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June 2017
Breaking Down Democracy:
Goals, Strategies, and Methods
of Modern Authoritarians
by Arch Puddington
CONTENTS
Executive Summary 1
Introduction: Modern Authoritarians: Origins,
Anatomy, Outlook 5
Chapters
1. Validating Autocracy through the Ballot 10
2. Propaganda at Home and Abroad 15
3. The Enemy Within: Civil Society at Bay 22
4. The Ministry of Truth in Peace and War 29
5. The Rise of ‘Illiberal Democracy’ 35
6. Flacks and Friends 41
7. Bullying the Neighbors: Frozen Conflicts,
the Near Abroad, and Other Innovations 47
8. Back to the Future 52
Conclusion: Authoritarianism Comes Calling 57
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This report emerged from a presentation on the state of global freedom conducted by the author and David J. Kramer, former
president of Freedom House. The major source of data and analysis is Freedom in the World, the report on political rights and
civil liberties published annually by Freedom House. The author wishes to thank the Freedom House analysis staff and the
many scholars who have participated in Freedom House assessments of global democracy. The author also extends special
thanks to Elen Aghekyan, Tyler Roylance, Alexandra Cain, Danielle Recanati, Amy Slipowitz, Alan Williams, Christopher Walker,
Bret Nelson, Michael Johnson, Rebeka Foley, Zselyke Csaky, Sarah Repucci, Vanessa Tucker, Robert Ruby,
and Daniel Calingaert.
THE AUTHOR
Arch Puddington is Distinguished Scholar for Democracy Studies at Freedom House and a co-editor of Freedom in the World.
ON THE COVER
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing, 2016. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
Executive Summary
Breaking Down Democracy: Goals, Strategies,
and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
by Arch Puddington
The 21st century has been marked by a resurgence of authoritarian
rule that has proved resilient despite economic fragility and
occasional popular resistance. Modern authoritarianism has
succeeded, where previous totalitarian systems failed, due to refined
and nuanced strategies of repression, the exploitation of open
societies, and the spread of illiberal policies in democratic countries
themselves. The leaders of today’s authoritarian systems devote fulltime
attention to the challenge of crippling the opposition without
annihilating it, and flouting the rule of law while maintaining a
plausible veneer of order, legitimacy, and prosperity.
Central to the modern authoritarian strategy is the
capture of institutions that undergird political pluralism.
The goal is to dominate not only the executive
and legislative branches, but also the media, the
judiciary, civil society, the commanding heights of the
economy, and the security forces. With these institutions
under the effective if not absolute control of an
incumbent leader, changes in government through fair
and honest elections become all but impossible.
Unlike Soviet-style communism, modern authoritarianism
is not animated by an overarching ideology or
the messianic notion of an ideal future society. Nor
do today’s autocrats seek totalitarian control over
people’s everyday lives, movements, or thoughts.
The media are more diverse and entertaining under
modern authoritarianism, civil society can enjoy an
independent existence (as long as it does not pursue
political change), citizens can travel around the country
or abroad with only occasional interference, and
private enterprise can flourish (albeit with rampant
corruption and cronyism).
This study explains how modern authoritarianism defends
and propagates itself, as regimes from different
regions and with diverse socioeconomic foundations
copy and borrow techniques of political control.
Among its major findings:
• Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has
played an outsized role in the development of
modern authoritarian systems. This is particularly
true in the areas of media control, propaganda,
the smothering of civil society, and the
www.freedomhouse.org
1
BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
MAJOR DECLINES FOR INFLUENTIAL COUNTRIES OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS
0
Change in Freedom in the World Aggregate Score, 2007-2016
-5
-10
-15
-20
-25
Turkey
Bahrain
-25
Ethiopia
-21
Azerbaijan
Venezuela
-17 -17
Hungary
-16
Ecuador
Russia
Ukraine
-12 -12 -12
Afghanistan
-10
-30
-28
weakening of political pluralism. Russia has also
moved aggressively against neighboring states
where democratic institutions have emerged or
where democratic movements have succeeded
in ousting corrupt authoritarian leaders.
• The rewriting of history for political purposes is
common among modern authoritarians. Again,
Russia has taken the lead, with the state’s assertion
of authority over history textbooks and the
process, encouraged by Putin, of reassessing
the historical role of Joseph Stalin.
• The hiring of political consultants and lobbyists
from democratic countries to represent the
interests of autocracies is a growing phenomenon.
China is clearly in the vanguard, with multiple
representatives working for the state and for
large economic entities closely tied to the state.
But there are also K Street representatives for
Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Ethiopia,
and practically all of the authoritarian states in
the Middle East.
• The toxic combination of unfair elections and
crude majoritarianism is spreading from modern
authoritarian regimes to illiberal leaders in what
are still partly democratic countries. Increasingly,
populist politicians—once in office—claim
the right to suppress the media, civil society,
and other democratic institutions by citing
support from a majority of voters. The resulting
changes make it more difficult for the opposition
to compete in future elections and can pave
the way for a new authoritarian regime.
• An expanding cadre of politicians in democracies
are eager to emulate or cooperate with
authoritarian rulers. European parties of the
nationalistic right and anticapitalist left have
expressed admiration for Putin and aligned
their policy goals with his. Others have praised
2
Freedom House
EVERY INDICATOR HAS DECLINED OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS
0.0
Electoral
Process*
Pluralism and
Participation
Functioning of
Government*
Expression and
Belief
Association and
Assembly*
Rule of Law
Personal and
Individual Rights
-0.1
-0.2
Change in Score, 2007-2016
-0.3
-0.4
-0.5
-0.6
-0.7
*Denotes indicators scored on a 12-point scale. All others are scored on a 16-point scale.
illiberal governments in countries like Hungary
for their rejection of international democratic
standards in favor of perceived national interests.
Even when there is no direct collaboration,
such behavior benefits authoritarian powers by
breaking down the unity and solidarity of the
democratic world.
• There has been a rise in authoritarian internationalism.
Authoritarian powers form loose
but effective alliances to block criticism at the
United Nations and regional organizations like
the Organization for Security and Co-operation
in Europe and the Organization of American
States, and to defend embattled allies like Syria’s
Bashar al-Assad. There is also growing replication
of what might be called authoritarian best
practices, vividly on display in the new Chinese
law on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
and efforts by Russia and others to learn from
China’s experience in internet censorship.
• Modern authoritarians are working to revalidate
the concept of the leader-for-life. One of the
seeming gains of the postcommunist era was
the understanding that some form of term limits
should be imposed to prevent incumbents from
consolidating power into a dictatorship. In recent
years, however, a number of countries have
adjusted their constitutions to ease, eliminate,
or circumvent executive term limits. The result
has been a resurgence of potential leaders-forlife
from Latin America to Eurasia.
• While more subtle and calibrated methods of repression
are the defining feature of modern authoritarianism,
the past few years have featured
a reemergence of older tactics that undermine
the illusions of pluralism and openness as well
as integration with the global economy. Thus
Moscow has pursued its military intervention in
Ukraine despite economic sanctions and overseen
the assassination of opposition figures;
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
Beijing has revived the practice of coerced public
“confessions” and escalated its surveillance
of the Tibetan and Uighur minorities to totalitarian
levels; and Azerbaijan has made the Aliyev
family’s monopoly on political power painfully
obvious with the appointment of the president’s
wife as “first vice president.”
• Modern authoritarian systems are employing
these blunter methods in a context of increased
economic fragility. Venezuela is already in the
process of political and economic disintegration.
Other states that rely on energy exports
have also experienced setbacks due to low oil
and gas prices, and China faces rising debt and
slower growth after years of misallocated investment
and other structural problems. But these
regimes also face less international pressure to
observe democratic norms, raising their chances
of either surviving the current crises or—if
they break down—giving way to something even
worse.
In subsequent sections, this report will examine the
methods employed by authoritarian powers to neutralize
precisely those institutions that were thought
to be the most potent weapons against a revitalized
authoritarianism. The success of the Russian and
Chinese regimes in bringing to heel and even harnessing
the forces produced by globalization—digital
media, civil society, free markets—may be their most
impressive and troubling achievement.
Modern authoritarianism is particularly insidious in its
exploitation of open societies. Russia and China have
both taken advantage of democracies’ commitment to
freedom of expression and delivered infusions of propaganda
and disinformation. Moscow has effectively
prevented foreign broadcasting stations from reaching
Russian audiences even as it steadily expands the
reach of its own mouthpieces, the television channel
RT and the news service Sputnik. China blocks the
websites of mainstream foreign media while encouraging
its corporations to purchase influence in
popular culture abroad through control of Hollywood
studios. Similar combinations of obstruction at home
and interference abroad can be seen in sectors including
civil society, academia, and party politics.
The report draws on examples from a broad group
of authoritarian states and illiberal democracies, but
the focus remains on the two leading authoritarian
powers, China and Russia. Much of the report, in
fact, deals with Russia, since that country, more than
any other, has incubated and refined the ideas and
institutions at the foundation of 21st-century authoritarianism.
Finally, a basic assumption behind the report is that
modern authoritarianism will be a lasting feature of
geopolitics. Since 2012, both Vladimir Putin and Xi
Jinping have doubled down on existing efforts to
stamp out internal dissent, and both have grown more
aggressive on the world stage. All despotic regimes
have inherent weaknesses that leave them vulnerable
to sudden shocks and individually prone to collapse.
However, the past quarter-century has shown that
dictatorship in general will not disappear on its own.
Authoritarian systems will seek not just to survive, but
to weaken and defeat democracy around the world.
4
Freedom House
Introduction
Modern Authoritarianism: Origins, Anatomy, Outlook
As the world’s democracies confront a dangerous
internal challenge from populist and nationalist
political forces, it is imperative that they recognize the
simultaneous external threat presented by modern
authoritarian regimes. These 21 st century authoritarians
developed an arsenal of new tactics to use
against their domestic opponents, and gone on the
offensive in an effort to subvert and replace the liberal
international order.
But modern authoritarian systems are not simply
adversaries of free societies. They also represent an
alternative model—a grim future for beleaguered
democracies that have already fallen under the sway
of illiberal leaders and have suffered an erosion of
freedom.
Democracy under siege
Global democracy is currently facing the repercussions
of what has been called the “decade of decline.”
The phrase describes a 10-year-plus period, from 2006
to 2016, during which the state of freedom experienced
more reversals than gains as measured by Freedom
in the World, the annual report on political rights
and civil liberties published by Freedom House. 1
According to Freedom in the World, the crucial
indicators of democracy experienced setbacks in
each of the 10 years in question. In all, 105 countries
suffered net declines, while 61 showed some measure
of improvement. The decade marked the longest
democratic slump of its kind in more than 40 years of
Freedom House analysis. 2
The decade of decline has been principally characterized
by a steady erosion of political institutions in established
authoritarian countries, or in countries that
were clearly headed in that direction. In other words,
repressive countries became even more repressive—
the bad became even worse. 3
However, a parallel pattern of institutional erosion has
affected some more democratic states, pushing them
into the category of “illiberal democracies.” In these societies,
elections are regularly conducted, sometimes
under conditions that are reasonably fair. But the state,
usually under the control of a strong party or leader,
applies much of its energy to the systematic weakening
of political pluralism and the creation of a skewed
electoral playing field. Opposition parties are often
impotent, freedom of the press is circumscribed, and
the judiciary tends to be dominated by the ruling party.
Countries that fit this description include Hungary,
Bolivia, Ecuador, and, if recent trends continue, Poland.
There are many reasons for the global decline in democratic
indicators, but the statistical evidence from
Freedom in the World suggests that modern authoritarian
regimes have found a way to survive without
resorting to democratic reforms, and that a number
of democracies—as part of the general loss of liberal
consensus—are engaging in their own antidemocratic
experiments.
Modern authoritarianism
The traditional authoritarian state sought monopolistic
control over political life, a one-party system organized
around a strongman or military junta, and direct
rule by the executive, sometimes through martial law,
with little or no role for the parliament.
Traditional dictatorships and totalitarian regimes were
often defined by closed, command, or autarkic economies,
a state media monopoly with formal censorship,
and “civil society” organizations that were structured
as appendages of the ruling party or state. Especially
in military dictatorships, the use of force—including
military tribunals, curfews, arbitrary arrests, political
detentions, and summary executions—was pervasive.
Often facing international isolation, traditional dictatorships
and totalitarian regimes forged alliances based on
www.freedomhouse.org
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
common ideologies, whether faith in Marxist revolution
or ultraconservative, anticommunist reaction.
As the 20th century drew to a close, the weaknesses
of both communist systems and traditional dictatorships
became increasingly apparent. Front and center
was the growing economic gap between countries
that had opted for market economies and regimes
that were committed to statist economies.
The political and economic barriers that had long sheltered
the old dictatorships were soon swept away, and
those that survived or recovered did so by making a
series of strategic concessions to the new global order.
Modern authoritarianism has a different set of defining
features:
• An illusion of pluralism that masks state control
over key political institutions, with co-opted or
otherwise defanged opposition parties allowed
to participate in regular elections
• State or oligarchic control over key elements of
the national economy, which is otherwise open
to the global economy and private investment,
to ensure loyalty to the regime and bolster
regime claims of legitimacy based on economic
prosperity
• State or oligarchic control over information on
certain political subjects and key sectors of the
media, which are otherwise pluralistic, with high
production values and entertaining content; independent
outlets survive with small audiences
and little influence
• Suppression of nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) that are focused on human rights or
political reform, but state tolerance or support
for progovernment or apolitical groups that work
on public health, education, and other development
issues
• Legalized political repression, with targets punished
through vaguely worded laws and politically
obedient courts
• Limited, selective, and typically hidden use of
extralegal force or violence, with a concentration
on political dissidents, critical journalists, and
officials who have fallen from favor
• Opportunistic, non-ideological cooperation with
fellow authoritarian states against pressure
for democratic reform or leadership changes,
international human rights norms and mechanisms,
and international security or justice
interventions
• Knowledge-sharing with or emulation of fellow
authoritarian states regarding tactics and legislation
to enhance domestic control
China and Russia
The two major modern authoritarian powers are China
and Russia.
Until fairly recently, the conventional wisdom was that
China’s one-party authoritarian system would gradually
relax as the middle class expanded and the country
became fully integrated into the global economic
and diplomatic systems. The leadership did expand
citizens’ freedom to travel, make money, and access
information and entertainment that did not touch on
sensitive subjects. But it has resolutely refused to give
up control over the political sphere.
In fact, the state has become increasingly aggressive
in its suppression of political dissent and information
that might challenge the Communist Party narrative.
The regime’s rhetoric and policies have become more
hostile to democracy and “Western” values. Its propaganda
asserts the superior efficiency of the one-party
system and sneers at the messiness of democracy.
And the focus of its repressive apparatus has steadily
expanded from a relatively narrow segment of political
opposition figures to encompass a broad collection of
target groups, including human rights lawyers, ethnic
minorities, Christians, women’s rights advocates, liberal
academics, and independent journalists.
Russia is much smaller than China in terms of population
and economic might, but it has emerged as
a leader of modern authoritarian innovation. Under
Vladimir Putin, the Russian regime pioneered the
capture of the media through state enterprises and
oligarchic cronies, the adoption of laws designed to
dismember civil society, the use of the judiciary as
an instrument of political harassment, and, perhaps
most importantly of all, the development of modern
propaganda and disinformation.
Russia has also been in the vanguard of a relentless
campaign against liberal values, and has moved
relentlessly to export authoritarian ideas and techniques
to other societies, both in neighboring
6
Freedom House
Eurasian countries and elsewhere in the world. While
today there is nothing that resembles the Comintern
of Soviet times, authoritarian countries have developed
an ad hoc network of cooperation that has
proven effective at the United Nations and in regional
bodies like the Organization of American States.
Adapting to survive
Modern authoritarianism matured as regimes sought
to defend themselves against the sorts of civil society
movements that triggered “color revolutions” in
Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the early 2000s.
On their own, formal opposition parties were relatively
easy to marginalize or co-opt, and traditional mass
media could be brought to heel through pressure on
private owners, among other techniques. But civil
society organizations presented a formidable challenge
in some settings, as they were able to mobilize
the public—especially students and young people—
around nonpartisan reformist goals and use relatively
open online media to spread their messages.
It is now a major objective of modern authoritarian
states to suppress civil society before it becomes
strong enough to challenge the incumbent political
leadership. Yet whereas dissidents were dispatched
to the gulag or explicitly exiled by the Soviets, or jailed
and murdered by traditional dictatorships like Augusto
Pinochet’s Chile, today’s activists are checked by
NGO regulations that control registration and foreign
funding, laws that allow arbitrary restrictions on public
protest, and trumped-up criminal charges for key
organizers that serve to intimidate others.
Modern authoritarianism has also devised special
methods to bring the internet under political control
without shutting it down entirely. While old-style dictatorships
like Cuba long prevented the widespread
use of the internet out of fear that online communications
would pose a threat to the state’s monopoly
on information, modern authoritarians understood
that a high rate of internet penetration is essential to
participation in the global economy. However, once
online media emerged as a real alternative to traditional
news sources and a crucial tool for civic and
political mobilization, these regimes began to step up
their interference.
The Chinese government has developed the world’s
most sophisticated system of internet controls. Its socalled
Great Firewall, a censorship and filtering apparatus
designed to prevent the circulation of information
that the authorities deem politically dangerous
without affecting nonsensitive information, requires
tremendous financial, human, and technological resources
to maintain. Other regimes have not attempted
anything approaching the scale of China’s system,
but some have constructed more limited versions or
simply relied on inexpensive offline techniques like
arrests of critical bloggers, direct pressure on the
owners of major online platforms, and new laws that
force internet sites to self-censor.
Alternative values
While modern authoritarians initially mobilized for
defensive purposes, to thwart color revolutions or
the liberal opposition, they have become increasingly
aggressive in challenging the democratic norms that
prevailed in the wake of the Cold War, and in setting
forth a rough set of political values as an alternative
to the liberal model. Examples of this phenomenon
include:
1. Majoritarianism: A signal idea of many authoritarians
is the proposition that elections are
winner-take-all affairs in which the victor has an
absolute mandate, with little or no interference
from institutional checks and balances. Putin,
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the
Venezuelan chavista leadership all behave as
if there are no valid controls on their authority,
the opposition has no rights, and the system
is theirs to dismantle and remake from top to
bottom. Disturbingly, the leaders of some democratic
societies have begun to embrace the
majoritarian idea. The Hungarian prime minister,
Viktor Orbán, has instituted a thorough overhaul
of the country’s constitution and national legislation
with an eye toward measures that will
insulate his party from future defeat.
2. Sovereignty: A number of governments have
invoked the doctrine of absolute sovereignty
to rebuff international criticism of restrictions
on the press, the smothering of civil society,
the persecution of the political opposition, and
the repression of minority groups. They claim
that the enforcement of universal human rights
standards or judgments from transnational legal
bodies represent undue interference in their
domestic affairs and a violation of national prerogatives.
3. Dictatorship of law: Initially articulated by Vladimir
Putin, this phrase has come to signify the
adoption of laws that are so vaguely written as to
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
give the authorities wide discretion in applying
them to regime opponents. Such measures are
typically paired with a court system that uses law
merely to justify political instructions from the executive
branch, making a mockery of due process
and international conceptions of the rule of law.
4. History revised: A number of countries have undertaken
a refashioning of history to buttress the
legitimacy and aims of the current government.
Historians and journalists are forbidden to cross
certain redlines set by the authorities. In China,
the state has prevented the publication of full,
accurate, or critical accounts of the Great Leap
Forward, the Cultural Revolution, or the Mao Zedong
era in general. In Russia, Joseph Stalin has
been rehabilitated. He is now officially portrayed
as a strong if mildly flawed leader rather than as
the man responsible for the deaths of millions of
his own people. In Turkey, Erdoğan has decreed
that high school students should study the defunct
Ottoman language, challenging a nearly
century-old reform linked to Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk, modern Turkey’s founder. 4
5. Democracy redefined: It is a testament to the
power of the democratic idea that authoritarian
leaders around the globe have claimed the mantle
of democracy for forms of government that
amount to legalized repression. Even as they
heap disdain on the liberal order, they have often
insisted on the validity of their own systems
as types of democratic rule. They even devise
terms to describe their special variant, such as
“sovereign democracy,” “revolutionary democracy,”
or “illiberal democracy.”
6. Return of the leader for life: Among the changes
invariably instituted by modern authoritarians is
the de facto or de jure removal of constitutional
limits on presidential terms. Preventing the
concentration of power in a single leader is a
fundamental goal of democratic governance, but
authoritarian propaganda has presented term
limits as artificial constraints, associated them
with foreign origins, and claimed that they do
not suit every country’s unique historical, cultural,
or security conditions.
While these ideas may not amount to a coherent
or complete ideology, they do form the basis for an
impressive degree of collaboration and alliance-building
that has brought together modern authoritarian
regimes with significantly different economic systems,
official creeds, and sources of political legitimacy.
A loose-knit league of authoritarians works to protect
mutual interests at the United Nations and other international
forums, subverting global human rights standards
and blocking precedent-setting actions against
fellow despots. With the formation of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, Russia, China, and a number
of Central Asian governments have come together to
discuss common regime-security strategies. 5
More disturbingly, modern authoritarians collaborate
to prop up some of the world’s most reprehensible
regimes, apparently reasoning that the toppling of
one dictator thins the herd, inspires imitation, and
endangers them all. This is most visible in Syria, where
Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela at various times
have offered diplomatic support, loans, fuel, or direct
military aid to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Dashed hopes
Democracy recorded unprecedented gains during the
20th century’s last decades. In 1975, Freedom House
found that just 25 percent of the world’s sovereign
states qualified for the Free category; by 2000, the
share of countries rated as Free had reached 45
percent. 6
The numbers told an optimistic story, and a series of
accelerating social trends suggested that the recent
improvements would hold firm and expand as the new
millennium dawned.
There was, to begin with, a strong identification of free
societies with free markets. The degree of economic
freedom varied from one society to the next, and
corruption was a problem in practically all of the new
democracies. But there was no longer a major bloc of
countries that rejected capitalism, and practically every
country sought to deepen their participation in the
global economic system, as witnessed by the number
of governments seeking admission to the World Trade
Organization. Authorities in the United States and
elsewhere predicted that as countries came to accept
the rules of the game set down by the WTO, they
would also be more amenable to accepting the norms
of liberal democracy, including fair elections, freedom
of expression, minority rights, and the rule of law.
A second development was the introduction of the internet
and other digital media. In the wake of the collapse
of the Soviet Union, communist governments in
8
Freedom House
Eastern Europe, and military dictatorships elsewhere,
there was an explosion of newspapers, radio and
television stations, and other independent media with
diverse editorial policies. But the internet in particular
was seen as an irresistible force that could render
censorship of any kind impossible. In 2000, President
Bill Clinton compared China’s efforts to control internet
content to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” 7
Third, a growing number of experts began to identify
a new instigator of democratic change in global civil
society. Unlike the “people’s movements” of earlier
decades, in which well-known leaders mobilized mass
demonstrations and often insurrectionary violence
with the goal of overthrowing despotic regimes, the
phenomenon that was labeled civil society consisted
of organizations that were often committed to a single
cause or a few causes united by a particular theme.
Most activists were young, with little prior involvement
in politics, and many regarded themselves as part of
a global effort to advance goals like reducing carbon
emissions, empowering women, or fighting corruption.
In a prescient 1997 article, Jessica T. Mathews predicted
that in the future global civil society would be the
triggering force behind liberal change. 8 She suggested
that in many cases civil society organizations would
play a more important role than governments. Her
words seemed prescient in light of later events in
Serbia, where student activists organized a campaign
that eventually brought about the downfall of President
Slobodan Milošević in 2000, and in Ukraine, where
young reformers played a pivotal role in ensuring that
the 2004 elections were not stolen through fraud.
In declaring that dictatorships or even authoritarian
methods were destined to succumb to this triad of
new social forces, commentators were also expressing
optimism about the universal appeal of liberal
values. The decade after the end of the Cold War
was a heyday for democratic ideas and norms. It was
increasingly expected that countries would not only
hold elections, but that their elections would meet
international standards and be judged “free and fair.”
There was also an expectation that political parties
would be able to compete on a reasonably level
playing field, that opposition leaders would not be
harassed or arrested, and that minorities would be
able to pursue their agendas through normal political
channels and not find it necessary to wage perpetual
protest campaigns.
However, there were nagging questions. It remained
unclear whether most societies would have access to
multiple sources of political ideas, multiple interpretations
of the news, and open scholarly inquiries about
the past. Would there be honest judicial proceedings,
especially in cases with political implications? Would
property rights be secure?
Beyond these primarily domestic issues, there was
another series of questions related to individual
governments’ relations with their neighbors and the
rest of the world. The end of the Cold War had brought
a peace dividend, both financial and psychological,
for all sides. At the time, most assumed that peace
would prove durable. But would the general decline
in military budgets hold? Would the new national
boundaries that divided the former Soviet Union and
the former Yugoslavia be sustainable?
As modern authoritarianism has taken root and expanded
its influence, the answers to these questions
are increasingly negative.
1. Freedom in the World 2016 (New York: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2016.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ceylan Yeginsu, “Turks Feud Over Change in Education,” New York Times, December 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/
world/europe/erdogan-pushes-ottoman-language-classes-as-part-of-tradtional-turkish-values.html.
5. Eleanor Albert, “The Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 14, 2015, http://www.cfr.org/
china/shanghai-cooperation-organization/p10883.
6. “Freedom in the World at 41,” in Freedom in the World 2014 (New York: Freedom House, 2014), https://freedomhouse.org/sites/
default/files/Freedom%20in%20the%20World%202014%20Booklet.pdf.
7. “China’s Internet: A Giant Cage,” Economist, April 6, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21574628-internetwas-expected-help-democratise-china-instead-it-has-enabled.
8. Jessica T. Mathews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 1997), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-01-01/
power-shift.
www.freedomhouse.org
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
Chapter 1
Validating Autocracy through the Ballot
A major difference between modern authoritarian
systems and traditional dictatorships lies in the role of
elections for parliament and head of state.
Twentieth-century dictatorships often dispensed with
elections entirely or conducted them under blatantly
fraudulent conditions. In the Soviet bloc, elections
were a pointless ritual in which citizens were pressured
to go to a polling place and cast ballots for the
Communist Party candidate, the only one permitted to
compete. Military and postcolonial dictatorships often
canceled elections on spurious “national emergency”
grounds, or rigged the outcome through crude ballot-stuffing
and open intimidation.
“We’re not perfect. But we do have
democracy.”
