators must also be ruthlessly focused on threats to their power from within the metaphorical, or actual, palace walls. Managing the competing factions beneath is “like sitting on top of a pit of ten-foot snakes”, writes Dirsus. “Those monsters either have to be fed or they have to be kept down.” The author suggests following the advice of Niccolò Machiavelli, who counselled rulers to “pamper people or destroy them”. Punish your subordinates “just a little and they’ll hit back”, he warned in The Prince. “Harm them seriously and they won’t be able to. So if you’re going to do people harm, make sure you needn’t worry about their reaction.”

In practice, Putin often tries to avoid doing very much at all. Contrary to the chest-beating strongman image, the Russian leader’s overriding instinct when confronted with a crisis seems to be to disappear. When the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in August 2000, it took Putin nine days to visit the rescue site and meet the missing sailors’ desperate families. “He didn’t know how to deal with it, and therefore he tried to avoid dealing with it”, a former Kremlin insider later told the journalist Catherine Belton, as reported in Putin’s People (2020). After the Beslan massacre in 2004, when terrorists killed 186 children at a school in North Ossetia, Putin made a furtive overnight visit to the hospital where some of the survivors were being treated, but it took him twenty years to visit the school and meet with a (carefully vetted) selection of bereaved mothers. Last summer, when the Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin seized a military base in Rostov-on-Don and launched his march on Moscow, it took Putin thirteen hours to make a brief statement on camera. Then, as rumours surged on social media that he had fled the capital, he disappeared again.

When he does decide to act, Putin abides by Machiavelli’s approach to those he considers traitors. Two months to the day after Prigozhin launched his rebellion, he was killed, along with his top commanders, when his private jet exploded in the skies northwest of Moscow. The spectacular manner of his demise was clearly intended as a message to the country’s private jet-owning elite about the fate that awaited them if they, too, ever challenged him. And, as the cases of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal made clear, even in western democracies the regime’s enemies are never safe.

By contrast, the Russian leader tolerates abject mediocrity in his closest associates. Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian armed forces, remains in his post despite calamitous military failures – from the disastrous initial assault on Ukraine to the recent invasion of Russia. Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s frequent adventure buddy on hunting expeditions in Siberia, was defence minister for twelve years before he was finally replaced by an economist, Andrey Belousov, in May. At least two of Shoigu’s deputies have since been arrested as part of an alleged large-scale bribery scandal – even if you are loyal, you can only steal so much if the country is at war – but Shoigu has merely been shuffled sideways to become the secretary of Russia’s security council. Putin clearly values loyalty over competence.

This makes sense. According to a study carried out in 2018 by the political scientist Erica Frantz, 65 per cent of authoritarian leaders who lost power between 1950 and 2012 did so at the hands of regime insiders. The greatest threat to the modern autocrat, it turns out, is not the disgruntled masses, but the ambitious lieutenants plotting their own ascent from within the gilded halls. This explains why it is so important for dictators to retain the appearance of robust physical health – and why there is so much interest in signs that Putin might be ailing. If the regime elite concludes that the leader is on his way out, its members will start manoeuvring to replace him and protect their interests. This dynamic also makes it dangerous for ageing rulers to contemplate relinquishing power. “On the one hand, tyrants looking to step down have to find someone powerful and competent enough to protect them once they are no longer in power”, explains Dirsus. “On the other hand, somebody who is competent and powerful enough to protect them can also destroy them.” So they find themselves trapped on what he calls the “dictator’s treadmill”, endlessly sprinting to hold on to power and see off threats to their rule.

Fortunately for the modern autocrat, he – and it is usually a he – has the consolation of company. Contemporary dictators can draw on a network of like-minded rulers from around the world, or what Applebaum calls “Autocracy, Inc.”. Unlike during the Cold War, these leaders are not united by a single ideology. There is no shared vision for global revolution, and few shared values. Instead they are bound by a common enemy: the West in general and the US in particular. Above all, they seek what the political scientist Jessica Chen Weiss has called, “a world safe for autocracy”, which means undermining dangerous ideas such as “western constitutional democracy” and “universal human rights”. This might involve working together to evade international sanctions and provide one another with diplomatic cover; or more direct forms of support such as transferring crucial weapons and technology; or, in Russia’s case, offering a “regime survival package”, including both mercenaries and propagandists, to shore up embattled tyrants. “A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia”, explains Applebaum. “That world is the one we are living in, right now.”

In that effort, today’s autocratic leaders have an unexpected source of help: contemporary democracies. In The Origins of Elected Strongmen, Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joseph Wright detail the alarming trend of long-established democracies “decaying from within”. “Whereas in the past, democracies typically collapsed via force (through coups or other coerced seizures of power), today incumbent leaders are typically spearheading the drift to authoritarianism by pursuing grabs for power that ultimately deteriorate democracy and give way to dictatorship.” The authors focus on the examples of Hungary and El Salvador, where illiberal leaders have hollowed out democratic institutions in favour of personalized regimes – moves they view as part of a disturbing global pattern. “The origins of the new strongman era lie within the rise of personalist political parties throughout the world … All over the globe, leaders are increasingly coming to power backed by personalist parties – or those parties that exist primarily to promote and further the leader’s personal political career rather than advance policy.”

This is true of the most egregious examples of recent democratic backsliding, such as in Venezuela, Turkey and India, but it also applies to that famous shining city on a hill: the US. Considering Donald Trump’s baseless attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, the authors note the importance of the “many local-level Republican officials [who] spoke out in key states such as Michigan and Georgia” – and did so despite concerted pressure, and in some cases personal appeals from Trump, to change the results. This time around, county- and state-level officials are likely to come up against a more co-ordinated campaign by Trump’s supporters to prevent the certification of unfavourable votes. In Georgia, a crucial swing state, a group of election officials that spans at least five counties and calls itself the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition is already pushing for rules that will make it easier to challenge the outcome of the election. Trump has praised several of the people involved as “pit bulls” who are “doing a great job”.

