To stay in power, modern autocrats need to be able to take money and hide it without being bothered by political institutions that encourage transparency, accountability, or public debate. The money, in turn, helps them shore up the instruments of repression….

Kleptocracy and autocracy go hand in hand, reinforcing each other but also undermining any other institutions that they touch. The real estate agents who don’t ask too many questions in Sussex or Hampshire, the factory owners eager to unload failing businesses in Warren, the bankers in Sioux Falls happy to accept mystery deposits from mystery clients—all of them help undermine the rule of law in their own countries and around the world. The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: The Greed That Binds from Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum, published by Vintage Books, New York, USA, 2024, 2025 Edition, pp. 41-42.  

Synopsis: In Autocracy, Inc., author Anne Applebaum calls on all democracies to fight a new kind of threat from autocratic states that, in the twenty-first century, now work together to stay in power. These states operate like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology, but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc. Corrupt companies and kleptocrats do business with their counterparts in other countries. Police in one country can arm and train the police in another. Diplomats conspire to bend international rules. Propagandists share resources and themes to disseminate the same message about the weakness of democracy and the evil of the West.

As Applebaum notes in the Introduction (p. 3):
Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals but through deals—deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.

Softer Autocracies & Hybrid Democracies: Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, and Hungary. Applebaum notes: “[They] sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t.

Members of Autocracy, Inc.: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others.

Autocracy, Inc. in action: Russia-Ukraine War (2022-present)
As reported in Applebaum’s “Introduction” (pp. 15-17).

• China signaled support for Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine before it began and later refused to directly criticize Russia. They profited from the sanctions by buying Russian oil and gas at low prices and quietly sold defense technology to Russia.
• Iran exported thousands of lethal drones to Russia.
• North Korea supplied ammunition and missiles. In April 2025, after the publication of Applebaum’s book, they sent around 1,500 soldiers to Russia for training and deployment to Ukraine.
• Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Mali, and the Central African Republic backed Russia at the United Nations and elsewhere.
• Belarus allowed Russian troops to use its territory, including roads, railway lines, and military bases.
• Turkey, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, all illiberal states with transactional ties to the autocratic world, helped the Russian defense industry evade sanctions and import machine tools and electronics.
• India took advantage of lowered prices to buy Russian oil.

May we find the courage to resist the tyranny of our times: No Kings Rally, March 28, 2026.

---

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian. After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, she became a staff writer at The Atlantic in January 2020. She is a Senior Fellow at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. She is the author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington, D.C.