—Hugo Chávez
“Yes, we falsified the last election.…
In fact, 93.5 percent [of ballots were]
for President Lukashenka. People
say this is not a European result, so
we changed it to 86 percent.”
—Alyaksandr Lukashenka
At a certain point in the 1980s, however, the strongmen,
juntas, and revolutionary councils of the era
realized that reasonably fair elections could no longer
be avoided. Sometimes a ruling group understood
that this would likely lead to an opposition victory. But
usually, the incumbent leaders—and often foreign
journalists and diplomats—presumed that voters in
repressive settings preferred stability to uncertainty
and would opt for the reassuring faces of authority.
These calculations proved wildly misplaced. Opposition
parties swept to victory in country after country—in
Uruguay, Argentina, Nicaragua, South Korea,
the Philippines, Poland. The word “stunning” made
a frequent appearance in news accounts, as in the
stunning rejection of the ruling party in Poland, or the
stunning setback suffered by Chile’s Augusto Pinochet
in a referendum on the continuation of his dictatorship.
Or, perhaps most astonishing, the stunning
defeat of Communist Party stalwarts in a number of
Soviet cities in 1990 local elections. 1
Elections became a key force behind the wave of democratization
that engulfed much of the world during
that decade. Today, the obligation to hold some form of
multiparty balloting is felt by nearly all governments.
The illusion of pluralism
Yet just as with other democratic institutions, modern
authoritarians have mastered the techniques of control
over the electoral process, maintaining political
dominance behind a screen of false diversity.
They have adapted in many ways to the age of the internet
and the expectations of a better-informed public. In
the most sophisticated authoritarian states, professional
political operatives—in Russia they are called
“political technologists”—work just as hard as their
counterparts in the United States. Their goal, however,
is not to defeat opposition candidates in a competitive
setting, but rather to organize a system that creates the
illusion of competition while squelching it in reality.
In most countries, elections are largely “free and fair,”
meaning the playing field is reasonably level, there is an
honest tabulation of the ballots, vote buying and ballot
stuffing do not change the outcome, and independent
election observers are allowed to monitor the proceedings.
For 2015, Freedom in the World placed the number
of electoral democracies at 125, around 64 percent
of the world’s sovereign states. 2 By historical standards,
this is an impressive figure. Still, there are 70 countries
that do not qualify as electoral democracies. In all but
a few of these settings, elections are indeed held, but
they are either badly flawed or patently dishonest.
Yet even in systems where elections are tainted or fixed
outright, authoritarian leaders often claim legitimacy
from the ballot box. Of the countries assessed in this
study, only China rejects elections as part of the leadership’s
strategy for political control. In Russia, Turkey, Venezuela,
and elsewhere, the leadership invokes victory at
the polls as a mandate for government, including the
adoption of policies that are in fact deeply unpopular.
In some authoritarian states, elections are neither free
nor fair, with heavy manipulation that directly ensures
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Freedom House
the ruling party’s dominance. But in other settings, elections
are held under conditions that are relatively free
but effectively unfair. That is, the electoral playing field
is tilted to favor the incumbents, though the balloting
itself is not fixed and remains somewhat unpredictable.
In illiberal environments like Hungary and Turkey over
the past five years, prospects for an opposition victory
are remote, but not out of the question. Even in a quasi-dictatorship
like Venezuela, the opposition can score
impressive victories in parliamentary elections and mobilize
competitive campaigns for the presidency.
A display of supremacy
In December 2011, members of the Russian opposition
obtained video evidence of ballot stuffing committed by
operatives from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in
that month’s parliamentary elections. A series of unusually
large protests ensued. Putin weathered the furor and
went on to win a presidential poll the following year. But
for a brief period, Putin lost control of Russia’s political
narrative and was placed on the defensive. He seemed
angry and rattled, and subsequently blamed the turmoil
on the United States, claiming that statements by then
secretary of state Hillary Clinton were meant as a signal
to the opposition to launch a color revolution in Russia.
(The theme of Clinton as the puppet master behind
a plot aimed at regime change in Russia was revived
during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when the
Russian media displayed a clear preference for Republican
candidate Donald Trump and disdain for Clinton. 3 )
For Putin, the events of late 2011 and early 2012 were
evidence of weakness and political incompetence. A
ruling party whose triumph requires that party members
be ferried by bus from one voting district to another
to cast multiple ballots is, by today’s authoritarian
standards, a party that has grown careless and lazy.
Authoritarian rulers today seek to fix outcomes well
before election day through laws and policies that embed
unfairness at every level.
These leaders take a measure of pride in election victories,
even if the results were secured through dishonest
methods. They are held up as demonstrations of political
mastery rather than neutral measurements of public
preference. Putin’s victories at the polls enable him
to reject comparisons with Leonid Brezhnev and other
doddering, defensive Soviet-era leaders. Likewise, Hugo
Chávez boasted that unlike the colonels and generals
who ruled over South American dictatorships during
the 20th century, his tenure as president of Venezuela
was sanctified by no fewer than 17 elections, including
a number of referendums. Chávez won all but one. 4
There are, of course, examples of elections whose outcome
resembles the obviously rigged results in totalitarian
or junta-like settings. Eurasian presidents such
as Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and Belarus’s Alyaksandr
Lukashenka have repeatedly won elections with over
80 percent of the vote, and others have easily broken
the 90 percent barrier. The ruling Ethiopian Peoples’
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) won every
seat in the most recent parliamentary polling. 5
However, more sophisticated autocracies try to
manage elections so as to maintain a pluralist façade
and hide evidence of systematic fraud or intimidation.
In Russia, nominal opposition parties usually garner a
significant share of parliamentary seats. But all defer
to Putin as the country’s unchallenged leader and
typically vote according to his wishes on key issues. 6
Genuine opposition forces that seek to win political
power are not tolerated, particularly if they champion
liberal values. Putin has long sought to prevent
the rise of a democratic opposition that could raise
embarrassing questions about systemic corruption,
foreign interventions, or economic stagnation.
State media and state resources
Predetermining ballot results depends both on the
rules and regulations that govern the administration
of elections and on the regime’s control of other assets
that can influence the outcome.
Control of the media is crucial. The methods of modern
censorship are examined in more detail in another
section of this report. But when a would-be authoritarian
leader assumes power, one of the first goals is
to secure domination over whichever sector of the
media has the greatest impact on public opinion and
therefore on voting behavior.
The first clear indicator of Putin’s authoritarian bent was
his aggressive move to eliminate independent ownership
of Russia’s major television stations. Through various
forms of intimidation, the new president persuaded
private media moguls to surrender ownership to the
state, state-owned corporations, or political cronies.
Television thus became a propaganda vehicle for Putin
and a potent weapon against his critics, who have
since been mocked, vilified, or ignored on the nation’s
most important medium. All this occurred within a few
years after his election as president in 2000.
In Venezuela, Chávez used his authority over media
licensing to destroy Radio Caracas Television (RCTV),
a popular broadcast station that was aligned with the
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
opposition. Other critical voices in television and print
media later faced legal suits, regulatory harassment,
and withdrawal of advertising revenue until the owners
agreed to sell their holdings to business interests
that were on more friendly terms with the regime. 7
A prominent theme that runs through authoritarian
media is the imperfect nature of electoral processes
in the leading democracies, especially the United
States. The goal is less to portray elections in Russia,
Venezuela, or Iran as paragons of democratic practice
than to muddy the waters—to make the case that
countries like the United States have no right to lecture
others on democracy, and that perhaps all elections
are equally flawed. The Kremlin’s chief propagandist
described the 2016 U.S. election as “so horribly
noxious that it only engenders disgust towards what is
still inexplicably called a ‘democracy.’” 8
A second important instrument in authoritarians’
election toolbox is the state itself. During his period
as Venezuela’s president, Chávez became a master
at using state money and manpower to ensure voter
loyalty. In the 2012 election, the last before his death,
Chávez is estimated to have invested billions of dollars
in state resources, including giveaways of household
goods to ordinary citizens, in a rather unsubtle
vote-buying campaign.
That election vividly illustrated the powerful interplay
of state media and state resources in undemocratic
settings, and it is worth examining in greater detail. Superficially,
it seemed reasonably consistent with democratic
standards. The voting itself took place without
serious violence or major complaints of irregularities.
But to a substantial degree, the results were shaped by
the regime’s actions well before the ballots were cast.
Chávez had by that time secured an iron grip on the media.
Through the state or political allies, he controlled six
of the eight national television stations and about half
of the country’s radio stations. In some regions, he commanded
a virtual information monopoly. The opposition
was effectively shut out of the Chávez-aligned outlets,
earning mention only as cartoonish villains.
The incumbent benefited especially from a practice
whereby all radio and television stations are obliged to
preempt normal programming to accommodate the
president’s speeches to the nation. During 2012, Chávez
took advantage of this tool to fill 100 hours of broadcasting,
47 of them in the 90 days prior to the election. Aurelio
Concheso, an analyst with Transparency Venezuela,
placed the value of this free airtime at $1.8 billion. Another
government mandate required radio and television
stations to broadcast 10 state messages of 30 seconds
each on a daily basis; the messages, not surprisingly,
dovetailed with the arguments of the Chávez campaign.
Concheso estimated the value of this free airtime at
$292 million. In addition, the government spent an estimated
$200 million on advertising with private radio
and television stations. By contrast, the opposition had
access to five minutes of airtime a day, at a cost of $102
million. The opposition was thus limited to an incredible
4 percent of the airtime enjoyed by Chávez.
Meanwhile, according to Concheso, the state oil company
spent some $20 billion on gifts of home durable
goods, apartments, and outright cash subsidies to
purchase the allegiance of Venezuelan voters and
underscore the message that without Chávez, this
largesse would dry up.
Finally, a measure of fear was introduced through a
campaign suggesting that although the balloting was
secret, the government had ways of ascertaining a
voter’s choice. The threat had a special effect given
public memories of an episode in 2004, in which those
who signed a petition for a referendum to remove
Chávez from office were blacklisted and excluded
from government jobs, benefits, and contracts.
Favored tactics
The following are among the other tactics deployed by
modern authoritarians to ensure success at the polls:
1. Intimidating the opposition: Opposition leaders
are only occasionally targeted for assassination.
But they can face a variety of other cruel fates.
Wealthy businessman and opposition supporter
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was dispatched to a Russian
prison for 10 years for daring to challenge
Putin. In 2017, anticorruption campaigner Andrei
Navalny, widely regarded as the most serious
challenger to Putin, was effectively eliminated
from the 2018 presidential contest after being
convicted in a trumped-up embezzlement case. 9
In Malaysia, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim
has twice been convicted and jailed on sodomy
charges. Prominent political figures have also
been jailed in Belarus, Venezuela, Iran, Ethiopia,
Turkey, and Egypt, among many others. Human
rights activists and bloggers are also subject to
harassment and persecution. They are frequently
jailed on trumped-up charges of defamation,
tax fraud, or drug trafficking, among others.
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Freedom House
2. Marginalizing the opposition: As noted above,
authoritarian leaders use their media power to
paint critics as knaves or buffoons. Especially
through television coverage, opposition figures
are presented as clownish, effeminate, shady,
elitist, or enslaved by foreign interests. The message
is pounded home day after day, until the
image of the opposition as small and unfit to
rule is fixed in the public’s mind.
3. Tolerating the pseudo-opposition: Having jailed,
exiled, or silenced potentially competitive opposition
figures, authoritarians tolerate nominal opposition
parties that are effectively controlled by
the regime. These groups have accepted the supremacy
of the incumbent leadership and settled
into their roles in a stage-managed democracy.
4. Criminalizing protest: The crippling of formal
opposition parties leads many voters to channel
their dissent into loosely organized civic
activism, often relying on protests to mobilize
support and reach the broader public despite
state control of the media. Authoritarian governments
have responded by adopting harsher laws
on public assembly, enabling them to jail protest
leaders and even ordinary participants for
vaguely defined offenses like disturbing public
order and gathering without a permit. Protesters
can also be imprisoned on trumped-up charges,
such as assaulting a police officer or possessing
a weapon. This discourages others from joining
the civic movements and prevents them from
growing into organized political forces.
5. Discarding term limits: Term limits designed
to prevent the concentration of power in one
individual have been rolled back, circumvented,
or removed altogether in Venezuela, Nicaragua,
Bolivia, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and many
other countries over the past 15 years. 10 Endless
incumbency denies opposition forces an opportunity
to win over both voters and elements of
the ruling establishment that may be ready for
new leadership. It also promotes personal loyalty
at the expense of public service, stunts the
development of possible successors, reinforces
the impression that only the current leader is fit
to govern, and feeds a self-perpetuating fear of
political change.
Returning to old habits
While modern authoritarian regimes have generally
maintained some illusion of pluralism as one of their
main concessions to the post–Cold War international order,
a number of governments have been less attentive
to this priority, drifting back toward the electoral tactics,
and lopsided results, of 20th-century dictatorships.
In Belarus, the election of just two members of the
opposition to the rubber-stamp parliament in 2016 was
actually regarded as a step forward from the 2004, 2008,
and 2012 balloting, in which no opposition candidates
won seats. Lukashenka, in power since 1994, was
accused of directing an assassination squad prior to the
2001 presidential election. Four politicians and journalists
who had been critical of the incumbent disappeared
prior to the vote. After Lukashenka won another term in
a deeply flawed 2010 election, the authorities arrested
over 700 protesters, including seven of the nine opposition
presidential candidates. The regime later sentenced
three of the former candidates to prison terms. 11
Ethiopian opposition members were beaten and arrested
during the 2015 electoral campaign. The Semayawi
Party reported that more than 50 of its members were
arrested ahead of the polls, and nearly half of Semayawi
candidates were deregistered on administrative
grounds. The ruling EPRDF and its allies took all 547
seats in the lower house. The 2010 elections were also
tightly controlled, with local officials or neighborhood
militia going door to door and verifying that residents
had registered as members of the EPRDF. Voters were
threatened with the loss of their jobs, homes, or government
services if they did not turn out for the party.
The most charismatic opposition figure, the leader of
the Unity and Justice Party, Birtukan Mideksa, remained
in prison during the election, in which opposition
candidates took only two seats. 12
The possible motivations for retrograde electoral abuses
vary from country to country, but authoritarians
may feel emboldened to drop their quasi-democratic
camouflage due to the lack of diplomatic repercussions
for such actions. The European Union and the
United States have criticized Belarus as “Europe’s last
dictatorship,” but they always seem willing to give Lukashenka
another chance to improve relations based
on the thinnest hopes of reform. Democratic powers
have treated Ethiopia as a counterterrorism ally and a
model of rapid economic development, granting it billions
of dollars in foreign assistance.
Elections and democratic renewal
Whether through blatant repression or less obvious
methods, modern authoritarians seek to control the
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
outcome of elections. They need to hold votes to validate
their rule, but they also recognize the risk involved,
as elections remain a potent instrument of democratic
renewal even in deeply troubled societies.
The events of late 2014 and 2015 include vivid reminders
of the power of the ballot. In Nigeria, Africa’s
most populous country and largest economy, voters
who were fed up with governmental complacency,
terrorism, and graft rejected the incumbent president,
Goodluck Jonathan, and elected Muhammadu Buhari
to replace him. In Myanmar, a huge turnout produced
an overwhelming victory in parliamentary elections for
longtime opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her
National League for Democracy (NLD), a remarkable
turnaround in a country that until recently ranked
among the world’s most repressive.
Voters in Sri Lanka ousted their increasingly authoritarian
and divisive president, Mahinda Rajapaksa,
in favor of Maithripala Sirisena. Upon taking office,
Sirisena immediately overturned some of Rajapaksa’s
repressive policies and began repairing relations with
both the country’s Tamil minority and the international
community. And in Argentina, opposition candidate
Mauricio Macri won the presidency by defeating the
nominee of incumbent Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,
who with her late husband, Néstor Kirchner, had
dominated the executive branch for over a decade.
Combined with a victory for the democratic opposition
in Venezuela’s parliamentary elections, Macri’s
victory may have been the beginning of a rollback of
Latin America’s populist movements, which had previously
made impressive gains across the region. 13
Voters in these countries retained faith in the democratic
process even after experiencing hardship after hardship,
including military rule (Myanmar), civil war and authoritarian
rule (Sri Lanka), a terrorist scourge (Nigeria),
economic collapse and political repression (Venezuela),
and economic setback and unaccountable government
(Argentina). They prevailed despite, in some cases, an
electoral playing field tilted sharply against the opposition;
in other cases, a history of political violence; and in
still other cases, apprehensions about what lies ahead
when dictatorships give way to normal politics.
Some of these voters were also rejecting political
figures who had publicly disdained the world’s democracies
and drawn closer to authoritarian powers like
Russia, China, and Iran. They were willing to listen to
candidates who talked about the rule of law, freedom
of expression, and the right to be free of payoffs and
bribes, and they were unimpressed by those who
blamed every step backward on foreign plots.
There will always be dictators and would-be leaders
for life who grow overconfident, lose touch with the
mood of their people, and fail to do what it takes to
ensure victory at the polls, as apparently occurred in
The Gambia in late 2016. But the rest can be expected
to learn from such mistakes and invest the necessary
resources in a false mockery of democratic suffrage.
1. Arch Puddington, “The Rise of Virtual Elections,” Freedom at Issue, October 10, 2014, https://freedomhouse.org/blog/rise-virtual-elections.
2. Freedom in the World 2016 (New York: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2016.
3. See, among others, Steve Rosenberg, “Russian Media’s Love Affair with Trump,” British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), November
2, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37837432.
4. Javier Corrales, “Autocratic Legalism in Venezuela,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 2 (April 2015): 37–51, http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Corrales-26-2.pdf.
5. “Ethiopia,” in Freedom in the World 2016.
6. “Russia,” in Freedom in the World 2016.
7. “Venezuela,” in Freedom of the Press 2015 (New York: Freedom House, 2015), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/venezuela.
8. “Whoever Wins the American Presidential Election, Russia Comes Out Ahead,” Economist, November 8, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21709892-americas-campaign-has-served-vladimir-putins-purpose-discrediting-democracy-whoever-wins.
9. Neil MacFarquhar and Ivan Nechepurenko, “Aleksei Navalny, Viable Putin Rival, Is Barred from a Presidential Run,” New York Times,
February 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/world/europe/russia-aleksei-navalny-putin.html?_r=0.
10. Farid Guliyev, “End of Term Limits,” Harvard International Review, February 28, 2009, http://hir.harvard.edu/end-of-term-limits/.
11. “Belarus,” in Freedom in the World 2011 (New York: Freedom House, 2011), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2011/
belarus.
12. “Ethiopia,” in Freedom in the World 2016; “Ethiopia,” in Freedom in the World 2011 (New York: Freedom House, 2011), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2011/ethiopia.
13. “Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies,” in Freedom in the World 2016.
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Chapter 2
Propaganda at Home and Abroad
The following propositions have all appeared in the
Russian media over the past few years:
• The United States hired Islamic State terrorists
to sabotage the Russian commercial airliner that
was destroyed after takeoff in the Sinai in 2015.
• A three-year-old boy was crucified by the U.S.-
backed Ukrainian army in Slovyansk in 2014.
• The United States is planning a major war in Europe
to enable Washington to cancel its national
debt.
• The downing of the Malaysian airliner over
eastern Ukraine in 2014 was in fact the central
ingredient in an elaborate, American-driven plot
to place blame on Russia.
• American policies will lead to a global “homosexual
sodomite tsunami.”
This is just a small sample of similar claims or conjectures
that have made their way into Russian news coverage,
especially in the wake of Moscow’s occupation
of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. They stand
as a reminder that under Vladimir Putin, the Russian
media environment has been transformed from one
marked by vibrancy and diverse opinions (if not high
professional standards) to one dominated by blatant
propaganda on the most sensitive international topics
of the day.
The basic regime narrative of U.S.-led conspiracy is
applied to a broad set of themes: depression in oil
prices, downgrading of Russia’s credit ratings, political
change in Ukraine, Russia’s Olympics doping scandal.
Every problem, Russians are told, is due to American
plots and maneuvers.
Press freedom and democracy
A free press ranks among the most critical institutions
of liberal democracy. Among the reforms introduced
by Mikhail Gorbachev in his campaign to modernize
the Soviet system, glasnost, or openness, played the
most important role in challenging the decades-old
system of Soviet totalitarianism. Something similar
can be said of press freedom initiatives in other new
democracies during the latter part of the 20th century,
“If the 20th century was defined by
the battle for freedom of information
and against censorship, the 21st
century will be defined by malevolent
actors, states or corporations,
abusing the right to freedom of
information for quite other ends.”
—Vasily Gatov, media analyst
“Information wars have already
become standard practice and the
main type of warfare. The bombers
are now sent in after the information
campaign.”
—Dmitry Kiselyov, chief Russian propaganda strategist
particularly in postcommunist societies where strict
press censorship had prevailed for years. Even if the
professionalism and ethical standards of journalism
in those countries were not always up to the highest
levels, the fact that the press spoke with different
voices, different opinions, and even different biases
was a huge step toward a world in which democracy
was the norm.
Authoritarians push back
It is precisely because of press freedom’s central
importance to democracy that the new generation of
authoritarian leaders has made its annihilation a top
priority. However, modern authoritarians recognize
that the methods of the print and analog broadcast
era—prepublication censorship and stilted, formulaic
propaganda—were no longer viable in the age of
digital media and globalization.
At a minimum, governments that sought involvement
in the world economy found it advisable to tolerate a
measure of openness about budgets, economic data,
and those aspects of social life that are critical for
international business. Authoritarian leaders thus face
the dilemma of retaining domination over the political
story while permitting a degree of accurate information
about economic affairs.
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
Furthermore, because the population now has greater
access to foreign sources of news and entertainment,
regimes must grapple with the complex task of
monopolizing the political discourse in ways that are
far more convincing and compelling than the robotic
pronouncements that played such a crucial part in
communism’s loss of credibility.
As is the case with so much of modern authoritarian
practice, Russia has taken the lead in developing strategies
and methods of media domination. The system
built under Vladimir Putin is defined by the following
characteristics:
1. Control over the commanding heights of the
media: Among Putin’s first goals as president
was securing domination of the most influential
media—the national television stations. They
had been controlled by various oligarchs, who
used the outlets to promote their personal and
political interests. While the resulting journalism
was hardly objective and independent, Russian
television and Russian media generally were notable
for their liveliness and diversity during the
presidency of Boris Yeltsin. All did not sing out
of the same hymnal, and most influential outlets
reflected a variety of opinions about government
policies, including the Kremlin’s conduct of the
war in Chechnya.
Putin moved quickly to change these conditions.
He reorganized and exerted tighter political control
over state-owned television stations, brought
others under indirect state control, and ensured
that most of the remainder fell into the hands
of loyal businessmen. Likewise, a number of the
country’s leading newspapers and journals were
bought by cronies of the leadership. The era of
media diversity came to an abrupt end. 1
2. Distortion of coverage on sensitive topics: Unlike
in communist times, the media do provide
independent coverage of topics that the Kremlin
considers less politically relevant. However,
some normally apolitical topics can take on a
highly political meaning. For example, coverage
of the penalties meted out to Russian Olympic
athletes for systematic doping reflected the
leadership’s position that the scandal was a
product of American machinations. 2
3. Shrinking gap between offline and online media:
For much of Putin’s tenure, the internet
remained lightly regulated in comparison with
the Kremlin’s tight control over television and
other mass media. However, Freedom House
has noted growing restrictions over the past
several years, with a series of new laws, prosecutions,
and ownership changes that have reduced
the Russian internet’s freedom and diversity in
practice. 3
4. A small stable of independent outlets: A token
number of media outlets are allowed to remain
independent at the sufferance of the Kremlin.
These include the newspaper Novaya Gazeta,
the indirectly state-owned radio station Ekho
Moskvy, and a handful of internet-based news
services, some of which are forced to operate
from neighboring countries. Coerced ownership
changes and other forms of pressure have
gradually reduced the already tiny independent
media sector in recent years. And the remaining
independent outlets have little reach, small audiences,
and at best modest impact on domestic
politics.
5. The ‘weaponization’ of information: While Putin
has used the press as a propaganda instrument
throughout his political career, it was after his
third term as president began in 2012 that the
media were given a special, central role in demonizing
Putin’s critics, preparing the Russian
people for armed conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere,
depicting Europe as morally corrupt, and
attributing Russia’s problems and setbacks to
the United States. 4 With the invasion of Ukraine
in 2014, the world awakened to the return of
propaganda as an instrument of warfare. This is
not just normal political spin or public diplomacy,
but sheer, raw propaganda that deliberately
crosses the line between interpretation of facts
and outright mendacity. The aim is both to stir
up belligerence at home and to isolate, confuse,
and demoralize the enemy. 5
6. The centralization of information policy: The
creation in 2013 of Rossiya Segodnya, an umbrella
organization for Moscow’s foreign news services,
signaled the leadership’s intention to use
information in a more strategic way to advance
the country’s international objectives. Dmitry
Kiselyov, a controversial television presenter,
was named to head the new entity. 6 He actually
embraces his identity as the Kremlin’s chief
propagandist, arguing that “Western” concepts
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of journalistic neutrality are fraudulent and
self-serving. There is, he contends, no difference
between his role and the role of a chief editor of
Reuters or the Associated Press. In one interview,
Kiselyov equated those two news services
with Rossiya Segodnya: “Both are propaganda
agencies—they shape the dominant narrative
and tell their audiences what and how to think.”
He continued: “In today’s world, information—
how it is gathered, analyzed, interpreted and
processed … pushes a value system, certain
views on good and evil, and shapes attitudes to
different events.” 7
7. The irrelevance of truth: “For the Soviets, the
idea of truth was important—even when they
were lying,” Peter Pomerantsev has written. “Soviet
propaganda went to great lengths to ‘prove’
that the Kremlin’s theories or bits of information
were fact.” By contrast, in today’s Russia the idea
of truth is seen as irrelevant and “the borders
between fact and fiction have become utterly
blurred.” Pomerantsev quotes Russia’s deputy
minister of communications as admonishing
journalism students at Moscow State University
to forget about high ideals. “We should
give students a clear understanding: They are
going to work for The Man, and The Man will tell
them what to write, what not to write, and how
this or that thing should be written.” 8 Russian
propaganda outlets, especially RT, derive their
influence from a clever blend of act and faction,
mixing reports on genuine events with exaggerations,
biased coverage, and outright lies. And
this mixture of fact and fiction is presented with
modern production techniques that mimic credible
outlets like the BBC.
Propaganda works
The idea that governments can influence events
through propaganda once seemed far-fetched in the
internet age. Developments in Ukraine, however, have
spurred a reassessment of propaganda’s role in setting
the stage for intervention abroad and repression at
home.
