Autocracy Inc. review: Why we MUST stand up to the tyrants in the East, writes DOMINIC LAWSON

Autocracy Inc. 

by Anne Applebaum (Allen Lane £20, 240pp)

There isn't a more rigorous or engaged analyst of the crimes of the erstwhile Soviet dictatorship than Anne Applebaum, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning history of the Gulag, and also of Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine.

But the historian is also rooted in the present, as a fearsomely active journalist, and her latest work is an-up-to-the moment examination of how modern-day autocracies, not just that of Russia's President Putin, but also including China, North Korea, and Iran, act as a kind of informal bloc to challenge what they see as the West's 'hegemony'.

It's a pity the phrase 'axis of evil' has already been taken, since that would be a fine description. Alas, it was inappropriately used by George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to join together Iran, Iraq and North Korea — which actually had no military or financial links at all.

But now Russia, China, North Korea and Iran do connect in this way, accelerated by Moscow's war on Ukraine.

My only minor criticism of Applebaum's terrific book is that it never mentions the Iraq War of 2003-2011 or the later Western intervention in Libya. For these were the developments which not only gave rocket fuel to the anti-Western agenda globally, but also convinced many — including in the West itself — that we had little moral authority to criticise the military escapades launched by the Kremlin.

Applebaum is especially good, however, in setting out the remarkable success of modern Russian propaganda (beyond the scope that Stalin could ever have dreamed of) using the worldwide web, and of China's ability both to control its own people through technology and to censor what was thought to be unstoppable.

At the dawn of the millennium the ever-optimistic U.S. President Bill Clinton proclaimed that the internet would liberalise China, by exposing its people to all the possibilities the free world had to offer, in real time.

When arguing (on similar grounds) for China to be admitted to the World Trade Organisation, he gave an address in which he ridiculed the idea that Beijing could keep a lid on this.

'Now, there's no question that China's been trying to crack down on the internet,' he declared. At that point, as Applebaum records, Clinton chuckled, adding: 'Good luck!' — and his audience joined in the laughter.

Well, they are not laughing now. The Great Firewall of China, and even more sophisticated tools than that, have allowed Beijing to succeed, keeping billions in a form of intellectual slavery.

Similarly, the German political establishment had long believed in the doctrine known as Wandel durch Handel — 'change through trade' — the idea that making nice with Moscow in terms of market access (most notably with pipelines taking Russian gas to Europe) would lead inevitably to political and cultural liberalisation. That dream, too, (or self-interest, in terms of the aspirations of German business) has been shattered. The kleptocracy just got richer and more ruthless.

As the deputy mayor of St Petersburg (his first public role) in 1992, the former KGB officer Putin argued that 'the entrepreneurial class should become the basis for the flourishing of our society as a whole'. Music to the Western investors' ears. But Putin was then, already, creaming off vast sums for himself and associates, via his control of local export licences for raw material.

As Applebaum notes, under Putin's (perpetually renewed) presidency this ultimately developed into 'a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a Mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leadership'. It was for his leading role in exposing this that Alexei Navalny paid with his life.

Despite his apparent personal austerity and regular crackdowns on colossal financial corruption within the Chinese Communist Party — the inevitable consequence of permanent one-party rule — Xi Jinping is only too happy to make common cause with the multi-billionaire plutocrat Putin.

At heart, this is because they share a primordial terror of a popular uprising against their regimes: in this context, it was striking how in 2022 Xi suddenly abandoned his hitherto iron-cast Covid lockdown measures after revolt threatened to spread to the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.

And the 'no limits' friendship which Xi entered into with Putin on February 4, 2022, was specifically designed to demonstrate a kind of solidarity among autocracies, against what they both constantly refer to as the West's 'attempts at hegemony'.

Their communiqué denounced 'the abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states'. Weeks later, Putin sent his tanks towards Kyiv.

There was a tantalising glimpse of a possible fracture in the relationship at that moment: it seems likely that Xi had not been given a warning by Putin of what was about to happen and, some months later, Beijing made public its concern about the Kremlin's threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

But as Anne Applebaum concludes, the challenge to 'Autocracy Inc' must come from within the West itself.

Yet the American people seem likely to elect to the White House (again) their own version of Autocracy Inc: Donald J. Trump.