This is part of a dangerous, self-propelling shift towards the personalization of political power. “Once a leader successfully expands executive control and dismisses party officials who oppose [their actions] from the inner circle, it sends a clear signal to other elites that they must fall in line or risk being expelled from positions of power”, the authors write. Leaders of such parties “tend to eschew individuals from the political establishment, opting instead to fill high-level party positions with individuals from their personal network, such as friends and family members, who usually lack government experience”. Trump’s decision to appoint his daughter-in-law, the former television producer Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee appears to fit this mould.

The global prevalence of democracy is, of course, a relatively recent development. “Some variant of authoritarianism has been the default setting of human government for thousands of years”, explains Zack Beauchamp in The Reactionary Spirit. “But in a little more than half a century, democracy went from nearly extinct – just twelve democracies survived the Second World War – to globally dominant.” The postwar wave of decolonization, along with the collapse of dictatorships in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, and the eventual demise of the Soviet Union, produced a remarkable surge of democratization. “No single political system had ever conquered the entire planet so rapidly or so thoroughly.”

But, just as Francis Fukuyama celebrated the apparent triumph of liberal democracy in his famous, and frequently misrepresented, bookThe End of History and the Last Man (1992), he also warned against complacency. “No regime – no ‘socio-economic system’ – is able to satisfy all men in all places”, he cautioned. “Dissatisfaction arises precisely where democracy has triumphed most completely: it is a dissatisfaction with liberty and equality. Thus those who remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history.” Beauchamp drills down into what the twentieth-century German theorist, and later prominent Nazi, Carl Schmitt identified as the fundamental tension between democracy’s promise of equal citizenship and liberalism’s focus on individual freedoms, which has been exacerbated in recent decades by the profound social change produced by increased migration and the drive for greater social equality – including racial and gender equality – in liberal democracies. “[This] existentially unsettled the way white European majorities understood social hierarchy … For some it was a shattering event – one that created a political opening for the reactionary spirit’s resurgence.” That spirit, writes Beauchamp, resides in the idea that “if democracy threatens existing social hierarchies, it is right and maybe even righteous to overthrow democracy rather than permit social change”. That sentiment has coexisted with democracy throughout its modern history, Beauchamp warns, but it now poses an “extinction-level threat to its future”.

The Reactionary Spirit charts the evolution of these ideas on the right across advanced democracies, with a focus on four countries that have seen the advent of strongman-style leaders in recent years – from Hungary, which Beauchamp describes under Viktor Orbán’s leadership as an “authoritarian beachhead in the heart of the democratic world”, through the rise of Narendra Modi in India and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, to the grievance-fuelled presidency of Trump. With Trump again poised on the brink of power, worse may be yet to come. “The Republican Party, thoroughly controlled by the reactionary spirit, is developing new ways to abuse federal authority and concentrate power in an authoritarian-minded leader’s hands – to begin, in short, constructing the scaffolding for a competitive authoritarian system at the federal level.”

Federico Finchelstein calls these leaders “the wannabe fascists”. In his book of the same name he situates Trump alongside Orbán, Modi and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro as part of an emergent group of aspiring strongmen who “seek to destroy democracy for short-term personal gain but are not fully committed to the fascist cause”. They are what the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini once dismissed as “semi-wandering men”, not driven by passionate conviction, but with their ears “raised … to feel the voice of public opinion”. Such leaders do not openly advocate fascism, but “gravitate towards fascist political styles and behaviours”. This means that they have “blurred but not erased the separation of powers” and “employ propaganda and lies but have not fully developed an Orwellian state machine”. Their style of fascism is “aspirational” – but it is still dangerous.

The author does not throw these terms around lightly. He was born in Argentina in 1975, the year before Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta took power, and after moving to the US in 2001 he embarked on his career as a historian of fascism and populism, in part because he wanted to understand how “fascist ideology became a reality in a modern nation with a strong, progressive civil society”. As a result, he cautions against simplistic assumptions that the US is “too good for fascism”, and that its institutions are “strong enough to withstand the crude Trumpian threat to democracy”. Rather, he argues, the more one knows about past fascist movements, the more worried one should be about the path ahead: “Trumpism is part of a twenty-first-century global trend toward autocracy that has reformulated the history of populism, turning it into wannabe fascism”.

The unifying thread across all these books is their deep concern about the health of twenty-first-century democracy. Their authors understand all too well that, just as the reality of contemporary dictatorship is far more banal than the cartoonish depictions of Putin’s tsar-like rule, the foundations of many modern democracies are more shallow and more precarious than we might assume. Autocracy is not some exotic phenomenon that happens only in faraway lands. The instinct to pursue power – and to maximize and preserve that power – transcends political systems. This is why the world’s most successful democracies put such an emphasis on term limits, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power. Or, at least, why they did. But autocracy, it turns out, is not the mirror image of democracy. The exercise of power is a continuum. Some of the twentieth century’s most notorious dictators came to rule through the ballot box, and if there is a common plea across these books, it is for the citizens of today’s advanced democracies not to assume that “it can’t happen here”.

Katie Stallard is Senior Editor, China and Global Affairs, at the New Statesman and the author of Dancing on Bones: History and power in China, Russia, and North Korea, 2022

The post Sliding towards autocracy appeared first on TLS.