According to numerous accounts in the international
media, many Russians believe that the Ukrainian government
is responsible for massive war crimes, including
the crucifixion of small children and the downing
of the Malaysian Airlines passenger jet. 9 Many of the
wildest assertions have been reinforced by altered or
repurposed images that allegedly depict Ukrainian
atrocities but actually show events in Mexico, Syria,
Iraq, or other zones of civil conflict. Ordinary Russians
and many Ukrainian consumers of Russian media
have told foreign journalists of fears that “fascism” has
come to power in Ukraine. 10
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the Ministry
of Truth advanced what today would be called a regime
narrative, with accounts of never-ending conflict
abroad and treasonous enemies within. In similar
fashion, though with considerably more finesse and
sophistication than was described in Orwell’s masterpiece,
Russian media today preach a strident message
of external encirclement by Russophobes in Ukraine,
the Baltics, Georgia, and elsewhere, and internal
fifth-columnists among bloggers, civil society organizations,
and advocates of gay rights.
The media in democracies, especially in Europe,
proved unprepared for the deluge of Russian propaganda
during and after the seizure of Crimea. Putin
was thus able to drum home the portrayal of Ukraine
as a “divided state” or an “artificial state,” labels that
could be attached to many sovereign nations, Russia
included. 11 Few were ready to mount a challenge
to the Russian proposition that Ukraine’s status
was unique, and was a legitimate cause for Russia’s
concern and even a justification for war. The Russian
propaganda machine also zeroed in on Ukraine’s supposed
lack of respect for minority rights, a problem
that Moscow had not raised during the administrations
of Viktor Yanukovych or Leonid Kuchma. Neither
Ukrainians nor informed observers in the outside
world believed that Ukraine was faced with a civil war.
This was entirely a creation of Moscow’s propaganda
and active intervention. 12
Russia’s government is not alone in its use of propaganda
to further its interests. But it is uniquely aggressive
in pressing the dominant theme of the moment
and the most effective in mimicking the idioms of
modern commercial media while doing so. Furthermore,
as the country faces serious decay in economic
and other material terms, the Kremlin sees success
in the war of information as critical to Russia’s identity
as a great power. Other authoritarian regimes will take
note of Russia’s successes, and act accordingly.
In past eras, dictators’ instrument of choice was censorship.
However, people understood that they were
being cheated when the authorities banned books
and prosecuted those who possessed “unauthorized
literature.” Under a modern propaganda regime,
www.freedomhouse.org
17
BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
alternative perspectives are permitted on a carefully
rationed basis. But dissenting opinions are invariably
subjected to relentless attack and ridicule, and
the dissidents themselves face a form of character
assassination in which their views are twisted to make
them appear foolish, extreme, unpatriotic, or immoral.
Christopher Walker, a vice president at the National
Endowment for Democracy who has written extensively
on modern authoritarianism, believes that control
of information is the most important achievement
of today’s generation of autocrats:
I think modern authoritarians have been
adept at adjusting to the new environment.
They recognize that trying to control the
wealth of information out there is impossible,
and therefore they don’t try. There are
a number of countries which have found
effective ways to incorporate entertainment
and culture into their media offerings while
keeping domination over the political sphere.
They have thus defied the assumptions we
held 20 years ago when the internet was
emerging. The conventional wisdom then
was that the internet guaranteed media
diversity, and there is no way regimes could
keep the genie in the bottle. In fact, in many
countries authoritarians have kept the genie
in the bottle through managing the political
narrative and denying people access to key
information. 14
Walker’s comments certainly apply to conditions in Russia.
During the communist period, Soviet propaganda
was meant to justify both state socialism and Russia’s
isolation from the global economic system and Western
culture. In Russia, China, and elsewhere, it is now possible
for citizens to enjoy the latest international music,
fashion, and entertainment while hating the liberal
values that are systematically disparaged in the media.
What is tragic about all this is that Russians already
came through a decades-long period of propaganda
in which reality was twisted and lies circulated as a
conscious matter of national policy. Orwell and other
foes of totalitarian rule sought to describe the danger
that propaganda and censorship posed to knowledge,
reality, and independent thought. But instead of
things getting better after the demise of totalitarianism,
a newer and in some ways more insidious form of
information control has emerged, one which does not
so much try to persuade people that the government
line is the only correct line, but that facts do not exist
as such and nothing can be believed.
China: 21st-century censorship
The Chinese model of information control differs in
crucial ways from the propaganda methods favored by
Russia. Especially in its policies towards the internet,
China focuses its energies on preventing access to information
or news on a wide and perpetually evolving
range of subjects that the ruling Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) regards as sensitive.
Under Xi Jinping, who took power in late 2012, the
government has been much more open in arguing for
the right of the political leadership to censor internet
content. He has, in fact, launched a campaign designed
to radically redraw the global rules on internet
freedom so as to enshrine the concept of “internet
sovereignty,” according to which individual countries
would “independently choose their own path of cyber
development” and “model of cyber regulation.” 15
In late 2015, Xi also made the baffling statement,
“Freedom is what order is meant for, and order is
the guarantee of freedom.” 16 Over the next several
months, regulators moved to enforce the president’s
vision for tighter CCP control over all news media and
imposed rules that further restricted the production
of independent news content by online outlets. 17
Perhaps most important have been the threats to the
livelihood and personal liberty of bloggers and online
commentators. In recent years, the state has pursued
a campaign of arrest, prosecution, and public humiliation
directed against well-known microbloggers
and other media personalities, including a series of
televised “confessions.” The machinery of repression
was directed against those who had used their platforms
to criticize the leadership or its policies, and to
a disturbing extent, the effort has been successful in
silencing such criticism.
Among other recent developments in the CCP’s censorship
drive:
• The authorities have punished journalists
for publishing news about the economy that
highlighted negative trends, and issued media
directives aimed at shaping coverage of economy-related
topics. The economy was the second
most censored topic in China in 2015, a year
that featured a dramatic stock-market crash and
slowing economic growth. 18
18
Freedom House
• Chinese censors sent out guidelines listing subjects
that should not be covered or not covered
in a negative way during parliamentary sessions
in 2016. Included on the list were the wealth
of parliamentary delegates, military budgets,
compliance with international human rights
conventions, air pollution, church demolitions,
and jokes about parliamentarians’ proposals. 19
• Censorship officials quashed coverage of the
“Panama Papers,” the trove of documents leaked
in 2016 that listed the offshore holdings of the
global elite, including the relatives of top Chinese
officials. 20
• China added Time and the Economist to the list
of blocked media websites in 2016, apparently
in retaliation for articles that were critical of Xi
Jinping’s accumulation of power. 21
• In February 2016 visits to China Central Television
(CCTV), the Xinhua news agency, and
the People’s Daily newspaper—the flagships of
the party and state media—Xi admonished the
assembled journalists to give absolute support
to the party leadership and later declared that
all media should “have the party as their family
name.” 22
While critical voices can still be found on the internet,
the authorities have been highly successful in
suppressing material that might lead to any broad
form of online protest or collective action. In addition
to intrusive laws and regulations, the regime deploys
armies of paid and volunteer commentators to flood
social media with progovernment remarks, influence
online discussions, report or attack those who make
antigovernment comments, or sow confusion about
particular incidents that might reflect poorly on the
leadership. 23
The overall goal of this strategy is to weaken the
internet’s potential as a mobilizing force for critics or
reformers. Indeed, after years of intense pressure, the
medium is drawing closer to Xi Jinping’s ideal of an
internet that is “clear and bright.” 24
Global reach
Both Russia and China have launched ambitious and
expensive projects to expand the reach of propaganda
and censorship beyond their borders. Russia’s project is
better known due to RT, a global television network that
is available to foreign audiences in a number of languages
and through many cable packages. Russia has
also launched Sputnik, an international news service,
in multiple languages. These outlets tend to be more
effective than China’s at imitating the production styles
and intentionally contentious formats now employed
by many major outlets in democratic countries.
The degree to which RT and other arms of the Russian
global media apparatus actually influence the debate
about Russia is unclear. RT makes grandiose claims
of high viewership, but some analysts believe that its
audience in the United States and elsewhere is much
lower than asserted, and that its sizeable audience on
YouTube may be inflated by enticing video clips with
little political relevance. 25
When it was launched in 2005, RT’s programming
stressed the achievements of Russia and the strong
leadership of Vladimir Putin. Subsequently, the focus
changed to negative messages about the West,
especially the United States. Programs have chronicled
American poverty, inequality, political hypocrisy,
racial injustice, and other real or perceived flaws. The
network often promotes conspiracy theories about
everything from the destruction of New York’s World
Trade Center in 2001 to America’s alleged role as puppet
master behind the Ukrainian protest movement of
2013–14. 26
Superficially, China’s overseas propaganda efforts
seem less aggressive. While Beijing has greatly expanded
the capacity of CCTV’s international broadcasts
and opened media offices around the globe,
the news content is less polemical and therefore less
interesting than that of RT.
But the CCP’s ultimate objectives may actually be far
more ambitious. Rather than engaging, like Russia, in
what amount to guerrilla-style attacks on mainstream
news and information abroad, the Chinese regime is
using its superior economic muscle to steadily gain
control over how China is depicted in news coverage
and popular culture in the rest of the world, and to
establish something of a consensus on the idea of a
“sovereign internet.”
Its various tactics include state pressure on foreign
correspondents tasked with informing the world
about developments in China: Those who are too critical
or too aggressive in conducting investigations into
sensitive matters may find their visas revoked, their
outlet’s website blocked, and their employers placed
in a sort of political purgatory. 27
www.freedomhouse.org
19
BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
The CCP has also asserted control over news outlets
in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese diaspora communities
around the world. 28 Beijing has used pressure
tactics and exerted influence through intermediaries
to change editors or owners of critical outlets in
Hong Kong. 29 Wealthy progovernment forces from the
mainland have begun to buy up media outlets in Hong
Kong and elsewhere. 30 And there have been instances
in which businessmen with economic interests in
China have attempted to expand their media holdings
in Taiwan. 31
Perhaps more disturbing is China’s effort to purchase
influence in global culture through its state-affiliated
and nominally private companies. For example, Visual
China Group, a mainland company, has purchased
the image and licensing division of Corbis, a company
that controls a huge archive of historically important
photographs. The trove includes iconic photographs
of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations,
which CCP censors have worked hard to keep out of
the Chinese media. Those involved in the sale offered
assurances that the new owners would not hinder the
global circulation of politically sensitive images, but
there is little to prevent them from casting aside such
pledges at some future date. 32
Another Chinese company, Dalian Wanda Group,
has raised concerns with its rapid incursions into the
U.S. film industry. Already the world’s largest owner
of cinemas, including the second-largest U.S. theater
chain, Wanda purchased Legendary Entertainment, a
production company, in 2016 and is said to be interested
in gaining control of a major Hollywood studio.
American lawmakers were sufficiently disturbed by
Wanda’s initiatives to request a Justice Department investigation.
There is concern that China’s companies,
with state encouragement, are pursuing influence in
Hollywood to ensure a favorable depiction of China
and its CCP regime in major films. 33 Even with studios
under U.S. ownership, the international media have
repeatedly uncovered cases in which U.S. filmmakers
altered elements of their work to address or anticipate
the objections of Chinese censors, who serve as gatekeepers
to the country’s lucrative domestic market. 34
Exploiting democratic culture for authoritarian ends
Ironically, some products of democratic culture have
facilitated the work of modern authoritarian propagandists.
The notion that there is no such thing as
objective truth and that history is nothing more than a
contest of competing narratives owes its popularity to
radical theorists who have gained a strong foothold in
academia and even among some who call themselves
journalists, such as Glenn Greenwald.
While accusations that the press is biased or publishes
lies are common in American political campaigns,
the hysterical charges hurled by Donald Trump against
the media during the 2016 presidential campaign
served to reinforce the Kremlin’s model of a world in
which the truth is determined by power rather than
impartial investigation.
Moscow especially makes shrewd use of an unfortunate
journalistic habit in which evenhandedness—a
worthy goal when presenting two sides in a genuine
debate—is improperly applied, so that patently false
assertions are treated as symmetrical with legitimate
views or facts.
Many outside Russia would not disagree with Kiselyov’s
dismissive views on the concept of impartial
reporting. In meeting the challenge of authoritarian
propaganda, a good place to start would be a reaffirmation
of the central role occupied by high-quality,
traditional journalism in democratic societies.
1. See for example “Russia,” in Freedom of the Press 2004 (New York: Freedom House, 2004), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2004/russia.
2. Christopher Walker and Robert Orttung, “Russia’s Media Autarky Strengthens Its Grip,” Real Clear World, November 30, 2014, http://
www.realclearworld.com/articles/2014/11/30/russias_media_autarky_110826.html.
3. “Russia,” in Freedom on the Net 2016 (New York: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/russia.
4. Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money
(New York: Institute of Modern Russia, 2014), http://www.interpretermag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The_Menace_of_Unreality_Final.pdf.
5. Ibid.
6. “From Burning Hearts to Civil Unions: The Unlikely Evolution of Dmitry Kiselyov,” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, June 30, 2015,
http://www.rferl.org/a/dmitry-kiselyov-civil-unions-lgbt-unlikely-evolution/27102541.html; Joshua Yaffa, “Dmitry Kiselev Is Redefining
the Art of Russian Propaganda,” New Republic, July 1, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118438/dmitry-kiselev-putins-favorite-tv-host-russias-top-propogandist.
20
Freedom House
7. “Dmitry Kiselev: ‘Western Behavior Borders on Schizophrenia,’” Sputnik, April 5, 2014, https://sputniknews.com/analysis/20140405189054528-Dmitry-Kiselev-Western-behavior-borders-on-schizophrenia/.
8. Peter Pomerantsev, “Russia and the Menace of Unreality,” Atlantic, September 9, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/
archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/.
9. Editorial Board, “Putin’s Propaganda Keeps Russians in the Dark about Ukraine and More,” Washington Post, August 31,
2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putins-propoganda-keeps-russians-in-the-dark-about-ukraine-andmore/2014/08/31/6ba4114a-2fc5-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html?utm_term=.835f55ca0486.
10. Janina Semenova, “Behind Russia’s TV Propaganda Machine,” Deutsche Welle, February 9, 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/behind-russias-tv-propaganda-machine/a-18689297.
11. Alexander Motyl, “Is Russia Artificial?” World Affairs, November 7, 2014, http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/
russia-and-ukraine-artificial-or-authentic.
12. Halya Coynash, “Russia Continues Its False Narrative as Defender of Oppressed Minorities in Ukraine,” Human Rights in Ukraine,
March 29, 2014, http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1396038633.
14. Interview with author.
15. “China Touts Its Great Firewall in Push for Internet Control,” Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/
china-touts-its-great-firewall-in-push-for-internet-control-1450251090.
16. Tom Phillips, “China’s Xi Jinping Says Internet Users Must Be Free to Speak Their Minds,” Guardian, December 16, 2015, https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/16/china-xi-jinping-internet-users-freedom-speech-online.
17. “Xi Jinping Visits Flagship State Media, Lays Out Vision for Party Control,” China Media Bulletin no. 113 (March 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/china-media/china-media-bulletin-issue-no-113-march-2016;
“New Rules Clamp Down on Online News,” China
Media Bulletin no. 116 (September 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/china-media/china-media-bulletin-issue-no-116-september-2016.
18. “China’s Most Censored News Topics in 2015,” China Media Bulletin no. 111 (January 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/china-media/china-media-bulletin-issue-no-111-january-2016.
19. Didi K. Tatlow, “What Chinese Media Mustn’t Cover at the ‘2 Sessions,’” New York Times, March 9, 2016, http://www.nytimes.
com/2016/03/10/world/asia/china-news-censorship-two-sessions.html.
20. Michael Forsythe and Austin Ramzy, “China Censors Mentions of ‘Panama Papers’ Leaks,” New York Times, April 5, 2016, http://
www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/asia/china-panama-papers.html.
21. Emily Feng, “China Blocks Economist and Time Websites, Apparently over Xi Jinping Articles,” New York Times, April 8, 2016, http://
www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/world/asia/china-blocks-economist-time.html.
22. Edward Wong, “Xi Jinping’s News Alert: Chinese Media Must Serve the Party,” New York Times, February 22, 2016, http://www.
nytimes.com/2016/02/23/world/asia/china-media-policy-xi-jinping.html.
23. “China,” in Freedom on the Net 2016 (New York: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/china.
24. David Bandurski, “How Xi Jinping Sees the Internet,” China Media Project, December 9, 2015, http://cmp.hku.
hk/2015/12/09/39451/.
25. Katie Zevadski, “Putin’s Propaganda TV Lies About Its Popularity,” Daily Beast, September 17, 2015, http://www.thedailybeast.com/
articles/2015/09/17/putin-s-propaganda-tv-lies-about-ratings.html.
26. Neil MacFarquhar, “A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories,” New York Times, August 28, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/world/europe/russia-sweden-disinformation.html.
27. PEN America, “New PEN America Report Shows Growing Pressure on Foreign Correspondents to Bias Coverage in China,” news
release, September 22, 2016, https://pen.org/press-release/2016/09/22/new-pen-america-report-shows-growing-pressure-foreign-correspondents-bias.
28. Sarah Cook, The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship: How the Communist Party’s Media Restrictions Affect News Outlets around
the World (Washington: Center for International Media Assistance, 2013), http://www.cima.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/
CIMA-China_Sarah%20Cook.pdf.
29. Michael Forsythe and Alan Wong, “Timing of Editor’s Firing Has Hong Kong Worried about Press Freedom,” New York Times, April 20,
2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/world/asia/hong-kong-ming-pao-editor.html.
30. David Barboza, “Alibaba Buying South China Morning Post, Aiming to Influence Media,” New York Times, December 11, 2015, http://
www.nytimes.com/2015/12/12/business/dealbook/alibaba-scmp-south-china-morning-post.html.
31. Ben Goren, “China’s Influence on Taiwan’s Media,” Chinet, June 23, 2014, http://chinet.cz/reviews/contemporary-china/chinas-influence-on-taiwans-media/.
32. Mike McPhate, “With Corbis Sale, Tiananmen Protest Images Go to Chinese Media Company,” New York Times, January 27, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/business/media/with-corbis-sale-tiananmen-protest-images-go-to-chinese-media-company.html.
33. Michael Forsythe, “Justice Dept. Is Asked to Review Chinese Company’s Hollywood Purchases,” New York Times, October 7, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/world/asia/us-hollywood-dalian-wanda.html.
34. Clare Baldwin and Kristina Cooke, “How Sony Sanitized the New Adam Sandler Movie to Please Chinese Censors,” Reuters, July 24,
2015, http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-film/.
www.freedomhouse.org
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
Chapter 3
The Enemy Within: Civil Society at Bay
Among the more surprising developments in
21st-century politics are the reversals experienced by
civil society, once regarded as an irresistible force in
the global struggle for democracy.
According to Freedom in the World, the ability of
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other
civil society institutions to function without state restrictions
has suffered a pronounced decline over the
past decade. The setbacks have been concentrated in
authoritarian states like Russia, China, Venezuela, and
Iran. But civil society has also met with growing problems
in democracies—India and Indonesia among
them—and in settings where democracy’s prospects
are unclear, as with Ecuador, Hungary, and Kenya.
The growing offensive against civil society is in many
respects a tribute to the prominent role that NGOs
have come to play in the political life of most countries.
An active civil society is often seen as a formidable
threat to a repressive or illiberal status quo. Civil
society was the linchpin in the successful popular
revolutions in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia. In fact,
civil society organizations frequently pose a greater
threat to autocracy than do traditional opposition parties,
which have proven relatively easy for determined
strongmen to sideline, neutralize, or co-opt. Civil society
movements, by contrast, are generally composed
of younger activists, committed to a cause, more
resilient, more agile, and less prone to corruption.
To be sure, even some authoritarian states can boast
of an active and growing civil society sector consisting
of humanitarian organizations, religious entities,
conservation groups, associations focused on public
health or development, and so forth. It is with the
NGOs that pursue politically sensitive objectives—human
rights advocacy, democratic reform, or anticorruption
measures—that oppressive leaders have
serious differences. Especially in countries where
elections have been rendered meaningless, civil society
groups can become surrogates for a democratic
opposition, and are therefore regarded with deep
suspicion by the leadership.
The specter of ‘color revolution’
The term “color revolution” emerged in 2003–05 to
describe a phenomenon whereby an existing political
leadership is overthrown by a popular movement
”Countries in western Asia and
northern Africa, Ukraine and Thailand,
which have experienced street
protests and even armed conflicts,
have been led astray to the wrong
path of Western-style democracy,
that is, ‘street politics.’… The United
States and some Western forces
have been involved in the street
politics in these countries, either on
stage or behind the scenes.”
—Xinhua, paraphrasing an editorial by Mi Bohua of the
People’s Daily
“In the modern world, extremism is
being used as a geopolitical instrument
and for remaking spheres of
influence. We see what tragic consequences
the wave of so-called color
revolutions led to…. We should do
everything necessary so that nothing
similar ever happens in Russia.”
—Vladimir Putin
using tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Successful nonviolent democratic revolutions are not
new. Perhaps the first color revolution took place in
1974, when a dictatorship in Portugal was overthrown
by military officers who drew on the support of civilian
democracy advocates. Later peaceful revolutions
overcame authoritarian regimes in the Philippines,
South Korea, Chile, and Poland.
In the 21st century, however, the definitive events
behind the new label took place in Georgia (2003) and
Ukraine (2004–5). Both countries were governed by
politicians with close ties to Moscow who were either
personally corrupt or tolerated high levels of graft.
In the Ukrainian elections of 2004, there was strong
evidence of rigging to ensure the victory of Viktor Yanukovych,
the candidate of the pro-Russian old guard.
22
Freedom House
Tightening the Screws: The Kremlin’s Legal Campaign against Civil Society
l JANUARY 2006: Amendments to Certain
Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation
This law gave authorities the power to deny
registration to organizations that “threaten”
Russia, bar foreigners from opening
organizations, subject foreign funding to more
scrutiny, and make the founding and operation of
organizations excessively burdensome, including
by imposing frequent audits and reporting
requirements.
l JULY 2012: Amendments to the Law on
Noncommercial Organizations, the Criminal
Code, the Law on Public Associations, and the
Law on Combating Money Laundering and the
Financing of Terrorism
This package of measures, which included
the provision known as the “foreign agents
law,” required nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) that receive foreign funding and carry
out broadly defined “political activity” to register
with the Justice Ministry and meet onerous
requirements, including filing quarterly financial
reports, submitting to annual and unscheduled
audits, subjecting foreign donations to
monitoring, and marking all publications and
events with the “foreign agent” label. Penalties
for noncompliance include fines, suspension
of funds, and imprisonment of personnel.
Other amendments penalized creating and
participating in “illegitimate” groups and groups
that urge citizens to shirk their civic duties or
perform other illegal acts.
l FEBRUARY 2014: Amendments to the Law on
Noncommercial Organizations
This change greatly expanded the list of reasons
for unannounced audits of NGOs.
l JUNE 2014: Amendments to the Law on
Noncommercial Organizations
Enacted to strengthen enforcement of the
foreign agents law, this legislation authorized
the Justice Ministry to register NGOs as foreign
agents without their consent and without a court
order, and shifted the burden of proof to NGOs,
compelling them to go to court to fight the label.
l MAY 2015: Amendments to Certain Legislative
Acts of the Russian Federation
Known as the “undesirable organizations
law,” this package of changes empowered the
prosecutor general to shut down or restrict the
activities of NGOs that are deemed “undesirable,”
vaguely defined as groups that pose “a threat
to the foundation of the constitutional order of
the Russian Federation, the defense capability
of the country, or the security of the state.”
The amendments bar such organizations from
opening delegate offices, carrying out programs,
and promoting their activities in Russia, and
subject collaborators with these NGOs to
possible fines and imprisonment.
l JUNE 2016: Amendments to the Law on Public
Associations and the Law on Noncommercial
Organizations
This legislation revised the loose definition of
“political activity” under the foreign agents law,
but rather than narrowing the meaning of the
term, it applied the law’s restrictions to any
activity aimed at influencing the government
or public opinion. That could include opinion
surveys, monitoring of government agencies’
performance, analysis of laws or policies, and
petitions or other communications aimed at
government officials.
Confronted by mass demonstrations, the authorities
ordered a rerun. The candidate of the reformist
Orange coalition won that election, which was widely
seen as free and honest.
The Orange Revolution was to have far-reaching repercussions.
While democracies celebrated the outcome,
repressive regimes reacted with alarm. The concerns
expressed by Russian officials were soon echoed
in China, Iran, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and
other authoritarian countries. Vladimir Putin spoke
of the color revolution as the latest form of American
interventionism, and began a process of restricting
Russian NGOs that was to reach a climax a decade
later.
Yanukovych eventually won the presidency in a 2010
comeback, but a second protest-driven revolution
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
in Ukraine, the Maidan uprising of 2013–14, forced
him to flee to Russia after a bloody crackdown failed
to disperse the demonstrators. Among other things,
the episode shattered the old political establishment,
which had been more or less equally divided between
parties that were friendly to Russia and parties that
favored independence from the Kremlin and an
orientation toward Europe. For the foreseeable future,
pro-Russian parties were unlikely to play a major role
in Ukrainian political life.
Russia responded by seizing and illegally annexing
Crimea and fomenting a frozen conflict in eastern
Ukraine. But the Kremlin also stepped up its campaign
to demonize color revolutions more broadly as America’s
favored instrument of regime change, though no
serious evidence of U.S. involvement in the Maidan
revolution was put forward. The color revolution threat
became a major theme of Russian domestic propaganda
and political discourse. It even became a focus
of the country’s military planning.
When speaking of color revolutions, Russian officials
and commentators have struck several common
themes:
1. Color revolutions are a U.S. strategy to break
Russia’s influence over its neighbors. 1 Nikolay
Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council
and a longtime director of the Federal Security
Service (FSB), has described color revolutions
as an American scheme to bring down governments
through the financing of opposition
groups and economic sanctions “under the pretext
of human rights protection and the necessity
to form civil society institutions.” 2 Russian
officials in 2015 warned that Electric Yerevan, an
Armenian protest movement against electricity
price hikes, could be a provocation by the West
dedicated to toppling a Moscow-friendly administration.
3
2. The threat of military action is an integral part of
the strategy. While color revolutions by definition
employ nonviolent tactics, Russian strategists
claim that the military dimension can be indirect,
embedded in democratic governments’ warnings
not to use force against protesters. In other words,
according to the Kremlin, the United States and
its allies stoke uprisings and then threaten to intervene
if the authorities defend themselves. Russia’s
own response to the Maidan revolution was a
reflection of this distorted image: It orchestrated
separatist revolts in parts of Ukraine and then
used its military to defend them. 4
3. Color revolutions pose a danger to Russia’s allies
around the world. To communicate its concerns
on this front, the Kremlin has invited military
delegations from China, Iran, Egypt, and other
authoritarian regimes for meetings at which
countering color revolutions is an important
theme. 5 Russian propaganda encourages governments
to do what is necessary to put down
civil society challenges, and praises incumbents
who succeed.
4. Russia itself is under threat. “The aim is obvious,”
Putin said of protests and social media activity
in 2015, “to provoke civil conflict and strike
a blow at our country’s constitutional foundations,
and ultimately even at our sovereignty.” 6
5. Incumbents are ‘legitimate’ rulers. Russian officials
have stressed the legal and constitutional
legitimacy of authoritarian leaders facing major
protests, regardless of their crimes and blatant
abuses of human rights and democratic norms.
Moscow insisted that Yanukovych remained the
“legitimate” president even after he had abandoned
his post to escape punishment for his
role in the crackdown on demonstrators.
6. Russia reserves the right to intervene in defense
of ethnic Russians. By asserting this right, the
Kremlin is effectively saying that any color revolutions
in neighboring states—many of which
have Russian-speaking minorities—could trigger
a Russian invasion, as in Ukraine. It could also
become a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby the
governments of neighboring countries come
to mistrust and mistreat their ethnic Russian
citizens, providing the Kremlin with an excuse to
get involved. 7
The Russian leadership’s reaction to the color revolutions,
with its paranoid obsession with sinister outside
forces, is a clear indication of the lack of self-confidence
that is shared by all authoritarian powers. Whether the
state is led by a strongman, a politburo, or a supreme
religious leader, the world’s most repressive regimes
understand that their systems offer few regular outlets
for public frustration with government performance.
Fear of color revolutions has intensified since the 2014
events in Ukraine, with a particular focus on the alleged
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Authoritarians on Color Revolutions
“In my opinion, everything that happened in
Ukraine shook Russia.… Young people began
to discuss and think about Russia’s direction.”
—Ivan Mostovich, press secretary of the pro-Kremlin youth
organization Nashi, April 2005
“We’re only afraid these changes will be chaotic.…
It’ll be a banana republic where the one
who shouts loudest is the one who wins.”
—Vladimir Putin, President of Russia,
September 2005
“We have sympathy with [Arab governments]
because they did not read warnings that
they should have read. That things were
changing because of the wishes of their
people, and because of machinations of the
imperialists.”
—Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, June 2011
“It is hardly likely that the US will admit to
manipulating [Hong Kong’s] ‘Occupy Central’
movement, just as it will not admit to manipulating
other anti-China forces. It sees such
activities as justified by ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’
‘human rights’ and other values.”
—People’s Daily commentary, October 2014
“Hostile forces have always attempted to
make Hong Kong the bridgehead for subverting
and infiltrating mainland China…. The illegal
Occupy Central activities in 2014 came
as minority radical groups in Hong Kong,
under the instigation and support of external
forces … orchestrated a Hong Kong version of
a color revolution.”
—Gen. Sun Jianguo, deputy chief of general staff, People’s
Liberation Army, March 2015
“Various human rights organizations, think
tanks, and simple NGOs of the U.S. and its
allies in Europe, concealing their true goals,
have established a huge network of affiliates
around the world.… It is they who act as the
‘fifth column.’”
—Ramiz Mehdiyev, head of presidential administration,
Azerbaijan, December 2014
“The sides noted that Russia and China had
a common approach to the key problems
of regional and international security and
expressed readiness to counteract ‘color
revolutions.’… Russia and China suffered the
biggest losses during WWII and should be
resolutely opposed to any attempts to revive
fascism and falsify the results of the bloodiest
conflict in human history.”
—Russian Security Council, statement on security consultations
with China, May 2015
role of the United States as puppet master. Yet neither
the Kremlin nor likeminded regimes have advanced
credible evidence that the various civic movements
were inauthentic. The American role in the Orange Revolution
of 2004–5, for example, was limited to funding
for voter training, upgrading of election technology,
and other measures designed to assist authorities in
ensuring fair balloting. There is no evidence of direct
American government help to the Orange forces. If the
United States influenced the eventual outcome, it did
so by making it more difficult for the Ukrainian authorities
to rig the election results. 8
Strangled by law
Over the past decade there has been a steady stream
of laws that restrict the funding and operations of
NGOs. While more than 50 countries have passed
such legislation, the most aggressive campaign to
bring civil society to heel through legal constraints
has been carried out by the Russian authorities.
There are 11 laws on the books in Russia that deal
solely with civil society organizations and another 35
that mention NGOs. Yet nowhere are NGOs defined.
This vagueness is deliberate. It gives officials the
discretion to decide which civil society organizations
should be prosecuted and harassed and which should
be left alone or encouraged. It enables them to penalize,
for example, a foundation that supports scientific
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
research due to alleged foreign funding, while ignoring
foreign funding for a quasi-political charity sponsored
by the Orthodox Church. 9
In fact, most of these laws are unnecessary. In a state
like Russia, China, or Iran, the authorities already have
ample latitude to deregister and ban any organization,
and to prevent foreign organizations from doing
business with domestic partners. A legal system that
is flexible enough to serve the evolving needs of the
regime and target virtually any adversary is a hallmark
of modern authoritarianism. But the NGO measures
give an added veneer of legality to what is essentially
arbitrary rule.
The repeated adoption of new laws also gives the
leadership the opportunity to showcase emotional
propaganda that stresses the subversive nature of
foreign or independent domestic civil society organizations,
reinforcing the idea that the motherland
is threatened by hostile encirclement and political
infiltration. 10
Foreign agents
In 2012, Russia adopted the so-called foreign agents
law. It requires NGOs that receive foreign funding and
engage in what the authorities define as political work
to register as “foreign agents,” a term that, in Russian,
is synonymous with foreign spy. Subsequent amendments
allow the Justice Ministry to register groups as
foreign agents without their consent. As with many
other Russian laws, the standards for enforcement are
entirely political. The designation is applied principally
to NGOs that seek political reforms or criticize
the Kremlin’s antidemocratic direction, though the
authorities’ reasoning in many cases is difficult to
fathom. State-friendly organizations have generally
been left alone.
Memorial, the human rights organization founded
to carry forward the ideals associated with Andrey
Sakharov, was one of the first groups to be unilaterally
registered as a foreign agent by the Justice Ministry
in 2014. In 2015, the ministry accused Memorial of
“undermining the foundations of constitutional order”
by describing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as
aggression and by asserting, correctly, that active duty
Russian troops were taking part in the conflict. 11
As in most countries, including some democracies,
civil society organizations in authoritarian climates
are largely funded by governmental or foreign entities.
There is little tradition of private philanthropic funding
for NGOs, and even if there were, few wealthy Russians
or Iranians would risk reprisal from the authorities
by donating to regime critics. Consequently, organizations
that lose access to foreign funding typically
have no domestic alternative and must curtail their
operations or give up their political independence.
In Russia, even NGOs with politically anodyne missions
have been targeted as foreign agents, as the
regime seeks to deter any civil society activity that
could challenge official policies or foster international
ties without state approval. One such organization
was the Northern Nature Coalition, which protects
old-growth forests and had protested certain development
projects. Another was Young Karelia, which
sponsors puppet shows for children in Karelian—a
language closely related to that spoken in neighboring
Finland. The latter group was declared a foreign agent
in part because of a $10,000 grant from the United
Nations. 12
The undesirables
Once it was the CIA that dictatorships reflexively
blamed when under pressure. More recently, the target
of attack is a group of prodemocracy foundations,
mostly American, that encourage political reform
through nonviolent methods. According to the denunciations
of officials from Russia, China, Venezuela,
and other repressive states, the National Endowment
for Democracy and the organizations associated with
philanthropist George Soros present a danger to the
status quo that rivals NATO or Western intelligence
agencies. 13
In 2015, Putin signed a law that allowed the prosecutor
general to declare foreign organizations “undesirable”
if they are deemed to pose a threat to the
country’s security, defense capability, or public order.
The measure empowered the authorities to shut such
entities’ offices in Russia, ban Russian groups from
working with them, and freeze their assets.
While the law has been used to expel foreign prodemocracy
organizations, the real targets are Russian
citizens. This is made clear by a section of the law
that calls for heavy fines and jail terms of up to six
years for Russians who collaborate with organizations
on the undesirable list. Conceivably, a Russia human
rights advocate who attends a seminar in Poland or
Germany sponsored by the International Republican
Institute—one of the groups added to the list in
2016—could be prosecuted once back in Russia. 14
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Freedom House
Sharing worst practices
During the 1990s there was much discussion in the
major democracies regarding the export of “best practices,”
meaning the institutions, policies, and ways
of doing things that had strengthened democratic
governance in some of the more successful post-authoritarian
societies, especially in Central Europe.
More recently, modern authoritarian regimes have
turned this concept on its head by sharing their own
experiences with laws and tactics that have the effect
of retarding democratic development.
Laws restricting the autonomy and funding of NGOs
have been widely copied around the world. Many of
the affected countries tolerated civil society activism
in the period after the Cold War, only to move in a
more repressive direction after the most prominent
color revolutions alerted incumbent leaders to potential
threat posed by civic activism. Once Russia had
demonstrated a willingness to adopt legislation and
then enforce it, other countries followed suit, first in
Eurasia but subsequently in Africa, Asia, the Middle
East, and Latin America.
Governments that adopt such laws seldom if ever
shut down the civil society sector entirely. Instead,
they deal with NGOs selectively, tolerating those that
present no threat to the status quo, monitoring others,
and repressing those that the leadership regards
as a potential focus of opposition activity. Even some
democracies, such as India, Indonesia, and Kenya,
have enacted laws to strengthen state control over
NGOs. But the most serious restrictions have been
imposed by authoritarian regimes. 15
According to a 2013 report, 12 countries had prohibited
foreign funding for NGOs outright while another
49 placed restrictions on foreign donations. 16 For
authoritarian leaders, the imposition of foreign funding
restrictions is a convenient tactic in that it makes
it difficult for the organization to function effectively
but falls short of an outright ban, which could attract
sharper criticism. Furthermore, governments can justify
their action on grounds of protecting sovereignty
against foreign interference—a potent argument in
an era when nationalist ideas have garnered greater
public support. Thus in rejecting an appeal to government
policies that restrict NGO work, the Venezuelan
Supreme Court spoke of foreign assistance as “a
typical manifestation of the interventionist policies of
a foreign power to influence the internal affairs of the
Venezuelan state.” 17
China piles on
In early 2016, joining its authoritarian colleagues,
China adopted its first formal law meant to regulate
the country’s rapidly expanding NGO sector. Previously,
foreign NGOs registered as commercial enterprises
and conducted their advocacy work “off the books.”
Under the new law, foreign NGOs are subject to a series
of additional bureaucratic hurdles, some of which
could seriously impinge on their work.
For example, foreign NGOs are now required to join in
partnership with a Chinese organization. In practice,
this could make it difficult for NGOs that work on sensitive
issues like the rule of law to function, as Chinese
organizations would be hesitant to join a foreign entity
in pursuing such a politically explosive mission.
Moreover, foreign NGOs will be compelled to register
with the police rather than the Ministry of Civil Affairs,
as had been the case. 18 The law gives the police
sweeping powers to detain staff, restrict activities or
events, or regulate an NGO’s ability to open an office. 19
An NGO’s registration can be revoked under a vague
clause that forbids spreading rumors, engaging in
defamation, or publishing “other harmful information
that endangers state security or damages the national
interest.” 20
The new law was passed in the context of intensified
repression, an economic slowdown, and a drive by
the Xi Jinping leadership to suppress discussion of
“Western ideas” in the media and at universities. Even
as the country’s leadership boasted of China’s role as
a world power, the country’s education minister, Yuan
Guiren, felt compelled in 2015 to warn against the use
of “textbooks promoting Western values” in Chinese
classrooms.
Indeed, the authorities had carried out a series of
arrests, focusing on precisely the sort of independent-minded
activists with whom reform-oriented
international NGOs would expect to collaborate: human
rights lawyers, advocates for minority rights and
religious freedom, and women’s rights campaigners. 21
Around the time of the law’s adoption, the government
took the unusual step of showcasing a televised
confession by a Swedish citizen who had worked with
legal reform groups in China. Xinhua claimed that
the activist, Peter Dahlin, had served a human rights
organization that “hired and trained others to gather,
fabricate, and distort information about China.” 22
The adoption of formal restrictions on NGOs is one
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
sign among many that China is rolling up the welcome
mat for the outside world. The leadership’s exertion
of pressure on reform-minded foreigners parallels its
increasingly skeptical attitude toward the international
press, certain foreign technology firms, Christian
churches, and especially “Western” ideas like democracy,
the rule of law, and press freedom. The hostility to
NGOs is particularly troubling, however, given the total
absence of national elections and opposition political
parties in China. The NGO sector was one of the few
outlets available to Chinese citizens who seek political
change. The Xi Jinping leadership, in adopting the new
law, is communicating its determination to shut off all
possible avenues for independent political action.
1. Roger McDermott, “Protecting the Motherland: Russia’s Counter–Color Revolution Military Doctrine,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, November
14, 2014, https://jamestown.org/program/protecting-the-motherland-russias-counter-color-revolution-military-doctrine/.
2. Leon Aron, “Drivers of Putin’s Foreign Policy,” American Enterprise Institute, June 14, 2016, https://www.aei.org/publication/
drivers-of-putins-foreign-policy/; Dennis Lynch, “Russian Security Council Warns US Seeks ‘Color Revolution’ against Kremlin,”
International Business Times, March 25, 2015, http://www.ibtimes.com/russian-security-council-warns-us-seeks-color-revolution-against-kremlin-1859808.
3. Howard Amos, “Russian Officials See ‘Color Revolution’ in Armenia,” Moscow Times, June 24, 2015, https://themoscowtimes.com/
articles/russian-officials-see-color-revolution-in-armenia-47670.
4. Alexander Golts, “Are Color Revolutions a New Form of War?” Moscow Times, June 2, 2014, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/
are-color-revolutions-a-new-form-of-war-36093.
5. Dmitry Gorenburg, “Countering Color Revolutions: Russia’s New Security Strategy and Its Implications for U.S. Policy,” Ponars Eurasia,
September 2014, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/countering-color-revolutions-russia%E2%80%99s-new-security-strategy-and-its-implications-us-policy.
6. Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber, “Putin Sounds the Alarm over Budding ‘Color Revolutions’ in Russia,” Moscow Times, March 4, 2015,
https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/putin-sounds-the-alarm-over-budding-color-revolutions-in-russia-44473.
7. Dmitry Gorenburg, “Countering Color Revolutions: Russia’s New Security Strategy and Its Implications for U.S. Policy.”
8. Anders Aslund and Michael McFaul, eds., Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine’s Democratic Breakthrough (Washington:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).
9. “Briefing on Shrinking Space for Civil Society in Russia,” Human Rights Watch, February 24, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/
news/2017/02/24/briefing-shrinking-space-civil-society-russia.
10. Tanya Lokshina, “Russia Civil Society Deemed ‘Undesirable,’” Open Democracy, May 20, 2015, https://www.hrw.org/
news/2015/05/20/russian-civil-society-deemed-undesirable.
11. Heather McGill, “Russian NGOs Cynically Treated Like Enemies of the State,” Amnesty International, November 13, 2015, https://
www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/11/russian-ngos-cynically-treated-like-enemies-of-the-state/.
12. Thomas Grove, “Russia Squeezes Critics at Home by Declaring Them ‘Foreign Agents,’” Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2015, http://
www.wsj.com/articles/russia-squeezes-critics-at-home-by-declaring-them-foreign-agents-1439778187.
13. Fred Weir, “Russia Moves to Silence Civil Society and Its ‘Undesirable’ Contacts,” Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 2015, http://
www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2015/0527/Russia-moves-to-silence-civil-society-and-its-undesirable-contacts.
14. “Russia Deems Two U.S.-Based NGOs ‘Undesirable,’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, August 18, 2016, http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-u-s-ngos-undesirable/27931869.html.
15. Thomas Carothers, “Closing Space: Democracy and Human Rights Support Under Fire,” Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, February 20, 2014, http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/02/20/closing-space-democracy-and-human-rights-support-under-fire-pub-54503.
16. Civicus 2013: Enabling Environment Index (Civicus), http://civicus.org/downloads/2013EEI%20REPORT.pdf.
17. Carothers, “Closing Space.”
18. Josh Chin, “China Gives Police Broad Powers over Foreign Nonprofits,” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/
articles/china-passes-law-clamping-down-on-foreign-ngos-1461853978.
19. Charlie Campbell, “China’s New Foreign NGO Law Is Threatening Vital Advocacy Work,” Time, April 26, 2016, http://time.
com/4307516/china-ngo-law-foreign-human-rights/.
20. Stanley Lubman, “China’s New Law on International NGOs—And Questions about Legal Reform,” Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2016,
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/05/25/chinas-new-law-on-international-ngos-and-questions-about-legal-reform/.
21. “China’s Strange Fear of a Colour Revolution,” Financial Times, February 9, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/9b5a2ed2-af96-11e4-
b42e-00144feab7de.
22. Tom Phillips, “Swedish Activist Peter Dahlin Paraded on China State TV for ‘Scripted Confession,’” Guardian, January 19, 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/20/swedish-activist-peter-dahlin-paraded-on-china-state-tv-for-scripted-confession.
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Chapter 4
The Ministry of Truth in Peace and War
An early and telling sign that Vladimir Putin planned
something more ambitious than a mere tightening
of state control over political life was his decision to
return Joseph Stalin to his position in the pantheon
of great Russian leaders. Stalin’s rehabilitation was
formalized in 2007, with the publication of a new curriculum
guide for teachers of Russian history. 1
The manual’s content dovetailed with Putin’s broader
promotion of a narrative in which Russia is a great
power that recovered from the chaos and weakness
of the Yeltsin era and overcame the hostility of determined
enemies, especially the United States. According
to the manual, Russia’s dark chapters—its domination
of Eastern Europe, internal repression, Stalinist
purges—were the regrettable but understandable
responses to the country’s underdevelopment and
encirclement by foreign enemies. The new history
paints a picture of an all-wise Russian state, under
both Stalin and Putin, whose requirements always
take precedence over the needs of the individual. 2
Putin took unusual interest in the preparation of the
history manual. The idea that history should be written
by historians, not political leaders, was never voiced in
public discussion. Putin later called for history textbooks
“written in proper Russian, free of internal contradictions
and double interpretation.” 3 He said the manual
was needed to clear up “the muddle” in teachers’ heads.
And in unveiling the new guide, he struck a theme
that runs through Russian propaganda in the Putin
era: Russian history “did contain some problematic
pages,” he said. “But so did other states’ histories.
We have fewer of them than in other countries. And
they were less terrible than in some other countries.”
Putin’s basic message was that “we can’t allow anyone
to impose a sense of guilt on us.” 4 More broadly, Putin
was saying that a sovereign state has the right to
interpret its history in whatever way it wants, to ignore
or distort the tragic chapters, and to burnish the reputations
of mass murderers and thugs.
Whereas other countries simply avoid serious study
of the most shameful episodes of their histories, as
Indonesia has done with the epidemic of political
killings during the 1960s, or as China has done with
the Cultural Revolution, Russia treats the Stalin era
“It’s easy predicting the future;
what’s difficult is predicting the
past.”
—Soviet joke
“A lie isn’t an alternative
point of view.”
—Linus Linkevičius, Lithuanian foreign minister
“The implied objective of this line
of thought is a nightmare world in
which the Leader, or some ruling
clique, controls not only the future
but the past…. This prospect frightens
me much more than bombs.”
—George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War
as a time of progress during which the foundation for
modern Russian greatness was laid. 5
To build a case that Russia’s dark pages were “less
terrible” than those of other countries, Russia’s official
history depicts Stalin as a strong leader who was capable
of acts of cruelty but whose rough tactics were
necessary for the defense of the homeland, which was
besieged militarily by the Nazis and politically by the
capitalist powers.
Excusing the Soviet empire
The Russian leadership is especially tenacious in
defending Stalin’s World War II diplomacy. Putin, for
example, has defended the Hitler-Stalin pact, the
1939 nonaggression agreement that opened the door
to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and carved up
much of Eastern Europe between the two totalitarian
states. 6 While Putin called the pact “immoral” during
a 2009 visit to Poland, he defended the agreement
during a joint press conference with Angela Merkel in
2015, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He did so in a fashion typical of current Russian propaganda
methods. He accused the West of trying to “hush
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
up” the agreement between British prime minister
Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler that resulted in
Germany’s seizure of parts and eventually all of Czechoslovakia.
This clearly falsified the historical record. Far
from suppressing Chamberlain’s actions, historians and
politicians alike have held up the Munich agreement
as a symbol of all that went wrong due to the European
democracies’ appeasement of Hitler. 7
Putin has also justified the Hitler-Stalin pact on the
grounds that it kept the Soviet Union out of war for a
time and was in keeping with the amoral power politics
practiced in that era. As for the divvying up of Eastern
Europe, he repeated the hoary lie that the record was
unclear as to whether the pact’s secret protocols—in
which the two parties agreed on which territories each
would subsequently control—were genuine. 8 Predictably,
Putin did not go into the unwritten parts of the
agreement that caused Stalin to forcibly repatriate a
group of German dissidents, mostly Communists, who
had sought refuge in the Soviet Union.
Both the history manual and the political leadership
justify the transformation of postwar Eastern Europe
into a Soviet-controlled bloc—in which the economy
came under state control, religious belief was
persecuted, civil society was destroyed, the press was
converted into a monolithic instrument of propaganda,
and opposition political parties were crushed—by
claiming that Moscow needed a layer of territorial
security to protect it from the hostile West. “Historical
necessity” is how Putin’s spokesman described Soviet
domination of the region. Putin likewise blames the
democracies for the Iron Curtain: “We understand the
fatality of an ‘iron curtain’ for us. We will not go down
this path. No one will build a wall around us.” 9
The manual recalls Mikhail Gorbachev not for his
attempts to reform and liberalize the Communist
system, but instead for his having permitted the
unraveling of the European security belt in 1989 and
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Moving into
the 21st century, the manual denounces the color
revolutions in neighboring countries like Georgia
and Ukraine as Western-backed schemes to replace
pro-Russian leaders with pro-American usurpers. In
this view, the centuries may change and the Soviet
empire may fade into history, but Russia’s geopolitical
predicament remains constant.
Sakharov as nonperson
Because Putin is intent on blaming the West for Russia’s
problems, both past and present, he has worked
to ensure that critical domestic voices are removed
from Russian history. This explains the near total absence
of Andrey Sakharov from any discussion of the
Soviet past or Russia’s future course.
Today Sakharov is recalled abroad as a dissident and
Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In Russia, however, he
has been relegated to the status of nonperson. Putin
and other leaders never refer to him, his legacy, or
his views. The organizations that were launched to
promote his principles are harassed and placed on the
“foreign agents” list. 10 In an age of flourishing digital
media, Russians are ironically less likely to know what
Sakharov stood for than was the case under Soviet
censorship, when underground samizdat literature
was reproduced on manual typewriters to reach an
audience of a few hundred. 11
In fact, Sakharov was an imposing global presence
from the mid-1960s until his death in 1989. His stature
derived from his prominent role in the development
of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. He was sometimes
called the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and because
of the respect he enjoyed in the global scientific community,
his views on arms control carried enormous
weight.
His initial forays into political dissent consisted of cautious
statements about the importance of weapons
treaties between Washington and Moscow. But the
more he thought about arms control, the more closely
he looked at his own society. And soon he was making
caustic comments about the yawning gap between
Soviet boasts on the achievements of socialism and
the reality of Soviet backwardness.
He eventually came to see the system that prevailed
in the Soviet Union as inherently repressive. Sakharov
attributed Russia’s epidemic of alcoholism to the
leadership’s having purged the governing system of
moral considerations. He said it was “important that
our society gradually emerge from the dead end of
unspirituality.” He spoke of the need for the “systematic
defense of human rights and ideals, and not a
political struggle, which would inevitably incite people
to violence, sectarianism, and frenzy.” 12
The Kremlin has worked hard to make Russians forget
that he once ranked among the eminent figures of
global political protest. The current leadership is
especially determined to ensure that Sakharov’s core
goals disappear from the debate: a Russia committed
to humane and democratic values, a government that
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deals honestly with the people, and a country that
lives at peace with its neighbors.
The Ukraine factor
The falsification of history that began during the early
years of Putin’s leadership has been intensified in the
wake of the invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea
in 2014. To convince the Russian people that waging
a form of low-intensity warfare against a neighbor was
justified, Putin has stepped up efforts to depict the
West as antagonistic to Russian interests, launched
a campaign to label those responsible for Ukraine’s
Maidan uprising as fascists, driven home the idea that
ethnic Russians living outside the Russian Federation
were under relentless persecution, and identified
Russian critics of aggression against Ukraine as a
treasonous fifth column.
A recurring theme of post-Crimea propaganda is the
notion that Russia faces the same threats from the
West today as it did during the Cold War. To make this
point, Russian television aired a documentary meant to
justify one of the more shameful events of the Soviet
period, the 1968 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention in
Czechoslovakia. The invasion was undertaken to crush
the reformist Prague Spring movement, whose leaders
were moving increasingly in the direction of jettisoning
state socialism, embracing democratic reforms, and
seeking a kind of neutral geopolitical status much like
that enjoyed at the time by Austria. The documentary
used archival footage to build a concocted case that
the invasion was necessary to thwart a NATO-inspired
coup in Prague. 13 The clear purpose of the film was to
portray NATO as a permanent threat to Russian interests,
as much in 2014 as in 1968. 14
Another television documentary focused on the seizure
of Crimea, a year after the event. As Lucian Kim
has noted, the program is something of a celebration
of the tactics of dictatorship. The filmmakers offer no
conflicting opinions and present American leaders
as puppet masters. Among other claims, the documentary
asserts that Washington gave the Maidan
forces information about Ukrainian security methods
that American officials had obtained during bilateral
exchange programs with the Kyiv government. 15
To further bolster the case for the invasion of Ukraine,
the Russian propaganda machinery devoted great
energy to demonstrating the fascist nature of the
Maidan, relying heavily on invocations of Soviet
history. The Ukrainian protesters and activists who
helped drive out corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych,
and the European-oriented politicians who replaced
him, were repeatedly labeled as present-day followers
of Stepan Bandera, a controversial nationalist leader
who fought the Soviets and at times cooperated with
the Nazis in a doomed campaign for an independent
Ukraine during World War II. Russian media presented
Bandera and his followers as unambiguous allies of
the Nazis, and highlighted their wartime atrocities.
Russian media also featured a number of documentaries
that emphasized Russian, as opposed to Soviet,
resistance to Hitler. The objective was to equate
contemporary Ukrainians who favored full sovereignty
and independence from Russian influence with Nazi
collaborators and pogromists. This served not only
to explain Moscow’s response, but also to deter any
emulation of the Maidan protests in Russia itself.
The assault on academic freedom
Since the occupation of Crimea and invasion of eastern
Ukraine, it has become increasingly dangerous
to express dissenting views on Russian foreign policy
in Russia’s schools and universities. Putin made the
point quite clearly in a speech before the parliament
in March 2014, when he referred to a “fifth column”
and a “disparate bunch of national traitors” sowing
discord within Russia. 16
In the ensuing months, anyone criticizing Russian policy
risked the label of foreign agent, which in Russian
usage is tantamount to being called a spy. Around
this time a new website called Predatel (traitor) began
listing alleged traitors, specifically those who had
criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea or supported
sanctions against Russian officials. The site encouraged
Russians to send in the names of other traitors.
Meanwhile, a number of educators fell afoul of the
new policies on the teaching of history. In March 2014,
Andrey Zubov, who held a position at the Moscow State
Institute of International Relations, was fired for “an immoral
act”—namely an article he published in the newspaper
Vedomosti that criticized the seizure of Crimea
and compared it to Hitler’s annexation of Austria. “We
must not behave the way the Germans once behaved,
based on the promises of Goebbels and Hitler,” he
wrote. The university’s explanation claimed that Zubov’s
writings “contradict Russia’s foreign policy and inflict
careless, irresponsible criticism on the actions of the
state.” 17 In a similar incident, senior sociologist Aleksandr
Konkov was let go by Sakhalin State University after
declaring that Russia had seized Crimea opportunistically
because Ukraine was weak, not because Crimeans
themselves had clamored for the takeover. 18
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
In May 2014, Putin signed a new law that criminalized
the purposeful distortion of the Soviet Union’s role in
World War II. It could easily be applied to historians
who, for example, criticize Stalin’s Great Terror and
its decimation of the military leadership in the years
before the war. 19 Historians who make the “wrong”
interpretations of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the huge
casualties suffered by the Red Army, or the rape and
plunder committed by Soviet troops as they marched
toward Berlin might also risk criminal penalties.
In late 2016 the Russian Security Council discussed
the establishment of a new center to counter the
“falsification” of history. The council placed the proposal
in the context of the country’s national security,
pointing to “deliberate destructive activity by foreign
state structures and international organizations to
realize geopolitical interests by means of carrying out
anti-Russian policies.”
A group of experts identified six topics from Russia’s
past that they claimed were being actively distorted
as part of an anti-Russia strategy. Among the topics:
the Soviet Union’s ethnic policies, the Hitler-Stalin
pact, the Soviet Union’s conduct during World War II,
the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Union’s
suppression of uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
and East Germany during the Cold War. 20 In each case,
the most serious and respected historical accounts
have been written by foreign scholars, due largely to
the pressures, including outright censorship, brought
to bear on Russian historians during Soviet times and
more recently during the Putin era.
China: Evading the past
Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward ranks among
the most deadly politically inspired catastrophes in
human history. From 1958 to 1962, Communist Party
authorities, under strict orders from Beijing, forcibly
herded millions of farmers into communes and then
proceeded to seize grain harvested in the countryside
to feed the urban population. The result, according to
long-standing estimates, was the death of some 30 million
people in the provinces. Historian Frank Dikötter,
who studied the archives in some of the most seriously
affected regions, has argued that the number of deaths
was at least 45 million, and others have cited higher
numbers. While most died of starvation, many were
tortured to death or murdered by local Communists. 21
To this day, Communist Party officials have refused to
acknowledge anything approaching the full dimensions
of the tragedy. Nor have they admitted that the
party, and especially Mao, were responsible. Often
they blame the weather. There are no official monuments
to the victims, no days of commemoration, no
serious histories available to the general public, and
most significantly, no effort to place accountability
where it belonged.
Chinese leaders may be even more concerned about
presenting the “correct” interpretation of history
than their Russian counterparts. An updated official
version of the party history that was released in
2011 took 16 years to draft, including four extensive
rewrites. It was vetted by 64 state and party bodies,
including the People’s Liberation Army. In telling the
story of the Great Leap Forward, the history admits
that the project brought great suffering, but credits
Mao with wanting to “change a picture of poverty and
backwardness and make China grow rich and strong
so that it could use its own strength to stand tall in
the forest of nations.” 22 In other words, one of the
century’s great politically driven famines was justified
because it supposedly contributed to China’s emergence
as a world power. The history also insists that
Mao tried to change course when he learned of the
growing rural suffering—an outright lie, as Mao actually
doubled down on the most disastrous policies.
The determination to suppress any real assessment
of the dark corners of Chinese history under the
Communist Party is also reflected in the exhibits at
the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a period of political
terror and violent nationwide purges, is dispensed
with through one photograph and a brief caption,
located in an out-of-the-way part of the facility. As for
the famine, it is glossed over with the euphemistic
phrase, “the project of constructing socialism suffered
severe complications.” 23
Seven ‘don’t mentions’
In 2013, the General Office of the Communist Party
Central Committee issued a secret directive prohibiting
universities from permitting the discussion of
seven themes—the “Seven Don’t Mentions.” According
to the directive, lecturers were not allowed to take
up universal values, freedom of the press, civil society,
civic rights, elite cronyism, judicial independence, and
past mistakes of the Communist Party. 24
To independent-minded scholars, the most disturbing
item in the roster of Don’t Mentions was the leadership’s
mistakes. While the authorities have never come
close to permitting a serious investigation of either
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the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution,
these and other aspects of the party’s past were not
considered utterly taboo, as long as the discussion did
not lead to serious challenges to orthodox historical
interpretations. According to the policies set down
under Xi Jinping’s leadership, talking in classrooms
about Mao’s errors is now forbidden. 25
The drive to inculcate a national amnesia on the
worst abuses of the Communist era is not limited to
university courses. Commentary and discussion in the
media and on the internet are also heavily censored,
especially on anniversary days when, in normal
societies, problematic events of the past are remembered
and debated. 26 The most sensitive anniversary,
of course, falls on June 4, marking the deadly 1989
crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen
Square. Even the most oblique or coded reference to
that date on social media is quickly censored.
There are no museums devoted the Cultural Revolution
or the Great Leap Forward. The archives of
the Cultural Revolution period are mainly closed to
researchers. Chinese historians have made some important
breakthroughs, but can discuss their findings
only with small groups of peers.
The Communist Party’s refusal to come to terms with
the crimes of the Mao era has enabled a revival of
the former leader’s personality cult that has captured
the support of millions of Chinese. As Jamil Anderlini
wrote in the Financial Times, Mao has come to be
seen as a symbol of a “simpler, fairer society—a time
when everyone was poorer but at least they were
equally poor.” 27 Xi and his colleagues have actively
promoted Maoist images, songs, and propaganda
themes as ornaments of Chinese nationalism, and
used Mao-style tactics and terminology in their drive
for ideological discipline and political loyalty.
The melding of nationalism and reverence for Mao is
no accident. According to the regime’s updated historical
narrative, China was subjugated by foreign powers
for more than a century until the party took power in
1949 and restored the country’s national greatness.
Admitting Mao’s abuses would mean admitting that
the first three decades of Communist rule left China
poor, isolated, and traumatized, and that only the
partial abandonment of party doctrine and control
allowed the country to prosper.
A side effect of the party’s appropriation of Chinese nationalism
is a renewed hostility toward the foreign powers
that kept China weak before Communist rule. Basic
history textbooks—in addition to omitting or distorting
the mistakes, failures, and criminal acts of the Communist
leadership—focus on China’s persecution at the
hands of outsiders, especially Japan. Some Chinese
critics worry that the teaching of history is cultivating
an alarming degree of xenophobia and jingoism. 28
History held hostage
In much of the world today, there are or have been
major efforts to confront uncomfortable truths
about the past. This is certainly true of Germany and
South Africa. Latin American countries like Chile and
Argentina have probed the histories of ugly conflicts
between military juntas and Marxist revolutionaries. In
China’s own backyard, South Korea and Taiwan have
moved to address the complex legacies, including
outright crimes, of dictators.
The process of accounting for the mistakes and
crimes of earlier decades can raise a tangle of ethical
and emotional challenges in any country. But resistance
to a full examination of the past is especially
bitter in societies where communism held sway. In
China, the heirs of Mao still control the state, and the
very legitimacy of the system is built on a veneration
of the Great Helmsman. In Russia, the Putin leadership
praises the achievements of Stalin and aspires to
the superpower status of the Soviet Union. A consequence
of this ahistorical nostalgia is that in Russia
today, 26 percent of those polled by Levada believe
that Stalinist repression was necessary; a decade
ago, the figure was just 9 percent. Likewise, only 45
percent told Levada that political persecution was a
crime; in 2007, the figure was 72 percent. 29
The communist system was responsible for four of
the most destructive episodes of the 20th century:
Stalin’s purges, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural
Revolution, and the Cambodian genocide. Add to this
the persecutions inflicted on the people of the Baltic
states, Eastern Europeans, Cubans, North Koreans,
and many others, and the population affected by mass
killings and misery swells even further. While few people
today admire totalitarian Marxism as a governing
system, there is a reluctance to reject it with the same
moral clarity as in assessments of Nazism. Scholars,
not to mention political figures, who express even modest
admiration for Hitler are immediately and properly
condemned. As long as Stalin and Mao, two of history’s
worst mass murderers, escape similar opprobrium in
their own countries, a reckoning with historical truth
and an understanding of its lessons will be postponed.
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
1. Andrew E. Kramer, “New Russian History: Yes, People Died, but ...,” New York Times, August 15, 2007, http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/08/15/world/europe/15iht-letter.1.7122937.html.
2. “The Rewriting of History,” Economist, November 8, 2007, http://www.economist.com/node/10102921.
3. Gabriela Baczynska, “Putin Accused of Soviet Tactics in Drafting New History Book,” Reuters, November 18, 2013, http://www.
reuters.com/article/us-russia-history-idUSBRE9AH0JK20131118.
4. “The Rewriting of History,” Economist.
5. Ben Hoyle, “Putin Rewrites History for New School Textbook,” Times (London), November 20, 2013, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/
news/world/europe/article3926546.ece.
6. Gabriela Baczynska, “Putin Accused of Soviet Tactics in Drafting New History Book.”
7. “​Merkel Listens as Putin Defends USSR’s Pact with Nazi Germany,” Kviv Post, May 10, 2015, https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/war-against-ukraine/merkel-listens-as-putin-defends-ussrs-pact-with-nazi-germany-388241.html;
“Putin Defends Ribbentrop-Molotov
Pact in Press Conference with Merkel,” Moscow Times, May 11, 2015, https://themoscowtimes.com/news/putin-defends-ribbentrop-molotov-pact-in-press-conference-with-merkel-46441.
8. Linas Linkevičius, “Putin Has Defended the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Time for the West to Wake Up,” Guardian, November 7, 2014, https://
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/07/vladimir-putin-defended-nazi-soviet-pact-west-world-war-two; Tom Parfitt,
“Vladimir Putin Says There Was Nothing Wrong with Soviet Union’s Pact with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany,” Telegraph, November 6,
2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir-putin/11213255/Vladimir-Putin-says-there-was-nothing-wrong-with-
Soviet-Unions-pact-with-Adolf-Hitlers-Nazi-Germany.html; Timothy Snyder, “Putin’s New Nostalgia,” New York Review of Books,
November 10, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/11/10/putin-nostalgia-stalin-hitler/.
9. Reuters, “Putin: ‘We Understand the Fatality of an Iron Curtain,’” Business Insider, November 23, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.
com/r-putin-says-russia-is-not-isolated-tass-2014-11.
10. Fred Weir, “How a Liberal Bastion Is Persevering in an Increasingly Illiberal Moscow,” Christian Science Monitor, January 25, 2016,
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2016/0125/How-a-liberal-bastion-is-persevering-in-an-increasingly-illiberal-Moscow.
11. Serge Schmemann, “Sakharov, Little Remembered in Putin’s Russia,” New York Times, December 17, 2014, http://www.nytimes.
com/2014/12/18/opinion/sakharov-little-remembered-in-putins-russia.html.
12. Arch Puddington, “A Prophet Ignored in His Own Land: Andrey D. Sakharov,” Freedom at Issue, September 28, 2015, https://freedomhouse.org/blog/prophet-ignored-his-own-land-andrey-d-sakharov.
13. Tony Barber, “Russia Rewrites History of the Prague Spring,” Financial Times, June 3, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/340a086c-
09df-11e5-b6bd-00144feabdc0.
14. Andrew Pulver, “New Russian Invasion Documentary Dismays Czech and Slovak Governments,” Guardian, June 2, 2015, https://
www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/02/new-russian-invasion-documentary-dismays-czech-slovak-governments; “Russian
Documentary on ‘Helpful’ 1968 Invasion Angers Czechs,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 1, 2015, http://www.rferl.org/a/
russian-documentary-on-helpful-1968-invasion-angers-czechs/27047867.html.
15. Lucian Kim, “Vladimir Putin’s New Faux Documentary Is Trying to Rewrite the History of His Own Aggression,” Slate, March 19, 2015,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/03/vladimir_putin_s_documentary_is_trying_to_rewrite_history_crimea_the_way.html.
16. Joshua Yaffa, “Putin’s New War on ‘Traitors,’” New Yorker, March 28, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-newwar-on-traitors.
17. “Russian Professor Sacked over Criticism of Actions in Ukraine,” Reuters, March 24, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/
us-ukraine-crisis-professor-idUSBREA2N1BM20140324; “Russian Propaganda: 1984 in 2014,” Economist, March 29, 2014, http://
www.economist.com/news/europe/21599829-new-propaganda-war-underpins-kremlins-clash-west-1984-2014.
18. Sergey Berzin, “Russian Academics Spooked by Zubov’s Dismissal,” University World News, April 11, 2014, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140410172832334.
19. “Putin Signs Law Criminalizing Denial of Nazi War Crimes,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May 5, 2014, http://www.rferl.org/a/
russia-criminalizes-nazi-denial/25373990.html.
20. Tom Balmforth, “Russia’s Security Council Turns Its Gaze to History and 1917,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 30, 2016.
http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-history-distortion-information-attacks/28087105.html.
21. Gao Wenqian, “China Must Purge Mao’s Ghost,” New York Times, December 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/opinion/china-must-purge-maos-ghost.html.
22. Andrew Higgins, “In China, a Long Path of Writing the Communist Party’s History,” Washington Post, May 26, 2011, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/world/in-china-a-long-path-of-writing-the-communist-partys-history/2011/05/16/AGDfMECH_story.html.
23. Ian Johnson, “At China’s New Museum, History Toes Party Line,” New York Times, April 3, 2011, http://www.nytimes.
com/2011/04/04/world/asia/04museum.html.
24. Anne Henochowicz, “Sensitive Words: Seven Don’t Mentions and More,” China Digital Times, May 11, 2013, http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/05/sensitive-words-seven-say-nots-and-more/.
25. Raymond Li, “Seven Subjects Off Limits for Teaching, Chinese Universities Told,” South China Morning Post, May 10, 2013, http://
www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1234453/seven-subjects-limits-teaching-chinese-universities-told.
26. Tom Mitchell, “China Deploys Amnesia on Fiftieth Anniversary of Cultural Revolution,” Financial Times, May 13, 2016, https://www.
ft.com/content/40b84132-18cf-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e.
27. Jamil Anderlini, “The Return of Mao: A New Threat to China’s Politics,” Financial Times, September 29, 2016, https://www.ft.com/
content/63a5a9b2-85cd-11e6-8897-2359a58ac7a5.
28. Cameron White, “Beijing’s Textbook Hypocrisy,” Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/beijings-textbook-h-1434555035.
29. Maxim Trudolyubov, “Putin Plays Politics with Russia’s Terrible Past,” Newsweek, November 3, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/
putin-plays-politics-russias-terrible-past-515906.
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Freedom House
Chapter 5
The Rise of ‘Illiberal Democracy’
In July 2014, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán
gave what has come to be known as his “illiberal
democracy” speech before an ethnic Hungarian audience
in Băile Tuşnad, Romania. 1 Several points in his
remarks are worth noting:
• Orbán urged his listeners to no longer regard the
1989 triumph over communism as the reference
point for developments in Hungary. Instead of
measuring progress from the transition from
dictatorship and foreign domination to elections,
civil liberties, and sovereignty, Orbán said Hungary
should adopt a new point of departure, the onset
of the global financial crisis in 2008, which also
marked the European Union’s greatest setback.
• He cited U.S. president Barack Obama and various
unnamed sources on the West’s weakness,
including an “internationally recognized analyst”
who wrote that liberal values today “embody
corruption, sex, and violence.”
• He suggested that in the future it would be
systems that were “not Western, not liberal,
not liberal democracies, and perhaps not even
democracies” that would create successful and
competitive societies. He asserted that “the
stars of the international analysts today are
Singapore, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.”
• In a passage devoted to the obstacles facing his
own political party, Fidesz, as it seeks to build an
alternative to liberalism, Orbán singled out civil
society and the nongovernmental sector. Civil
society critics, he insisted, “are not nongovernmental
organizations” but “paid political activists
who are attempting to enforce foreign interests
here in Hungary.” (In a separate speech in early
2016, he referred to “hordes of implacable human
rights warriors” who “feel an unquenchable
desire to lecture and accuse us.” 2 )
In this relatively short address, Orbán neatly summarized
most of the key factors that distinguish a fully
democratic “Western” system based on liberal values
and accountability from what he calls an “Eastern”
approach based on a strong state, a weak opposition,
and emaciated checks and balances.
”There is a race underway to find the
method of community organization,
the state, which is most capable of
making a nation and a community
internationally competitive.… [T]he
most popular topic in thinking today
is trying to understand how systems
that are not Western, not liberal, not
liberal democracies, and perhaps not
even democracies, can nevertheless
make their nations successful.”
—Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary
“If we want to organize our national
state to replace the liberal state, it is
very important that we make it clear
that we are not opposing nongovernmental
organizations here, and
it is not nongovernmental organizations
who are moving against us,
but paid political activists who are
attempting to enforce foreign interests
here in Hungary.”
—Viktor Orbán
First, his exhortation to no longer regard the events of
1989 as a seminal, even sacred, juncture in Hungarian
history is noteworthy given Orbán’s biography. While
he often cites his own role in the anticommunist
struggle and describes himself as a freedom fighter,
he now regards 1989—so redolent of liberal values,
ideas about individual freedom, and democratic
solidarity—as an intellectual impediment to his plans
for a Hungary that is skeptical of such ideals and of
European integration.
Second, Orbán included full-blown dictatorships
(Russia and China) in the roster of governments he
admires, along with quasi-democratic illiberal states
(Turkey and Singapore) and one genuine, if inconsistent,
democracy (India).
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
Third, he signaled his support for majoritarianism,
with its disdain for checks and balances and civil
society, as opposed to the values of pluralism that are
enshrined in liberal democratic practice.
The message here is important. For many, illiberalism’s
defining feature is intolerance toward minority groups:
the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender)
community, Roma, Muslims, refugees and migrants
of all sorts. But in Hungary and elsewhere, illiberal
government signifies something much more comprehensive
than the prime minister asserting that “every
single migrant poses a public security and terror risk,” 3
and that refugees bring “gangs hunting down our
women and daughters” 4 —two of Orbán’s more incendiary
declarations.
The Hungarian leader is instead telling us that illiberalism
involves a wholesale rejection of liberal values and
democratic norms, with all that this implies for politics
and governance. Fidesz’s “reform” efforts have been less
concerned with the repression of unpopular minorities
than with the creation of a system in which the
institutions of pluralism are hollowed out and the ruling
party’s dominance is assured over the long term.
Having come to office with a two-thirds parliamentary
majority in 2010, Orbán was able to rewrite the
constitution without the consent of the opposition.
He rushed through a series of constitutional changes,
cardinal laws (requiring a two-thirds vote to change or
remove), and regular laws that had the effect of turning
the Hungarian political system upside down.
Among the steps taken by Fidesz after its 2010 triumph:
• The Constitutional Court was overhauled so that
Fidesz appointees became a majority and its
jurisdiction was narrowed. 5
• The government eliminated the independent
Fiscal Council, responsible for overseeing budgetary
policy, then replaced it with a new council
under Fidesz control.
• A new election law created gerrymandered legislative
districts that were favorable to Fidesz. 6
• Orbán gave voting rights to ethnic Hungarians
in neighboring countries, who were likely to
support Fidesz. 7
• The government created a new press authority
whose chair and members were Fidesz loyalists.
The authority was given wide-ranging powers to
fine media outlets. 8
While the measures listed above were some of the most
notorious of the Fidesz initiatives, in some cases drawing
critical attention from European oversight bodies,
they represent only part of the campaign that has transformed
Hungary into a full-fledged illiberal democracy.
Perhaps the more far-reaching measures introduced
under Orban have been in the economic sphere. Since
2010, Hungary has evolved into a crony capitalist state
par excellence. But unlike in outright kleptocracies
such as Russia, where the regime itself is organized
around the plunder of public wealth by the ruling
clique, Orbán has used state laws and procurement
contracts to create a wealthy Fidesz-affiliated business
constituency that can finance political campaigns, reward
party supporters, and operate friendly media outlets.
The enrichment of cronies is less an objective in
itself than a means of fortifying the dominant political
party against any future challenge from the opposition. 9
While Orbán is highly unpopular in European liberal
circles, he has gained a following among conservatives
in both Europe and the United States. At a 2015
congressional subcommittee hearing in Washington,
one Republican legislator after another defended the
Fidesz government, often in ways that demonstrated
blatant ignorance of political conditions in Budapest. 10
Conservatives praise Orbán for his commitment to
traditional values and decisive leadership, but they
ignore the course he has set for the economy.
Since taking power in 2010, the prime minister has
violated practically every principle of the free market
and prudent economic stewardship. Were Hungary a
developing state in Latin America or Africa, donor governments
would likely have imposed special conditions
on foreign assistance given the overt acts of corruption
and cronyism that Fidesz has embraced as a matter of
public policy. This includes a pattern of awarding government
contracts to businesses with Fidesz ties, the
adoption of special laws to benefit Fidesz supporters in
the business community, the use of punitive taxation
against foreign-owned corporations, tax concessions
for corporations controlled by Fidesz loyalists, and the
granting of control over nationalized sectors of the
economy to Fidesz supporters.
In its relentless drive to hand economic power to its
allies, Fidesz resembles the old-style political ma-
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Freedom House
chines, with their vast patronage networks, that presided
over American cities a half-century ago. Fidesz
is apparently seeking to ensure that rival parties will
never have access to the funds or influence necessary
to unseat the incumbent government.
Is Orbán a Central European version of Putin?
Orbán’s domestic critics have often compared his
governing style to that of Russian president Vladimir
Putin. On the surface, the comparison seems unfair.
Hungary is still rated Free by Freedom House. It still
has genuine opposition parties, however weak, in
parliament, a relatively unfettered civil society sector,
freedom of assembly, and other civil liberties. Hungary
has also been spared the routine violence that marks
Russian politics. 11
But Orbán also began his current tenure in an environment
very different from the Russia inherited by Putin.
Hungary had been a successful, if flawed, democracy
for two decades before Orbán took office in 2010.
It was a member of the European Union (EU) and
subject to that bloc’s norms and regulations. It was
also a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). For Hungarians, the events of 1989 led to
democratic liberties and freedom from foreign domination.
For Russia, 1989 and 1991 meant the loss of a
vast empire and the beginning of a decade of political
and economic upheaval.
Given their different contexts, the striking feature in a
Putin-Orbán comparison is the similarities. The following
are some of the more obvious:
• Both have repeatedly expressed disdain for
“Western” liberal values.
• Both have employed a combination of control
over state broadcasters and crony ownership of
the private press to dominate the mainstream
media, though Hungary’s environment remains
notably more free than Russia’s.
• Both have hollowed out the institutions that
provide oversight and transparency regarding
actions by the executive branch.
• Both have made clear their dislike for civil
society organizations that pursue reformist or
human rights missions. While Orbán has yet to
enact Russian-style laws to declare such groups
“foreign agents” or ban them as “undesirable,” Fidesz
has announced the intention to introduce
parliamentary legislation designed to harass
NGOs and curb their funding. 12
• Both have seized political opportunities offered
by the presence of ethnic compatriots in surrounding
countries. Putin has exploited supposed
discrimination against ethnic Russians
and certain other minorities in Ukraine, Georgia,
Moldova, and the Baltic states as justification
for military intervention or hostile propaganda.
Orbán has brought nearby Hungarian minorities
into his political coalition by giving them the
right to vote in Hungarian national elections and
making it even easier for them to cast ballots
than it is for Hungarian citizens who are temporarily
working in Europe or elsewhere. 13
• As a matter of high priority, both Orbán and Putin
have secured domination over the judiciary
with the goal of removing its role as a check on
their power.
‘Law and Justice’ in Poland
Like Hungary, Poland was until recently regarded as
one of the chief success stories from the wave of democratization
that accompanied the end of the Cold
War. Poland’s democratic institutions were imperfect,
and the economic gains that were made possible by a
rapid changeover to free-market policies were spread
unevenly among the Polish people. But the achievements
seemed to outweigh the deficiencies. The
country’s rate of growth was impressive by European
standards; it was one of the few EU member states to
emerge relatively unscathed from the financial crisis
of 2008. Its leaders exercised influence within the EU
and NATO, and enjoyed global respect.
According to the leaders of the archconservative Law
and Justice (PiS) party, however, Poland was a deeply
troubled society whose system of government was in
need of a top-to-bottom overhaul.
Ahead of the 2015 elections, PiS appropriated a vocabulary
similar to that of Fidesz in its 2010 campaign.
It depicted the center-right government as the architect
of a failed economy. It denounced mainstream
leaders as more comfortable with the cosmopolitan
liberal values of Brussels and Berlin than with the
traditional Christian morality of rural Poland. And PiS
suggested that the liberal establishment that had governed
for most of the postcommunist period had “stowww.freedomhouse.org
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
len” the democratic revolution from the Polish people
by failing to carry out a proper purge of communists
and their collaborators. 14 PiS even initiated a campaign
to sully the reputation of Lech Walesa, leader of
the anticommunist Solidarity movement in the 1980s,
by accusing him of working as a communist agent. 15
Since coming to power with a parliamentary majority
in October 2015, PiS has embarked on a course of
change that places it solidly in the illiberal camp, with
many of the initiatives mirroring those enacted by
Fidesz in Hungary.
As in Hungary, an initial focus for the new government
was securing control of the Constitutional Tribunal.
PiS has moved to pack the court with its own appointees,
using tactics that are blatantly illegal according
to Polish law and which have drawn criticism both
from the EU and the United States. 16 However, party
leader Jarosław Kaczyński, who holds a seat in the
parliament but no formal government position, has
much greater ambitions to refashion Poland along
culturally conservative and politically illiberal lines.
The media are a major target. The government quickly
asserted control over public broadcasters and purged
them of journalists whom it regarded as loyal to the opposition.
17 PiS officials have also spoken of the need to
“restore balance” to the private media by, among other
things, taking measures to reduce foreign ownership of
key outlets. Already, the new government has used its
power over the allocation of state advertising to reward
friendly media and punish its critics. 18
The new government has involved itself in a debate
over history. It proposed a law that would punish those
who use the phrase “Polish death camps” to refer to
sites established by Nazi Germany in Poland during
World War II. 19 PiS leaders have demonized scholars,
such as the eminent historian Jan Gross, who have
published research on the participation of Poles in
the persecution of Jews during the war. Gross was
questioned by a prosecutor on his research, and there
was talk of rescinding an award he had received. 20 The
government threatened to withdraw support from the
Museum of the Second World War, a project that was
near completion in Gdansk and enjoyed strong support
from such highly regarded scholars as Timothy Snyder
and Norman Davies. PiS complained that the museum
focused on all victims of the conflict rather than on
specifically Polish suffering. 21
Perhaps the most unsettling measure enacted under
the PiS government is an ambitious law that, in the
name of counterterrorism, gives the security services
sweeping powers over telecommunications and
personal information. With this legislation, Poland
became one of the first countries in the democratic
world to embrace the use of telecommunications
shutdowns in a particular area, a measure that
smacks of digital repression. 22
The law gives Poland’s domestic intelligence agency
unrestricted access to personal data without approval
from a court or any other body. Tax reports,
vehicle information, insurance information, financial
statements, and other records are all now available
to the intelligence service of a government that has
made a point of naming party loyalists to key security
positions. The legislation also grants the domestic
security agency the ability to shut down websites. The
action can be reviewed by a court within five days, but
this is far from reassuring in light of the government’s
efforts to exert political control over the judiciary.
The legislation is ostensibly needed to counter acts of
terrorism. But Poland has not experienced a terrorist
act since 1939, and has one of the smallest populations
of Muslim immigrants—often perceived as a risk
factor for terrorism—in Europe. Furthermore, the law
is written in vague terms that give the government
great latitude to decide what is and is not an act of
terrorism. 23 Given the PiS leadership’s penchant for
smearing its political adversaries as traitors to the
Polish nation, 24 it is not inconceivable that such a law
could one day be used against the opposition.
Illiberalism’s preconditions
The triumph of illiberal governments in countries like
Hungary and Poland raises the question of whether
the phenomenon will spread further. Might illiberalism
come to dominate a society with much deeper
democratic roots—Austria, France, or even the United
States?
From a practical standpoint, illiberal forces are unlikely
to transform countries where the political divide is relatively
equal and the established parties have strong,
loyal followings.
It is only when the mainstream parties suffer catastrophic
electoral setbacks that illiberal challengers
can rush into the breach.
The Socialist Party had governed Hungary for much of
the period since 1989, but it rapidly lost credibility due
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Freedom House
to economic mismanagement and political dishonesty.
It was devastated by the 2010 election results, and
has failed to reemerge as a viable opposition entity. In
Poland, the center-right Civic Platform had been the
dominant force until the 2015 PiS victory. It achieved
economic success and gained respect in Brussels,
but lost the support of the working class, the provinces,
and all those who felt bypassed by globalization.
Similarly, the elitist secular parties that had ruled
Turkey for most of the 20th century were swept aside
by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development
Party, which appealed to a rising Islamist middle class.
And in Venezuela, it took only a few years in power
for Hugo Chávez to win over the country’s poor and
marginalize the conservative mainstream parties that
had led the country for decades.
A second precondition for the emergence of illiberal regimes
is a fundamental weakness in democratic institutions
beyond the political sphere, including the media,
civil society, anticorruption agencies, and the judiciary.
In many newer democracies, these checks and balances
remain fragile: It is widely assumed that whoever
controls the parliament will also come to dominate the
judiciary and the security services, and the media are
vulnerable to intimidation or partisan capture.
Illiberalism seems less likely to gain traction in the
United States because the courts, for example, are
proudly independent, and freedom of the press is firmly
protected by statute and constitutional jurisprudence.
But if illiberal forces have sufficient political
will and the defenders of democratic institutions lack
conviction and public support, anything is possible.
Polls have shown that popular faith in Congress and
the Supreme Court are at historic lows. A growing
number of Americans question the effectiveness of
representative democracy and ask whether it would
be better to let the president make decisions unencumbered
by the legislative branch. An astonishing
one in six Americans believe it would be acceptable
to have the army rule. And with each passing generation,
a smaller share of U.S. citizens believe that living
under a democracy is important. 25
1. “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Speech at the 25th Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp,” Website of the Hungarian
Government, July 26, 2014, http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp.
2. “Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on 15 March,” Website of the Hungarian Government, March 16, 2016, http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-on-15-march.
3. Cynthia Kroet, “Viktor Orbán: Migrants Are ‘a Poison,’” Politico, July 27, 2016, http://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-migrants-are-a-poison-hungarian-prime-minister-europe-refugee-crisis/.
4. “Speech by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on 15 March,” Website of the Hungarian Government, March 16, 2016, http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-on-15-march.
5. See for example “Hungary,” in Freedom in the World 2011 (New York: Freedom House, 2011), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2011/hungary.
6. “Hungary,” in Freedom in the World 2015 (New York: Freedom House, 2015), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2015/hungary.
7. Ibid.
8. “Hungary,” in Freedom of the Press 2012 (New York: Freedom House, 2012), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2012/
hungary.
9. “Bálint Magyar’s Latest Book: Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary,” Hungarian Spectrum, February 19, 2016, http://
hungarianspectrum.org/2016/02/19/balint-magyars-latest-book-post-communist-mafia-state-the-case-of-hungary/.
10. “Kim Lane Scheppele: Hungary and the State of American Democracy,” Hungarian Spectrum, May 21, 2015, http://hungarianspectrum.org/2015/05/21/kim-lane-scheppele-hungary-and-the-state-of-american-democracy/.
11. “Hungary,” in Freedom in the World 2016 (New York: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2016/hungary.
12. Pablo Gorondi, “Hungary Lawmakers Debate Bill Seen Meant to Intimidate NGOs,” Associated Press, April 19, 2017, https://apnews.
com/f70fa05a11fa4ec389d388b1f50aca19.
13. Mitchell A. Orenstein, Péter Krekó, and Attila Juhász. “The Hungarian Putin?” Foreign Affairs, February 8, 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/hungary/2015-02-08/hungarian-putin.
14. “Poland: An Inconvenient Truth,” Financial Times, May 1, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/4344ca44-0b94-11e6-9cd4-2be-
898308be3.
15. Dalibor Rohac, “’Illiberal Democracy’ Spreads to Poland,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/illiberal-democracy-spreads-to-poland-1465413404.
16. Noah Feldman, “Poland’s New Leaders Take Aim at Democracy,” Bloomberg View, December 31, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.
com/view/articles/2015-12-31/poland-s-new-leaders-take-aim-at-democracy.
17. Alison Smale and Joanna Berendt, “Poland’s Conservative Government Puts Curbs on State TV News,” New York Times, July 3,
2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/world/europe/polands-conservative-government-puts-curbs-on-state-tv-news.html.
www.freedomhouse.org
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
18. Jan Cienski, “Polish Media Veers Back to Pre-1989,” Politico, July 11, 2016, http://www.politico.eu/article/polish-tv-viewers-turnoff-tune-out-drop-out-poland-kaczynski/.
19. “Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Party Is Rewriting the History of Poland,” Financial Times, March 11, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/67532c78-e62d-11e5-a09b-1f8b0d268c39.
20. Ibid.
21. Vanessa Gera, “Polish Leaders Threaten Fate of Nearly Finished WWII Museum,” Washington Times, April 24, 2016, http://www.
washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/24/polish-leaders-threaten-fate-of-nearly-finished-ww/.
22. Jan Rydzak, “Now Poland’s Government Is Coming After the Internet,” Foreign Policy, June 10, 2016, http://foreignpolicy.
com/2016/06/10/now-polands-government-is-coming-after-the-internet/.
23. Ibid.
24. Henry Foy, “Poland’s New Majoritarians,” American Interest, June 7, 2016, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/06/07/polands-new-majoritarians/.
25. Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, “Across the Globe, a Growing Disillusionment with Democracy,” New York Times, September 15,
2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/opinion/across-the-globe-a-growing-disillusionment-with-democracy.html.
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Freedom House
Chapter 6
Flacks and Friends
Did the Russian government attempt to surreptitiously
influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election
in Donald Trump’s favor? The answer to that question
may never be definitively known. There is, nevertheless,
a critical mass of evidence that Kremlin-allied
forces were responsible for hacking into the Democratic
National Committee’s computers, stealing
millions of files, and turning the information over to
WikiLeaks, which in turn circulated it to the media.
Some may find the evidence unsatisfactory. But given
Russia’s well-established record of cyberwarfare,
previously directed at neighboring states like Estonia
and Ukraine, and the Russian regime’s dislike for the
Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, there is ample
reason to treat charges of Russian culpability as
strongly credible.
Another body of evidence can be found in Russia’s
record of involvement in the internal politics of a
number of countries in Europe, including European
Union (EU) member states. In fact, under Vladimir
Putin, Russia has repeatedly interfered in the affairs of
European states in ways that the Kremlin would regard
as intolerable if Russia were the target.
Russian involvement is usually camouflaged so as
to ensure a degree of deniability, but the disguise is
sometimes rather thin. In late 2014, France’s far-right
National Front party, led by Marine Le Pen, secured a
€9 million loan from a Russian bank with indirect ties
to the government in what many interpreted as a bet
by Putin on the future of French politics. Le Pen has
subsequently spoken favorably of Putin and criticized
the sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU. 1 She has
even called for a strategic alliance with Russia and
proposed a pan-European grouping that would include
Russia while leaving out the United States. By 2016, the
National Front was seeking more funding that would
enable it to participate on an equal footing with mainstream
parties in the 2017 presidential contest. 2
The 2014 loan came just months after the National
Front helped provide a veneer of legitimacy to Russia’s
illegal annexation of Crimea. Aymeric Chauprade, a Le
Pen adviser who once called Russia “the hope of the
world against new totalitarianism,” participated in an
observer mission to monitor the Crimean referendum
on secession from Ukraine and union with Russia. The
“As an operator, but not as a human
being, I would say Putin. The way he
played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant.”
—Nigel Farage, on the world leader he most admires
“I admire his cool head. Because
there is a cold war being waged
against him by the EU at the behest
of the United States…. I admire that
he has managed to restore pride and
contentment to a great nation that
had been humiliated and persecuted
for 70 years.”
—Marine Le Pen
“[Putin] makes a decision and he executes
it, quickly. And then everybody
reacts. That’s what you call a leader.”
—Rudy Giuliani
mission was arranged by a pro-Moscow organization
called the Eurasian Observatory for Elections and
Democracy, and consisted largely of politicians from
a variety of European far-right parties, including Hungary’s
Jobbik and Austria’s Freedom Party. The vote,
held under Russian military occupation, was widely regarded
as falling well short of international standards.
However, the Eurasian Observatory delegation gave
the referendum an enthusiastic thumbs-up. 3
Moscow has paid considerable attention to evolving
political developments in Central and Eastern Europe.
Despite their relatively recent histories of Soviet
subjugation and communist rule, a number of these
countries have seen the rise of populist or nationalist
parties that express admiration for or affinity with
Putin’s regime. Meanwhile, mainstream parties have
developed attitudes toward Russia that are notable
for their ambivalence, including on the pivotal issue of
the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
In some countries, Russia has made progress among
both far-right nationalists and more traditional conservative
parties. In Hungary, for example, Moscow
has a reliable ally in Jobbik and a business partner in
the ruling Fidesz party, which has been critical of the
EU’s economic sanctions. 4 The Hungarian parliament
conducted an investigation into allegations that the
Kremlin was helping to finance Jobbik. There were
also charges that a Jobbik member of the European
Parliament was a Russian agent. Gábor Vona, the
chairman of Jobbik, has embraced the idea of Eurasianism
and speculated that Hungary could serve as
a “bridge” between Europe and Asia.
At the intergovernmental level, Russia in 2015 provided
Hungary with a $10.8 billion loan to expand the Paks
nuclear power plant, a facility that supplies 40 percent
of the country’s electricity. The project was to have
been put out for open bidding until Hungarian officials
abruptly decided to accept the proposal from Russia’s
state nuclear energy firm—financed by the Kremlin’s
loan—without competition. 5 Some believe that the
Paks deal is meant to encourage the Fidesz government
to continue its support for an EU policy that would be
more sympathetic toward Russian interests. 6 While the
Fidesz leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has been
cautious in public statements about Putin and Russia,
he did identify Russia as one of several countries with
illiberal or authoritarian governments that would provide
the models for global political development in the
future, as opposed to supposedly declining powers like
the United States and the EU’s founding members. 7
The Russian government has also developed friendly
ties to parties in Slovakia. Marian Kotleba, leader of
the far-right People’s Party–Our Slovakia, supported
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in his decision
to reject an association agreement with the EU and
pursue closer ties with Russia instead—a decision
that ultimately led to Yanukovych’s fall from power in
February 2014. Slovakia’s left-leaning populist prime
minister, Robert Fico, has publicly expressed his lack
of enthusiasm for the EU sanctions imposed on Russia
following the invasion of Ukraine. 8
In other countries, there is evidence that Moscow has
bankrolled environmentalist protests against the development
of local hydrocarbon resources, which would
reduce European dependence on Russian oil and natural
gas. In 2012, street protests compelled Bulgaria’s
prime minister, Boyko Borisov, to cancel contracts with
Chevron to explore shale-oil sites in the country. Those
who suspect the Kremlin’s involvement in the demonstrations
point to a €20 million media campaign that
was handled by companies with Russian ties, as well
as enthusiastic support from Ataka, a far-right political
party that is aggressively pro-Russia. 9
Russia and the right
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union could count on
the uncritical support of a network of left-wing parties
and personalities in the democratic world. Some were
formally communist; others were independent leftists
or part of what was called the peace camp, which
argued that the West, especially the United States,
shared responsibility with the Soviets for the world’s
political tensions, and therefore chose a path of political
neutrality. In the Cold War’s later years, a growing
collection of business interests encouraged détente
between the Soviet Union and the United States due
to the economic opportunities it would offer.
Under Putin, Russia has formed its alliances on a
strictly nonideological basis. Russia has built close
diplomatic ties with Venezuela, governed by a socialist
movement; Iran, an authoritarian system under the
rule of Shiite Muslim clerics; Syria, a dictatorship with
nominally Arab nationalist views; and China, a formally
communist regime devoted to state-led capitalism.
The interests that draw these governments together
are a common hostility to democratic norms, a need
for allies to block criticism and sanctions at international
bodies, a fear of “color revolutions” and the
potential consequences of democracy-promotion
projects backed by foreign donors, and an adversarial
relationship with the United States.
In its dealings with European political parties or movements,
Russia adheres to a similar policy of ideological
indifference, focusing instead on those with an
interest in disrupting Europe’s political establishment
and weakening its unity. Thus Putin has courted leftist
parties like Syriza, which leads the current government
of Greece and opposes austerity measures
imposed by the EU. Nigel Farage, former leader of the
anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP),
and Nick Griffin, head of the far-right British National
Party, have both praised Putin for his leadership qualities;
but so has Alex Salmond of the Scottish National
Party, which seeks Scottish independence within the
EU and supports social democratic policies.
For the most part, however, Russia’s allies in democratic
countries are found on the political right. A
Swedish journalist who examined votes in the European
Parliament reported that right-leaning Euroskeptic
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Freedom House
Putin’s Foreign Admirers
“Putin decides what he wants to do, and he
does it in half a day, right? He decided he had
to go to their parliament—he went to their
parliament, he got permission in 15 minutes.…
He makes a decision and he executes
it, quickly. Then everybody reacts. That’s what
you call a leader.”
—Rudolph Giuliani, former New York City mayor
“In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues.…
Obviously, he may be wrong about
many things, but he has taken a stand to protect
his nation’s children from the damaging
effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.”
—Franklin Graham, American Christian evangelist
“Putin is certainly a pure democrat, but with
an authoritarian style. Russia is a great state.
The president has been endowed with great
power by the constitution.… Putin tries to
keep Russian interests from his perspective.”
—Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of Freedom Party of
Austria
“As an operator, but not as a human being, I
would say Putin [is the most admirable world
leader]. The way he played the whole Syria
thing. Brilliant.’”
—Nigel Farage, former leader of UK Independence Party
“I admire his cool head. Because there is a
cold war being waged against him by the EU
at the behest of the United States, which is
defending its own interests. I admire that he
has managed to restore pride and contentment
to a great nation that had been humiliated
and persecuted for 70 years.”
—Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front
“Between Putin and [Italian prime minister
Matteo] Renzi I will always choose Putin. I
wish Putin tomorrow morning became chairman
of the Council of Ministers of Italy.… Punishment
against Russia [through sanctions] is
a stupid measure, which will cost us 5 billion
euros. If there is a part of Ukraine, which
wants to be Russia, I don’t see why not.”
—Matteo Salvini, national secretary of Italy’s Northern
League
parties supported Russian interests on a select group
of issues. The most reliable pro-Russian party was
Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom,
followed by France’s National Front, Italy’s Northern
League, the Swedish Democrats, and UKIP. 10
Putin and other Kremlin officials speak of Russia as a
successful example of interreligious harmony, boast
of government policies to ensure fair treatment for
Russia’s large Muslim population, and denounce
those who brought down Yanukovych’s government in
Ukraine as fascists and pogromists. Yet when it comes
to potential allies in Europe, it makes no difference to
the Kremlin whether a party has views that are racist,
anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, or even openly fascist.
Russia welcomes the support of parties like Jobbik,
with its history of anti-Semitism and contempt for
Hungary’s Romany population, and has no qualms
about right-wing parties that speak of Muslims as
criminals and rapists.
For Russia, the payoff from this strategy is a network
of parties that identify with the Kremlin’s hatred of
liberal values, support Russia on critical foreign policy
issues, and praise Putin as a strong leader. While some
of these parties are still marginal forces in domestic
politics, a growing number are regarded as legitimate
contenders, especially since an uncontrolled influx of
refugees and an increase in terrorist attacks dented
public trust in mainstream parties. Even if Russia
remains unpopular in most European countries, the
fact that increasingly influential political figures laud
Putin for his energy, decisiveness, and eagerness to
challenge liberal orthodoxies is regarded as a gain for
Moscow. As these parties acquire a share of governing
power in EU states, the prospects for a recognition
of the Crimea annexation and the abandonment of
economic sanctions improve significantly.
The benefit for European far-right parties is less clear.
Though they claim to be champions of national sov-
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
ereignty, they are aligning themselves with a Russian
leader who has sought to dominate neighboring
states and who regularly invokes his country’s imperial
and Soviet past. Putin has refused to apologize for
Russia’s historical subjugation of Central and Eastern
Europe. He has defended the Soviet Union’s occupations
as necessary to secure its national interests, and
denounced the movement of former Soviet bloc countries
to join the EU and seek protection in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Far-right parties apparently see Putin not as a threat
to national security, but as an exemplar of their own
nationalist values. Like him, they hope to build a
strong national state without regard for international
agreements, domestic checks and balances, or fundamental
human rights. Putin’s contempt for democracy
carries no stigma among these parties, for which
elections and civil liberties are purely instrumental.
While Le Pen, Wilders, and their ilk need elections as
a means of gaining power and a free press to convey
their arguments, they are hostile to the extension of
rights to immigrants and minorities, and unenthusiastic
about independent courts that might block their
initiatives. To the extent that the EU enforces democratic
norms in its region, Putin and Europe’s far right
have a common enemy in Brussels.
Flacks for autocrats
Paul Manafort, a Washington lobbyist and consultant,
had a long career of work for leading Republicans,
including presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and
Ronald Reagan. But by the time he became Donald
Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, Manafort was
best known for his work on behalf of foreign political
leaders, including several with distinctly autocratic
pedigrees: Ferdinand Marcos, the strongman of the
Philippines until 1986; Mobutu Sese Seko, the kleptocratic
dictator of what is now the Democratic Republic
of Congo; Sani Abacha, a Nigerian military ruler; and
Viktor Yanukovych, president of Ukraine from 2010 to
2014, when he was forced to abandon the presidency
and flee to Russia in the wake of nationwide protests.
Manafort’s work to dress up the images of Marcos and
Mobutu stood out at a time when American consultants
seldom represented dictators or authoritarians.
In the 1980s, U.S. political operatives with experience
in major campaigns were expanding their clientele
to include foreign governments and political parties,
though usually in democratic settings. 11
By 2005, when Manafort signed on to work with Yanukovych,
political consultants, public relations specialists,
and blue-chip law firms were earning fees paid
by a majority of the world’s autocracies, dictatorships,
and illiberal regimes. Some, especially Middle Eastern
monarchies, are American allies. But others are hostile
to democracy and regard the United States—and often
the EU—as adversaries. The lobbyists and spin masters
they employ are not located exclusively in the United
States. Authoritarians with the requisite means and
interests have hired representatives in London and
Brussels as well as Washington and New York.
Lawyers and consultants often represent dictatorships
indirectly, through state-owned enterprises. A
number of China’s state businesses have hired legal
and political consultants in major democracies, as
have state energy corporations in oil-rich countries
like Azerbaijan, Venezuela, and Angola.
But authoritarian governments generally seek the
assistance of global public relations companies in the
wake of repressive crackdowns at home or acts of
aggression against neighbors. During Manafort’s relatively
brief tenure with the Trump campaign, it emerged
that several American firms had been contracted to
discourage Congress from criticizing the Yanukovych
government for its jailing of Yanukovych’s 2010 presidential
campaign rival, Yuliya Tymoshenko. That effort
failed, as members of Congress and the American media
made Tymoshenko’s fate a crucial criterion in their
assessment of Yanukovych’s record. 12 Manafort had
more success in his earlier work to prepare Yanukovych
for his candidacy in 2010. Ukrainian observers credited
the American adviser with smoothing Yanukovych’s
rough edges, convincing him to stay on message, and
reminding him that it was important to assure U.S. and
European audiences that he was committed to democracy
and the fight against corruption. 13
In 2016, Reuters reported that five global public relations
firms had competed for a contract to improve
China’s image abroad. The planned campaign would
presumably repair reputational damage caused by
the Chinese government’s intensifying domestic
repression, its aggressive territorial policies in the
South China Sea, and a push by Chinese companies
to acquire crucial assets in democratic countries. The
firms that participated in the public relations audition
were Hill+Knowlton, Ogilvy, Ketchum, FleishmanHillard,
and Edelman. According to the Reuters account,
the firms were asked to give a presentation “on China’s
most pressing image problems and demonstrate their
expertise on managing new forms of media.” 14
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Freedom House
Several other examples of consultants in the pay of
authoritarians are worth mention:
• Until rather recently, Azerbaijan was represented
by a battalion of lawyers, political operatives,
and public relations specialists in Washington,
London, and Brussels. While some worked for
the national energy company, others were hired
directly by the government to explain away the
regime’s miserable human rights record to the administration,
members of Congress, think tanks,
and other opinion makers in the United States. 15
• Bahrain spent over $32 million between 2011,
when political protests broke out, and 2015 on
political consultants in the United States and
Britain. During that period, the country experienced
an explosion in the number of political
prisoners as the Sunni Muslim monarchy carried
out an often violent persecution of the Shiite
majority. 16
• Despite their efforts to hollow out Venezuela’s
democratic infrastructure and their virulent
anti-Americanism, the late Hugo Chávez and his
successor, Nicolás Maduro, had no difficulty in
finding American consultants who would represent
the interests of their government and the
national oil company. 17
• Richard Burt, a former U.S. diplomat in Republican
administrations, earned hundreds of
thousands of dollars promoting a critical Russian
energy project while also helping to shape
candidate Trump’s foreign policy positions.
According to Politico, Burt received $365,000
in the first half of 2016 for lobbying on behalf of
Nord Stream II, a Russian-backed pipeline plan
that would deliver more natural gas directly to
Western and Central Europe via the Baltic Sea,
bypassing Ukraine and Belarus. At the same
time, Burt was helping to write a major Trump
foreign policy address. That speech, among
other things, called for greater cooperation with
Russia. 18
• In early 2017, an Egyptian intelligence agency
hired two Washington public relations firms
to lobby on the country’s behalf and boost its
image. Filings with the Department of Justice
showed the General Intelligence Service hired
Weber Shandwick and Cassidy and Associates
in a deal worth $1.8 million annually. 19
• Michael Flynn, who served briefly as President
Trump’s national security adviser, did lucrative
consulting work for a firm with ties to the
government of Turkish president Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan before and immediately after the 2016
election. Among other things, Flynn wrote an
op-ed that urged the American government to
expel Fethullah Gülen, a controversial cleric
who was accused by the Turkish government of
masterminding the 2016 coup attempt. Flynn’s
consulting firm was paid $535,000 for work
between September 9 and November 14. 20
Balance sheet
Even as they declare their disdain for liberal values,
modern authoritarians take maximum advantage
of the freedoms that are embedded in democratic
systems. Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, and others
have established television networks that broadcast
beyond their borders to countries around the globe.
Viewers in the United States or Europe can watch
Russia’s RT or China Central Television on their local
cable systems. Pro-Beijing tycoons have gained a
strong foothold in the Hong Kong press landscape,
and Chinese businesses are making substantial
investments in Hollywood studios and production
companies.
Russia would not tolerate a foreign power providing
funding for an opposition political party. Yet it helps
to finance France’s National Front and quite possibly
Hungary’s Jobbik. In 2013, Greenpeace activists
attempted to scale a Russian offshore drilling platform
as part of a protest against Arctic oil exploration; the
authorities arrested the protesters, charged them
with piracy, and held them for two months before their
release. 21 Yet at the same time, the Kremlin was allegedly
fostering anti-fracking demonstrations in parts
of Central and Eastern Europe. 22 Russia organizes
bogus election-monitoring missions that give a stamp
of approval to polling in Crimea and other authoritarian
settings, while effectively preventing legitimate
election observation teams from functioning on its
own soil.
Authoritarian states also rent the services of former government
officials and members of Congress, powerful
lawyers, and experienced political image-makers to persuade
skeptical audiences that they share the interests
of democracies. These lobbyists work to advance the
economic goals of their clients’ energy companies and
other businesses, but they also burnish the reputawww.freedomhouse.org
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
tions of regimes that have been sullied by the jailing of
dissidents or opposition leaders, the shuttering of media
outlets, or violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators.
Is the money that authoritarians allocate for image
beautification well spent? Some campaigns have been
more successful than others, but autocracies that
hire well-known former cabinet secretaries or elected
officials to defend or deny their acts of repression often
fail to sway either the public or the policy community
in the United States. If democratic leaders have not
mounted adequate responses to such repression, it is
generally because of other strategic concerns or simple
neglect, not because lobbyists have persuaded them
that the regime in question is benevolent and just.
Authoritarian efforts to change governments, as
opposed to perceptions, may ultimately prove more
rewarding. Russia’s wager on the rise of friendly
European populist parties already seems to be paying
off. After Britain’s vote to withdraw from the EU and
the triumph of Donald Trump in the United States,
the prospect of radical shifts in global politics can no
longer be dismissed as unthinkable.
1. Brian Whitmore, “Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon,” Atlantic, December 20, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/vladimir-putin-conservative-icon/282572/?single_page=true.
2. Ivo Oliveira, “National Front Seeks Russian Cash for Election Fight,” Politico, February 19, 2016, http://www.politico.eu/article/lepen-russia-crimea-putin-money-bank-national-front-seeks-russian-cash-for-election-fight/.
3. Andrew Higgins, “Far-Right Fever for a Europe Tied to Russia,” New York Times, May 20, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/
world/europe/europes-far-right-looks-to-russia-as-a-guiding-force.html?_r=0.
4. Susi Dennison and Dina Pardijs, “The World according to Europe’s Insurgent Parties: Putin, Migration and People Power,” European
Council on Foreign Relations, June 27, 2016, http://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/the_world_according_to_europes_insurgent_parties7055.
5. Krisztina Than, “Special Report: Inside Hungary’s $10.8 Billion Nuclear Deal with Russia,” Reuters, March 30, 2015, http://www.
reuters.com/article/us-russia-europe-hungary-specialreport-idUSKBN0MQ0MP20150330.
6. Dennison and Pardijs, “The World according to Europe’s Insurgent Parties.”
7. “Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Speech at the 25th Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp,” Website of the Hungarian
Government, July 26, 2014, http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp.
8. Dennison and Pardijs, “The World according to Europe’s Insurgent Parties.”
9. Ibid.
10. Jason Karaian, “Putin Has Friends on Europe’s Far Right and Left (but Mostly Right),” Quartz, January 15, 2015, http://
qz.com/326487/putin-has-friends-on-europes-far-right-and-left-but-mostly-right/.
11. Amber Phillips, “Paul Manafort’s Complicated Ties to Ukraine, Explained,” Washington Post, August 19, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/19/paul-manaforts-complicated-ties-to-ukraine-explained/.
12. Steven Lee Myers and Andrew E. Kramer, “How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump,” New York
Times, July 31, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/us/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html.
13. Ibid.
14. Engen Tham and Matthew Miller, “Exclusive: Beijing Auditions Foreign Public Relations Firms to Polish China Brand,” Reuters, April
22, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-pr-exclusive-idUSKCN0XJ007.
15. Arch Puddington, “Paul Manafort Is the Tip of the Iceberg,” Freedom at Issue, August 18, 2016, https://freedomhouse.org/blog/
paul-manafort-tip-iceberg; Ilya Lozovsky, “How Azerbaijan and Its Lobbyists Spin Congress,” Foreign Policy, June 11, 2015, http://
foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/11/how-azerbaijan-and-its-lobbyists-spin-congress/.
16. Ken Silverstein, “How Bahrain Works Washington,” Salon, December 8, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/12/08/how_bahrain_
works_washington/; Akbar Shahid Ahmed, “How Wealthy Arab Gulf States Shape the Washington Influence Game,” Huffington
Post, September 2, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arab-gulf-states-washington_us_55e62be5e4b0b7a9633ac659.
17. Lachlan Markay, “State-Owned Venezuelan Oil Firm Spends Millions on U.S. Lobbying,” Washington Free Beacon, June 6, 2016,
http://freebeacon.com/issues/state-owned-venezuelan-oil-firms-spends-millions-u-s-lobbying/.
18. Ben Schreckinger and Iulia Ioffe, “Lobbyist Advised Trump Campaign While Promoting Russian Pipeline,” Politico, October 7, 2016,
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/donald-trump-campaign-lobbyist-russian-pipeline-229264.
19. Brian Rohan, “Egypt’s Mukhabarat Hires Washington Lobbyists to Boost Image,” Associated Press, March 5, 2017, http://bigstory.
ap.org/article/d8d55dbbcedb4e589d33555cc5fa8855/egypts-general-intelligence-registers-washington-lobbyist.
20. Theodoric Meyer, “Flynn Lobbied for Turkish-linked Firm after Election, Documents Show,” Politico, March 8, 2017, http://www.
politico.com/story/2017/03/michael-flynn-lobby-turkey-235843.
21. Ben Stewart, “When Russia Declared War on Greenpeace: The Story of the Arctic 30 Captured on a Gazprom Drilling Platform and
Sentenced to Years in Jail,” Independent, April 11, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/when-russia-declaredwar-on-greenpeace-the-story-of-the-arctic-30-captured-on-a-gazprom-drilling-10170138.html.
22. Andrew Higgins, “Russian Money Suspected Behind Fracking Protests,” New York Times, November 30, 2014, http://www.nytimes.
com/2014/12/01/world/russian-money-suspected-behind-fracking-protests.html.
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Chapter 7
Bullying the Neighbors: Frozen Conflicts,
the Near Abroad, and Other Innovations
Vladimir Putin’s publicists have used the phrase
“sovereign democracy” to describe the political
system that evolved in Russia under his leadership. 1
In practice, however, Putin’s regime respects neither
democracy nor sovereignty.
Sovereign democracy bears no more resemblance to
the unmodified original than did previous variants:
guided democracy, managed democracy, people’s
democracy. Nor does sovereign democracy represent
a genuine commitment to the notion of national
sovereignty, as countries on the Russian periphery
will attest. On repeated occasions, Putin has demonstrated
a readiness to intervene in the affairs of nearby
countries by fomenting ethnic discontent, undermining
the economy, or grabbing territory.
Putin has in effect set down a doctrine of limited
sovereignty for Russia’s neighbors, especially those
that were part of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin’s
tactics are meant to keep these countries fearful and
off balance. The instruments of choice range from
the nonviolent, such as destabilizing propaganda and
economic pressure, to the lethally aggressive, such as
proxy insurgencies and outright invasion.
The following are the main techniques employed by
the Kremlin to influence the actions of its neighbors:
1. Civil society and ‘traditional values’: The Kremlin
has funded and encouraged pro-Russian civil
society organizations in neighboring states to
build influence among local populations and
promote its policies and interests. The Russian
government has also exploited its partnership
with the Orthodox Church to present itself as a
champion of “traditional values,” and to portray
opponents—including human rights activists
and European democracies—as purveyors of
hedonism and immorality. 2
“Certainly within the next four to five
years [Russia] will have the ability
to conduct operations in eastern
Ukraine and pressure the Baltics
and pressure Georgia and do other
things, without having to do a full
mobilization.”
—U.S. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges
3. The energy weapon: At various times during Putin’s
tenure, Russia has sought to use its oil and
natural gas exports as a means of disciplining
Ukraine and other neighbors. It has raised and
lowered prices for political reasons, abruptly
halted deliveries in the dead of winter, and manipulated
pipeline routes and investments to
drive a wedge between Germany and other European
powers on one side and the Baltic states
and Ukraine on the other.
4. The trade weapon: Russia has invoked dubious
health concerns and other pretexts to block
the import of products from countries whose
governments displease Putin, including Georgia,
Moldova, and Poland, as well as the European
Union (EU) as a bloc. 3
5. Cyberwarfare: Russian-backed hackers are
widely believed responsible for a powerful 2007
cyberattack on government websites in Estonia
in the wake of a controversy over the removal of
a war memorial. Other countries in the region
have since suffered similar attacks, particularly
Ukraine following the 2014 ouster of President
Viktor Yanukovych and Russia’s invasion of
Crimea and the Donbas.
2. Propaganda offensives: The Kremlin has made
powerful use of Russian-language media, especially
state-controlled television stations, to
spread disinformation and foment discontent
among ethnic Russians in the Baltics, Ukraine,
Moldova, and elsewhere.
6. Military threats: In the wake of the Ukraine invasion
and subsequent sanctions, the Russian military
launched a series of military exercises on
its borders with the Baltic states and intensified
more distant patrols that tested the readiness of
a number of European navies and air forces.
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
7. Military invasions: Russian forces poured into
Georgia through its two breakaway territories,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, during a brief conflict
in 2008. In 2014, Russian troops occupied
Crimea, oversaw a stage-managed referendum
on annexation there, and unofficially entered
eastern Ukraine en masse to support a supposedly
indigenous rebellion by ethnic Russian
separatists.
8. Frozen conflicts: The term “frozen conflict” indicates
a condition in which active fighting has
ended or subsided but there is no peace agreement
beyond a tenuous cease-fire. Under Putin,
Russia has perpetuated or created frozen conflicts
that affect Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova,
Georgia, and Ukraine. In each case, the Kremlin
retains for itself the capacity to subdue or escalate
tensions as needed to maximize its political
influence over the relevant country.
Moscow applies these tactics according to its objectives
for a particular country or region. For nearby EU
and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member
states, the goal is to remind local political leaders
that Russia can play a disruptive role, and to inject a
measure of fear into foreign policy calculations. While
the Kremlin holds out the possibility of military invasion
as an option, its preference thus far has been to
promote instability and uncertainty.
Russia’s message is meant both for the target country
and for its more distant allies. The target country is
effectively warned that challenging Russian interests
could provoke serious reprisals. For allies like the United
States, Britain, or Germany, the message is that
solidarity with the target country could entail a heavy
cost, including the possibility of a shooting war in
which they are obliged to defend small NATO member
states like Estonia and Latvia.
The ‘Russian world’
A favorite theme of Kremlin propaganda is the socalled
Russian world, a cultural or civilizational space
that extends beyond Russia’s political borders. This
deliberately flexible and nebulous concept suggests
that Russia claims the right to intervene wherever its
perceived brethren—ethnic Russians, other Russian
speakers, Orthodox Christians—are under threat.
Putin has spoken of one million Russians cut adrift by
the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has said it is his obligation
to protect these people, and he has tried to appeal
to them through culture, history, and the media. His
press spokesman, Dmitriy Peskov, has said that “Russia
is the country that underlies the Russian world, and the
president of that country is Putin; Putin precisely is the
main guarantor of the security of the Russian world.” 4
In 2014, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin
dredged up the tsarist-era term Novorossiya to describe
a large swath of southeastern Ukraine that he
hinted might be annexed. Suddenly, the Novorossiya
idea began appearing in Russian media, complete
with maps, while Russian-backed separatists moved
to write the “history” of the region into textbooks. 5
Eventually Putin dropped Novorossiya from his
speeches, having successfully stoked fears that the
Ukraine conflict could widen beyond Crimea and
the Donbas. The international community was then
apparently meant to feel grateful that Russian forces
did not press their attack any further.
In practice, Putin has invoked the idea of a greater
Russian world to intimidate only countries that have
embraced democracy and seek closer ties to the EU
and NATO. He has shown little interest in ethnic Russians
and other residents in Central Asian states like
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, even though they suffer
under political conditions that Freedom House ranks
as among the least free in the world. 6
The case of Estonia
Throughout its history, Estonia has been fought over by
Russia and European powers to the west. During World
War II, it was occupied by the Red Army and forcibly
annexed to the Soviet Union. Its elites and intellectuals
were murdered or deported to the Soviet gulag, and the
Estonian people endured over four decades of Sovietization
and Russification, including a policy of encouraging
Russian speakers to relocate to Estonia.
The country regained its independence in 1991 with
the disintegration of the Soviet Union. From early on,
relations between the ethnic Estonian majority and the
sizeable ethnic Russian minority have been difficult.
Estonia has adopted citizenship laws that require many
ethnic Russians to pass an Estonian language test,
and they complain of being treated as second-class
citizens. In opinion surveys, however, Russian speakers
show little enthusiasm for becoming citizens of Russia,
and have indicated an appreciation for the access to
Europe that citizenship in an EU country confers. 7
There are an estimated 300,000 ethnic Russians in
Estonia. Approximately three-quarters get their news
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Freedom House
through Russian television stations. On a daily basis,
they are exposed to propagandistic programs in which
the EU is demonized, NATO is treated as an aggressor,
the democracies on Russia’s borders are presented as
enemies, and the annexation of Crimea is hailed as a
milestone in the rebuilding of a great Russian state. 8
By exploiting the tensions that already exist between
Estonia’s ethnic communities, the Kremlin has sought
to turn a complex problem into something combustible.
The tendency of Russian speakers and ethnic
Estonians to live in parallel universes is exacerbated
by Russian propaganda, which depicts the Estonian
political leadership as hostile to Russians and as
members of a cosmopolitan European elite that
promotes sexual degeneracy and cultural radicalism.
Moscow also tries to create distrust of the Baltic
states among their NATO allies by depicting them as
overly emotional, irresponsible, and intent on dragging
other countries into a conflict with Russia.
There is no strong evidence that Russian speakers in
Estonia are simply embracing the Russian explanation
of things. Instead, they tend to reject both Russian
and Estonian sources of information. This is in itself
a victory of sorts for Russia, since the goal of external
Russian propaganda is less to win people over to its
way of thinking than to sow confusion and mistrust.
Moscow’s interests are served so long as Estonian society
remains divided. As a report on the integration of
Russian speakers in Estonia concluded, “They [ethnic
Estonians and Russian speakers] reside in separate information
spaces and hold divergent perceptions and
perspectives not just about each other, but also about
the Estonian state and its history, its threat environment,
and its national security policies. Since these
two Estonias do not fully trust one another, when
security developments put pressure on the country
they tend to drift to opposing poles—especially if the
factor of Russia is involved.” 9
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
In their campaign to assert control over countries on
Russia’s periphery, Kremlin officials have not hesitated
to use traditional authoritarian methods, up to and
including military invasion and the creation or support
of proxy insurgents. But they have taken care to
defend their efforts in terms meant to appeal to, or at
least confuse, democratic audiences.
This is especially the case with propaganda broadcasts.
While the Russian government has sought to prevent
foreign news services like Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty from reaching the Russian people, it expects
its own broadcasts to remain unhindered in neighboring
democracies, which are committed to freedom of
expression. Thus when Latvian authorities imposed a
six-month ban on the Russian television channel Rossiya
RTR for inciting ethnic hatred in April 2016, Russian
officials called on international watchdog bodies to investigate
the incident as a violation of media freedom. 10
Something similar is at work in the nongovernmental
organization (NGO) sector. Moscow has established or
supported a series of charities, think tanks, and associations
that promote Russian interests, claim to represent
Russian minorities, and in some cases advance
secessionist causes in the near abroad. 11 The Russian
government presumes that these organizations will be
allowed to operate without restriction in democracies.
Meanwhile, it compelled the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) to close down its Russia
operations in 2012, and has banned contact between
Russian NGOs and foreign organizations that have
been placed on its “undesirable” list.
Russia has also used the extensive distribution of
passports to draw populations involved in frozen
conflicts—or potentially involved in future conflicts—
into its orbit, and to justify its meddling in neighboring
states. Rather than conquering a foreign people, the
Russian authorities convert foreign individuals into
Russian citizens, then claim a right to defend them
from what had been their own government. Up to 90
percent of those living in Georgia’s breakaway region
of South Ossetia have Russian passports, which are
accessible to anyone who still has Soviet documents
or at least one ancestor who was a permanent resident
of Russia, among other forms of eligibility.
Limited sovereignty, limited options
For Russia’s neighbors, the constant intimidation and
interference from Moscow have significant consequences.
Most importantly, normal political development
becomes difficult, and sometimes impossible.
The affected countries lack full sovereignty in the sense
that they are not free to make fundamental decisions
about their political systems, their trading partners,
and whether to integrate into Euro-Atlantic institutions.
Their national identity and existence as states are regularly
cast into doubt. Democratic reform often takes
a back seat to security concerns, or to policy concessions
aimed at maintaining good relations with Russia.
Prior to the saber rattling from the Kremlin, Estonia
had an economy with one of Europe’s higher rates of
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
growth and was among the vanguard in embracing
e-government and other innovations associated with
a modern open society. Since the invasion of Ukraine
and the Russian military’s menacing gestures along
its border, Estonia has ramped up defense spending
and launched war games to increase preparedness.
Indeed, all three Baltic countries announced major
increases in military spending in 2016.
Conditions are even worse for states where Russia
has instigated frozen conflicts. Russia maintains
military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both
on the territory of Georgia, and in Transnistria. These
enclaves, as well as the occupied portions of Ukraine,
are impoverished, heavily militarized, and marked by
gangsterism and corruption.
Crimea is an instructive case for neighboring peoples
who live under the threat of Russian military intervention.
Residents of the peninsula enjoyed a reasonable
array of civil liberties under the Ukrainian government.
Under Russian occupation, all that has changed.
Moscow has sent Russian officials to run the region as
de facto viceroys. Freedom of the press, which was relatively
vigorous before 2014, has been extinguished,
and independent voices have been arrested or forced
into exile. Property rights are routinely ignored, and
expropriation is used as a blunt instrument against
those who oppose the new order.
The fate of the Crimean Tatars is especially tragic,
given the group’s history of persecution and mass
removal during Soviet times. Their leaders have been
silenced or driven out of the region, their commemorations
banned, and their media muzzled. By supporting
a still-deadly frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, the
Russian leadership has ensured that the attention of
policymakers in the democracies will be focused on
the fighting there, and not on the dreadful conditions
in Crimea. 12
Since its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has done its
best to maximize the intimidating effect on other
neighbors. It conducted war games in which 33,000
troops rehearsed the invasion of Sweden, Norway,
Finland, and Denmark. 13 The Russian navy has held
multiple, large-scale exercises in the Black Sea to defy
NATO, assert its control over Crimea, and threaten
Georgia. 14 Russian and Abkhaz separatist officials
have announced what amounts to a merger of troops
from the two sides under the command of a Russian
officer. 15 Russia’s military is developing the capacity
to simultaneously carry out several operations on the
scale of the Ukraine conflict—limited, rapid offensives
involving elite troops, deception, and propaganda that
would leave opponents fumbling for an appropriate response.
16 The intervention in Syria has already demonstrated
Russia’s ability to project force unexpectedly in
a new theater while maintaining its existing engagements
in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Russia’s renewed embrace of cross-border aggression
has had wide repercussions in Central Europe,
a region that had expected a secure alignment with
the democratic world after the end of the Cold War.
Poland, for example, had achieved something quite
remarkable prior to 2014, given its history of domination
by outside powers. It enjoyed friendly relations
with Germany, one of its past occupiers, and stable
ties with Russia, traditionally the other main threat
to its sovereignty. After the annexation of Crimea,
Poland’s leaders were forced to seriously contemplate
the possibility of a Russian invasion, especially given
Putin’s bellicose language about the speed with which
his tanks could reach nearby capitals. 17 As a result, Poland
has embarked on a military buildup to maintain
its hard-won independence and territorial integrity. 18
But no single European country could ever match
Russia’s present military might. If Poland, the Baltic
states, and their allies fail to maintain solidarity based
on shared democratic standards, it will not be long
before their sovereignty erodes under pressure from
the Kremlin.
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Freedom House
1. Vladimir Frolov, “Rise and Fall of Surkov’s Sovereign Democracy,” Moscow Times, May 13, 2013, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/rise-and-fall-of-surkovs-sovereign-democracy-23891.
2. Marlene Laruelle, The ‘Russian World’: Russia’s Soft Power and Geopolitical Imagination (Washington: Center on Global Interests,
May 2015), http://globalinterests.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/FINAL-CGI_Russian-World_Marlene-Laruelle.pdf.
3. Denis Cenusa, Michael Emerson, Tamara Kovziridze, and Veronika Movchan, “Russia’s Punitive Trade Policy Measures towards
Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia,” CEPS Working Document no. 400, September 2014, https://www.ceps.eu/publications/russia%E2%80%99s-punitive-trade-policy-measures-towards-ukraine-moldova-and-georgia.
4. Laruelle, The ‘Russian World.’
5. Peter Pomerantsev, “Russia and the Menace of Unreality,” Atlantic, September 9, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/
archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/.
6. Freedom in the World 2016 (New York: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2016.
7. Jill Dougherty and Riina Kaljurand, Estonia’s ‘Virtual Russian World’: The Influence of Russian Media on Estonia’s Russian Speakers
(Tallinn: International Centre for Defence and Security [RKK ICDS], October 2015), http://www.icds.ee/publications/article/estonias-virtual-russian-world-the-influence-of-russian-media-on-estonias-russian-speakers-1/.
8. Ibid.
9. Juhan Kivirähk, Integrating Estonia’s Russian-Speaking Population: Findings of National Defense Opinion Surveys (Tallinn: RKK ICDS,
December 2014), https://www.icds.ee/fileadmin/media/icds.ee/failid/Juhan_Kivirahk_-_Integrating_Estonias_Russian-Speaking_
Population.pdf.
10. TASS, “Foreign Ministry Says Latvian Ban of Russian TV Channel Violates Freedom of Speech,” Meduza, April 8, 2016, https://meduza.io/en/news/2016/04/08/foreign-ministry-says-latvian-ban-of-russian-tv-channel-violates-freedom-of-speech.
11. Laruelle, The ‘Russian World.’
12. Andrii Klymenko, Human Rights Abuses in Russian-Occupied Crimea (Washington: Atlantic Council and Freedom House, 2015),
https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/human-rights-abuses-russian-occupied-crimea#.WA-iD_krK70.
13. David Blair, “Russian Forces ‘Practiced Invasion of Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden,’” Telegraph, June 26, 2015, http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/11702328/Russian-forces-practised-invasion-of-Norway-Finland-Denmark-and-Sweden.html.
14. See for example “Russia Launches Large-Scale Naval Drill in Black Sea Same Day as NATO,” RT, July 4, 2014,
https://www.rt.com/news/170540-black-sea-russia-drill/.
15. Luke Harding, “Georgia Angered by Russia-Abkhazia Military Agreement,” Guardian, November 24, 2014,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/25/georgia-russia-abkhazia-military-agreement-putin.
16. Adrian Croft, “Russia Could Soon Run Multiple Ukraine-Sized Operations: U.S. General,” Reuters, January 16, 2015, http://www.
reuters.com/article/us-nato-russia-idUSKBN0KP1F620150116.
17. Ian Traynor, “Putin Claims Russian Forces ‘Could Conquer Ukraine Capital in Two Weeks,’” Guardian, September 2, 2014, https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/02/putin-russian-forces-could-conquer-ukraine-capital-kiev-fortnight.
18. Jeffrey Simpson, “Why Russia’s Neighbors Are Getting Nervous,” Globe and Mail, September 5, 2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.
com/opinion/why-russias-neighbours-are-getting-nervous/article20346364/.
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
Chapter 8
Back to the Future
Until recently, a distinguishing feature of modern
authoritarianism was the ruling group’s ability to consolidate
political power without resorting to the brutal
tactics that defined the mainstream dictatorships of
the 20th century.
The political leadership maintained control of the
commanding heights of the media while tolerating
a small group of critical outlets as a safety valve for
dissent and in order to tout the existence of diverse
opinions in the news. Reformist nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) were allowed to operate, but
not to grow or gain traction. The regime used violence
against its critics, but only sparingly, targeting a few
dissidents or independent journalists as a deterrent to
others. And they were careful to keep the number of
political prisoners to a minimum.
Perhaps most importantly, modern authoritarian
regimes generally refrained from overt acts of hostility
toward their neighbors. Some, such as China, boasted
of a policy that sought harmonious, mutually beneficial
relations with other regional states. Turkey
similarly claimed a policy of “zero problems” with its
neighbors in the period before the Syrian civil war.
Freedom House’s Tyler Roylance has described a
“common set of concessions” that 21st-century authoritarians
made to the prevailing democratic ethos
in the wake of the Cold War, when these regimes were
balancing domestic political control with the need
for deeper integration into the global diplomatic and
economic systems:
• Economic openness: Rather than attempting
to preserve a closed, command, or autarkic
economy, the typical “modern authoritarian”
regime cultivated extensive connections with
the outside world, creating a sense of freedom
and prosperity. However, state enterprises and
crony tycoons retained a dominant position, and
pliant legal systems allowed the leadership and
other corrupt officials to set and routinely reset
the terms of economic participation for foreign
companies, investors, and local entrepreneurs.
• Pluralistic media: Formal prepublication censorship
and media monopolies were abandoned in
most cases, clearing the way for a proliferation
of commercialized, well-produced, and often
entertaining media outlets. But the state and its
agents retained direct or indirect control of key
sectors, manipulated mainstream news coverage,
and kept truly independent journalism on
the margins of the information landscape.
• Political competition: Most regimes allowed
multiparty systems to emerge, and held regular
elections, but opposition parties were fabricated,
coopted, or defanged in practice, allowing
the ruling group to retain a de facto monopoly
on power.
• Civil society: Nongovernmental organizations
were permitted to operate, but they were kept
under close watch and forced to compete with
state-sponsored groups. Organizations focusing
on apolitical topics like public health or education
often received less scrutiny than critical
human rights activists, who were variously
belittled, harassed, or suppressed.
• Rule of law: Twentieth-century authoritarian staples
like martial law, curfews, mass arrests, and
summary executions were largely left behind,
and force began to be used more selectively,
so that most of the population rarely experienced
state brutality. Dissidents were punished
through the legal system, with its vaguely worded
laws and obedient judges, and in cases where
extralegal violence was used, state authorship
was either hidden or not acknowledged. Only
certain ethnic minorities faced naked military
force or deadly police tactics. 1
While more calibrated and less expansive
methods of repression are the defining feature
of modern authoritarianism, the past few years
have seen a reemergence of older methods that
undermine the illusions of pluralism, openness,
and integration into the global economy.
The most extreme departure from the modern
authoritarian policy of balancing national ambitions
with participation in global governance
was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation
of Crimea. No breach of international standards
of that magnitude had been committed since
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Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait in 1990. China’s claim of
ownership of the South China Sea, along with its
creeping militarization of previously uninhabited
islets, is at least as ambitious as Russia’s move,
though the impact is perhaps less jolting given
the dearth of occupied populations.
There have been other reversions to 20th-century
methods of repression. For example:
• Political prisoners: During the 20th century,
opposition figures, political dissidents, advocates
for minority groups, and people who wrote critical
commentaries were regularly sentenced to prison
terms, often under grim conditions, by dictatorships
of all stripes. Amnesty International’s
founding mission was the defense of what were
called “prisoners of conscience,” and they ranged
from dissidents and Jewish refuseniks in the Soviet
Union to those who resisted right-wing juntas
in Latin America. Soviet dissidents like Natan
Sharansky and Vladimir Bukovsky were the focus
of international campaigns organized by human
rights organizations and cautiously embraced by
the United States and other governments.
The ranks of political prisoners declined substantially
after the end of the Cold War and the
collapse of dictatorships in Latin America, Asia,
and to a certain extent Africa. Indeed, it was a
major objective of the new authoritarianism to
maintain political control without shedding blood
or putting people behind bars, actions that provoked
condemnation by human rights advocates,
democratic governments, and UN entities.
Recently, however, the political prisoner has
made a comeback. One notably egregious
offender is Azerbaijan. Under President Ilham
Aliyev, this country of just 9.4 million people has
amassed one of the world’s largest numbers of
political prisoners per capita, with approximately
80 prisoners of conscience during 2015, according
to verified figures. Azerbaijan’s repression
has grown despite the fact that Aliyev already
enjoyed near-total control of key institutions and
distinctly gentle treatment from U.S. and European
political leaders due to Azerbaijan’s role as
an alternative to Russian energy exports.
Venezuela also has a substantial number of
political prisoners—around 100 as of June 2016,
according to credible sources, including prominent
members of the political opposition. 2 Under
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, some estimates
suggest that Egypt holds as many as 60,000 political
prisoners. 3 Turkish authorities have similarly
rounded up tens of thousands of people in the
wake of the July 2016 coup attempt. A much
smaller country, Bahrain, has convicted hundreds
of people of political crimes since 2011, when the
monarchy began arresting members of the political
opposition who were demanding democratic
elections and other freedoms. 4
China is in a class by itself. Since the 1989
crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen
Square, the Communist Party leadership
has regularly jailed political dissidents, especially
those who argued publicly for democratic
political changes or made gestures toward the
formation of opposition political parties. The
most notable political prisoner is Liu Xiaobo, the
Nobel Peace Prize winner who was sentenced to
11 years in prison in 2009. However, conditions
have grown far worse under President Xi Jinping,
as a numbing procession of lawyers, journalists,
bloggers, women’s advocates, minority rights
campaigners, and religious believers have been
detained, placed under house arrest, disappeared,
or sentenced to prison. 5
• Public confessions: Humiliating public confessions
of ideological crimes were a staple of
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges and Mao
Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China. They
were also employed by Eastern European satellite
regimes during the show trials of the late
1940s. A peculiarly communist technique, the
public confession was largely abandoned after
the deaths of Stalin and Mao.
Under Xi, China has revived the practice. A growing
list of editors, human rights lawyers, and advocates
of political reform have been coerced into
making televised confessions of their “crimes.”
The Chinese authorities even intimidated a Swedish
citizen, legal reform activist Peter Dahlin, into
confessing that he broke Chinese law and “hurt
the feelings of the Chinese people.” Dahlin was
accused of endangering state security by funding
human rights lawyers and compiling reports on
the state of human rights in China. 6
Intensified media domination: Most modern authoritarian
countries allowed a sufficient degree
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
of criticism in the media to justify a tenuous claim
of pluralism. In recent years, tolerance for ideas
and opinions that are not aligned with those of
the regime has steadily eroded. In Russia, a bad
situation became much worse after the invasion
of Ukraine in 2014. Those who criticized or even
raised questions about the morality or wisdom of
the Kremlin’s actions were persecuted, dismissed
from employment, and banned from media commentary.
Putin also expanded the zone of media
control from the mainstream television and print
sectors to the internet.
In Venezuela, one opposition or independent
voice after another has been neutralized, as key
newspapers and television stations were sold,
under duress, to businessmen with ties to the
government. The new and often opaque owners
generally watered down political reporting and
forced out prominent journalists. 7
Even before the 2016 coup attempt, media freedom
in Turkey was deteriorating at an alarming
rate. The government, controlled by President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development
Party, aggressively used the penal code,
criminal defamation legislation, and antiterrorism
laws to punish critical reporting. Journalists
also faced growing violence, harassment,
and intimidation from both state and nonstate
actors. The authorities also used financial and
administrative leverage over media owners to
influence coverage and muzzle dissent. 8
• War propaganda: For some time, propaganda
from Russia, China, and other authoritarian
countries stressed a hostility toward liberal values
and democracy, framed around a relentless
anti-Americanism. There were, however, certain
redlines that propagandists were unlikely to
cross. They would criticize American foreign
policy and blame it for a country’s problems.
But only rarely would they accuse Washington
of warlike intentions, and they seldom if ever
made military threats themselves. Since the
invasion of Ukraine and the resulting economic
sanctions imposed by the United States and the
EU, Russian propaganda has assumed an uglier,
more menacing tone. The same is true in China,
where official expressions of hostility toward the
United States and “Western” democratic values
intensified—indeed took on a histrionic and
belligerent character—after the ascension of Xi
Jinping as Communist Party leader. In Turkey,
progovernment commentators have accused
the U.S. government and even an American
think tank of involvement in the failed coup of
2016. 9
• Closing doors to the outside world: More
than anything else, modern authoritarianism is
distinguished from traditional autocracy by its
openness to relatively normal relations with the
outside world. China, for example, long sought
to balance calibrated repression at home with
participation in an impressive array of global institutions.
Beijing welcomed the establishment
of local branches of foreign, mostly American,
universities, joint research ventures with foreign
scholars, and even the involvement of foreign
NGOs in areas such as legal reform and environmental
conservation. While more ambivalent
about the international media, Chinese
authorities did give unprecedented freedom of
movement to foreign journalists in the period
surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Russia
was less welcoming to foreign involvement in
the country, whether by governmental or private
entities, but for a time it maintained academic
exchanges with the United States and European
countries, grudgingly tolerated foreign NGOs,
and took some pride in the freedom of Russians
to travel freely abroad.
Conditions have deteriorated over the past
several years. In Russia, the government reduced
trade with Europe in response to sanctions,
imposed travel restrictions on millions of
public-sector employees, smeared domestic
human rights organizations as “foreign agents”
for accepting international funding, and began
blacklisting foreign NGOs as “undesirable.” China
has increased regulatory and legal pressure
on foreign companies, bullied foreign countries
into repatriating Chinese political refugees,
significantly increased regulatory restrictions on
foreign NGOs, and sharply curbed journalistic
freedom for foreign correspondents.
Propaganda and official rhetoric in both
countries has increasingly portrayed them as
besieged fortresses, threatened on all sides by
hostile foreign powers, spies, separatists, and
traitors who seek to topple the government and
deny the nation its rightful place in the world. In
this environment, any interaction with foreigners
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becomes suspect, and national security takes
precedence over the benefits of global integration.
• Foreign aggression: The revival of Russia as a
military power has been a central goal of Putin’s
leadership. He increased troop levels, devoted
billions of dollars to equipment modernization,
and instituted a series of reforms designed to
enable the military to engage in several limited
conflicts simultaneously. To compensate for the
material advantages of the United States and
NATO, the Russian military developed a strategic
approach known as hybrid warfare, which seeks
to combine conventional tactics, espionage and
subversion, cyberattacks, and propaganda so as
to limit the role of traditional battlefield operations
and, where possible, sow confusion as to
who is responsible for the aggression and how
it should be dealt with. The strategy has been
put into action in Ukraine, and intrusive Russian
patrols have also harassed foreign navies and
air forces across Northern Europe. In Georgia,
Russian troops have constantly encroached on
the Tbilisi government by simply moving border
fences encircling the Russian-backed separatist
region of South Ossetia.
China has also engaged in a massive military
buildup, and is pressing its maritime territorial
claims with huge fleets of coast guard vessels
and new island bases that bristle with armaments.
Its tactics at sea are openly aggressive,
but stop just short of the sort of action that
might trigger live fire.
Iran has long cultivated indirect methods of foreign
aggression, particularly through the covert
equipping and training of allied Shiite militias
in Arab states. In recent years, however, it has
openly deployed these militias in large numbers—overseen
on the front lines by high-ranking
Iranian officers—to battle zones in Syria and Iraq,
and it has increasingly drawn on Afghan recruits
in addition to Arabs. Iran’s regional rivals, chiefly
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have
responded with more direct foreign interventions
of their own, most notably in Yemen.
The recent embrace of more overtly repressive policies
stems in part from the common structural flaws of the
modern authoritarian model. The question of succession
in authoritarian governments is a constant source
of tension, producing crises—such as Putin’s return to
the presidency after his circumvention of term limits in
2012—that require new crackdowns on dissent.
Moreover, because these regimes do not allow
peaceful rotations of power through elections, they
rely in large part on the promise of economic growth
as a source of legitimacy. However, they also feature
systemic corruption as a means of maintaining internal
cohesion. All of this leaves them ill-equipped to
cope with economic shocks and related public anger.
The global economic downturn of 2008 and the more
recent drop in energy prices have shaken economies
and political establishments around the world, but
while citizens of democracies can take their frustrations
to the ballot box, authoritarian rulers must
treat protests against austerity or unemployment as
existential threats.
The promise of national greatness and the menace
of external enemies are tried-and-true alternatives
to economic prosperity as sources of regime legitimacy.
Unfortunately, promoting these narratives also
generates new cycles of dissent and repression, and
damages ties with the outside world, further undermining
the economy.
A transition from bad to worse
While the return to the blunt instruments of the past
suggests a fundamental weakness in the modern
authoritarianism model, it would be a mistake to conclude
that these regimes are doomed to extinction.
The emergence of this model was in fact a remarkable
demonstration of adaptability on the part of authoritarian
rulers, who faced a uniquely inhospitable environment
in the years after the end of the Cold War.
Democracy, human rights, and the rule of law were
newly ascendant as the governing principles of the
international order, and undemocratic leaders made
the changes necessary to survive without surrendering
their political dominance.
If they are now reversing some of these changes, it
is not just because the basic structures and incentives
of authoritarian rule tend to encourage greater
repression over time. It is also because the external
pressure to conform to democratic standards is rapidly
disappearing.
Leading democracies have absorbed the economic
blows of recent years without revolution or repression,
but voter frustration has increasingly lifted up
antiestablishment, populist, and nationalist politicians
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
who have little interest in the democratizing mission
traditionally espoused by mainstream parties with deep
roots in the global struggles of the 20th century. The
new mood is reflected in the democracies’ foreign policies,
many of which are aimed more at seeking national
advantage than at promoting the common good.
The rise of populist politics in democracies could give
modern authoritarianism a new lease on life. While it
may no longer be as useful for entrenched autocracies
to mask their nature with an illusion of pluralism, freely
elected leaders with authoritarian ambitions can
use similar techniques to replace genuine democratic
institutions with hollowed-out façades. This process
is already under way in the countries that have been
dubbed “illiberal democracies.”
With states across the spectrum shifting in an
authoritarian direction, there is not much comfort in
the fact that repressive regimes are fundamentally
more unstable and vulnerable to breakdowns than
democracies. Major authoritarian governments may
collapse in the face of economic crises, popular
protests, or succession battles. But in the absence of
international pressure and support, it seems doubtful
that they would be replaced by aspiring democracies.
Indeed, they could be succeeded by something
even worse.
1. Tyler Roylance, “The Twilight of ‘Modern Authoritarianism,’” Freedom at Issue, October 29, 2014, https://freedomhouse.org/blog/
twilight-modern-authoritarianism.
2. Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez, “In Venezuela, Political Prisoners as Pawns,” New York Times, July 1, 2016, http://www.nytimes.
com/2016/07/02/opinion/in-venezuela-political-prisoners-as-pawns.html.
3. Albaraa Abdullah, “Egypt Fills Its Prisons, But Don’t Worry, It’ll Make More,” Al-Monitor, February 3, 2016, http://www.al-monitor.
com/pulse/originals/2016/02/egypt-authorities-prison-free-speech-sisi.html.
4. “Bahrain,” in Annual Report (London: Amnesty International, 2016), https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/middle-east-and-northafrica/bahrain/report-bahrain/.
5. “China: List of Political Prisoners Detained or Imprisoned as of October 11, 2016,” U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on
China, http://www.cecc.gov/sites/chinacommission.house.gov/files/documents/CECC%20Pris%20List_20161011_1433.pdf.
6. Tom Phillips, “Swedish Activist Peter Dahlin Paraded on China State TV for ‘Scripted Confession,’” Guardian, January 19, 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/20/swedish-activist-peter-dahlin-paraded-on-china-state-tv-for-scripted-confession.
7. “Venezuela,” in Freedom of the Press 2015 (New York: Freedom House, 2015), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/venezuela.
8. “Turkey,” in Freedom of the Press 2016 (New York: Freedom House, 2016), https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2016/
turkey.
9. John Hudson, “Erdogan Allies Accuse Leading Washington Think Tank of Orchestrating Coup,” Foreign Policy, August 8, 2016,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/08/erdogan-allies-accuse-leading-washington-think-tank-of-orchestrating-coup/.
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Conclusion
Authoritarianism Comes Calling
Until very recently, the spread of the methods and strategies
described in this report has largely been greeted with complacency
and indifference in the democratic world. Even as it became clear
that the rejection of liberal values by Russia, China, and other
authoritarian states was a permanent fixture of global politics,
democracies convinced themselves that although modern
authoritarianism posed a challenge to the spread of freedom beyond
its current reach, their own freedoms were in no jeopardy.
In the aftermath of the stunning events of 2016, it is
apparent that the post–Cold War democratic order is
in fact facing an unprecedented threat. Britain’s vote
to leave the European Union (EU), the election of Donald
Trump as president of the United States, and the
emergence of populist demagogues across Europe
have all raised questions about the future of democracy
in its traditional bastions.
It can no longer be assumed that Russia’s challenge
to democracy is limited to its policies of internal
repression and aggression toward neighbors like
Ukraine and Georgia. The Kremlin’s development of
parallel institutions—government-controlled civil
society, a propaganda machine based on the latest
media technologies, realistic but purely decorative
elections—was once regarded as a project intended
for Russia alone. When Angela Merkel, in response to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, exclaimed that Vladimir
Putin lives in a different world, she meant a specifically
Russian universe where facts are irrelevant,
international treaties are obsolete, and sovereignty is
a matter of power rather than law.
Now, however, the Kremlin has attempted to project
this version of reality onto the democratic world. In
the United States, Russia brazenly interfered in the
electoral process through hacking efforts sponsored
by its intelligence agencies. Whether this interference
actually affected the outcome of the election is sub-
ject to debate. But there is strong evidence, endorsed
by the entirety of the U.S. intelligence establishment
and numerous independent analyses, that the interference
did occur.
Just as worrying is the suggestion that the United
States, much like Russia itself, has entered a “post-truth
era,” in which lies and distortions carry as much weight
as facts. Clearly, at least some of this hand-wringing
was a partisan reaction to Trump’s victory. But it
followed an election in which the winning candidate
falsely claimed, among other things, that the balloting
was rigged against him, that violent crime had reached
record levels, and that undocumented immigrants were
responsible for a large share of the violence.
Meanwhile, as of early 2017, populist parties with Russian-friendly
platforms and histories of nativism and
other forms of bigotry were expected to gain ground in
upcoming elections in countries like the Netherlands,
France, and Germany.
As it became more obvious that the democracies
were poorly equipped to contend with resurgent
authoritarianism, the leading autocracies were experimenting
with more frightening methods of assuring
domestic political control.
China in particular seemed to take an Orwellian
turn with the planned introduction of a social credit
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
system. This form of digital totalitarianism would allow
the state to gather information on Chinese citizens
from a variety of sources and use it to maintain scores
or rankings based on an individual’s perceived trustworthiness,
including on political matters. Chinese
officials have claimed that by 2020, the system will
“allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under
heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take
a single step.” 1 A citizen could receive bad marks for
petitioning the government, participating in protests,
or circulating banned ideas on social media.
As for Russia, the Kremlin complemented its covert interference
overseas with open and ugly acts of repression
at home. In one brief period in early 2017, Russian
opposition politician Aleksey Navalny was blocked from
competing in the 2018 presidential contest through
a trumped-up criminal conviction, dissident journalist
Vladimir Kara-Murza nearly died from his second suspected
poisoning, and the Russian parliament passed
a law to decriminalize domestic violence that results in
“minor harm” such as small lacerations and bruising. 2
Proponents of the domestic abuse law hailed it as a
win for traditional family values.
The confluence of authoritarian gains and setbacks
for democracy suggest a number of conclusions:
1. Modern authoritarianism is a permanent and
increasingly powerful rival to liberal democracy
as the dominant governing system of the 21st
century. Variations on the systems that have
proved effective in suppressing political dissent
and pluralism in Russia and China are less likely
to collapse than traditional authoritarian states,
given their relative flexibility and pragmatism.
2. The most serious threat to authoritarian systems
lies in economic breakdown. However, Russia,
China, and other major autocracies have shown
themselves capable of surviving economic setbacks
that, while affecting the standard of living,
did not push citizens to the limits of endurance.
The catastrophic case of Venezuela is a notable
exception. Of the main countries examined in
this study, only in Venezuela did the political leadership
attempt to impose a socialist economic
system and wage war on the private sector.
3. Illiberalism in democratic environments is more
than a temporary problem that can be fixed
through an inevitable rotation of power. In Hungary,
the Fidesz government has instituted policies
that make it difficult for opposition parties
to raise funds or present their political message,
creating a structurally uneven political playing
field. Other elected leaders with authoritarian
mindsets will take notice and follow suit.
4. Authoritarian states are likely to intensify efforts
to influence the political choices and government
polices of democracies. The pressure will
vary from country to country, but it will become
increasingly difficult to control due to global
economic integration, new developments in
the delivery of propaganda, and sympathetic
leaders and political movements within the democracies.
Putin and his cohorts have learned
well how to use democratic openness against
democracy itself.
5. Authoritarian leaders can count on an increasingly
vocal group of admirers in democratic
states. For several years now, European parties
of the nationalistic right and anticapitalist left
have forged ties with Moscow and aligned their
goals with Putin’s. The 2016 U.S. presidential
election revealed a new constituency, albeit
small, that harbors respect for Putin despite
his hostility to American interests and his interference
in the country’s democratic process.
A disturbing number of advisers to the Trump
campaign, including Trump himself, expressed
admiration for Putin and his system. In addition,
various political figures and commentators have
praised or come to the defense of despotic
rulers including Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Bashar
al-Assad.
6. Modern authoritarians can be expected to double
down on their drive to neuter civil society
as an incubator of reformist ideas and political
initiatives. Civil society can serve as a vibrant
alternative to mainstream democratic parties
as those parties fall prey to corruption, elitism,
and ossification. After the Kremlin effectively
defanged the collection of human rights organizations,
conservation projects, election monitors,
and anticorruption committees in Russia, other
autocrats and illiberal leaders began to act in
similar fashion. Both Viktor Orbán in Hungary and
the leaders of the Law and Justice party in Poland
have spoken of “bringing order” to the nongovernmental
sector, though serious restrictions on
freedom of association have yet to be adopted by
an EU state. That could change in 2017.
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7. The rewriting of history will become more widespread
and will greatly complicate societal efforts
to confront both past and present political
abuses. The rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin and
the airbrushing of Mao Zedong’s destructive
reign serve to facilitate an authoritarian form of
nationalism in which strength and unity supersede
justice and freedom, and the state is exalted
at the expense of individual human beings.
8. Authoritarian or illiberal forces are more likely to
gain supremacy in countries where the parties
that represent liberal democracy do not simply
lose elections, but experience a full-blown political
collapse, whether through corruption, ineptitude,
or failure to build lasting bonds with the public. In
the end, elections do matter, and real change still
requires victory at the polls. This is why robust,
self-confident, and uncorrupted opposition parties
are essential to democracy’s survival.
Recommendations
In studies of this kind, recommendations are primarily
addressed to policymakers, particularly in the administration
and Congress of the United States. Given
the election of Donald Trump, however, a different
approach is called for.
Trump has made clear again and again his admiration
for Vladimir Putin, to the point of asserting a kind of
moral equivalency between the Russian and American
governments. Since he assumed office, Trump and
certain aides have encouraged in America the kind of
“post-truth” environment that has prevailed in Russia
under Putin. The new president has shown no interest
in an American role in promoting human rights and
democracy around the world; indeed, he seemed to
dismiss this core element of U.S. foreign policy in
his initial address to Congress, instead emphasizing
“harmony and stability” and “the sovereign rights of all
nations.” Under these circumstances, to rely first and
foremost on the U.S. government to meet the challenge
posed by Russia, China, and other authoritarian
states would amount to an exercise in futility.
The role of governments, both in the United States
and Europe, will remain crucial. But the threat posed
by modern authoritarianism has spread well beyond
its original proving grounds. To some extent, the problems
discussed in this report have already infected
the United States and a number of European countries.
They represent a menace to the media, academic
freedom, civil society, electoral systems, and the
rule of law. They even put in jeopardy the integrity of
the facts and figures that an accountable government
and a successful economy require. When the values
of the political leadership are seen to waver, independent,
nongovernmental voices and institutions will
be called upon to do their part—not just to defend
democracy at home, but to convince skeptical politicians
and citizens that supporting the same struggle
abroad serves the public interest.
To the U.S. government: We urge the Trump administration
to appoint a director of global communications
who is experienced in journalism and allow that person
to build a program to counter hostile authoritarian
messaging through up-to-date delivery techniques,
honest reporting, and forthright commentary. Near
the end of 2016, Congress passed legislation that
placed the country’s government-supported international
media outlets—Voice of America (VOA), Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and their sister
services focused on Asia and other regions—under
more direct presidential control, on the theory that a
commander-in-chief who was committed to countering
aggressive Russian influence would be better able
to develop and implement new strategies. President
Trump has yet to indicate how he intends to use this
authority.
In the contest against Soviet communism, America’s
international broadcasting entities were the crown
jewels of U.S. soft power. Indeed, in some countries,
such as Poland or Romania, Radio Free Europe
functioned as the opposition press, and clearly had
a greater audience and more influence than the
censored government press. In the post–Cold War
period, what were initially shortwave radio services
have evolved into modern media outlets, with video
content, podcasts, blogs, social media engagement,
and other forms of information delivery. Nevertheless,
the United States today needs to update the strategy
and operations of its publicly supported broadcasters
and—most importantly—provide them with the
resources to compete with a Russian propaganda
machine that is nimble, attuned to popular discontent,
and generously funded.
To the independent media: The mainstream press
in the United States has recently shown increased
interest in reporting on Russian methods of information
warfare, some of which have been embraced
by far-right media outlets that seek to undermine
popular support for the core institutions of American
democracy. We urge more responsible media to
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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians
continue their investigation of these techniques and
experiment with ways to combat them.
We also urge more intense coverage of Beijing’s efforts
to undermine democratic norms in neighboring states
or territories, as in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and its
largely successful attempts to pressure other governments
into repatriating citizens who had fled persecution
in China.
Lastly, the media are not doing their job if they neglect
to give aggressive coverage to the lobbyists and public-relations
specialists who make money by representing
dictators and kleptocrats. Those who flack for
the leaders of China, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and their ilk
should be made to answer for each political prisoner,
murdered opposition figure, shuttered newspaper, and
offshore account full of stolen funds that can be tied
to their authoritarian clients.
To the academic community: We urge academic
associations, individual scholars, and university
administrations to stand up for freedom of thought
and open inquiry at a time when those values are
under relentless pressure from dictatorships. We
urge statements of protest against the persecution of
fellow scholars or the politicized rewriting of history,
especially in countries, like Russia and China, that are
integrated into the international university system.
We urge universities to reject the establishment of
projects and study departments—whether at home or
overseas—that do not adhere to the highest standards
of intellectual freedom or that restrict discussion
of certain subjects.
To the business community: We urge private businesses
to avoid commercial relationships with
authoritarian governments that force them to violate
fundamental democratic principles. Private companies
and investors have a clear interest in democratic
public goods like the rule of law, which guarantees
their property rights, and the transparency provided
by free media and corruption watchdogs, which
ensures the accuracy of economic data and the fair
allocation of state contracts. They should therefore do
what they can to prevent any further deterioration in
the condition of global democracy.
Some sectors are especially vulnerable to authoritarian
pressure, and have a special role to play in combating it.
We urge the film industry to reject involvement in joint
ventures with companies that have close ties to authoritarian
regimes and reputations for demanding politicized
censorship of artistic content. We also urge the
technology industry to refuse business arrangements
that require active complicity in or passive acceptance
of political censorship or information control.
To the European Union: We urge the EU to undertake
a comprehensive review of member states’ democratic
institutions to determine whether recent changes
have weakened checks and balances or unduly
protected incumbent parties from fair electoral competition.
The EU should adopt measures to publicize
departures from democratic standards and develop
a new set of sanctions that could be imposed on
noncompliant governments—whether inside, outside,
or hoping to join the bloc—even in the absence of
unanimity among member states. In the meantime,
the EU should use the sanctions already in place, even
if it means freezing a member state’s participation,
and be prepared to actually impose any new sanctions
that might be introduced.
To private foundations: We urge private foundations
to recognize and oppose the current assault on
democracy. With a few exceptions, the great institutions
of American philanthropy have studiously—and
shamefully—ignored the steady erosion of global freedom
and the rise of authoritarian powers. The recent
developments in Europe and the United States will
hopefully shake their complacency. There is a strong
need for analysis, support for individual dissidents,
and aid for societies under authoritarian threat, and as
many democratic governments waver in their commitment
to such priorities, it is essential for private
funders to step into the breach.
To mainstream political candidates: We urge responsible
political figures to call out colleagues or
rivals when they show contempt for basic democratic
ideas. Until now, politicians in the democracies have
been unimpressive in their responses to opponents
who embrace authoritarian figures like Putin. This
is despite the overwhelming evidence of egregious
crimes under Putin’s rule: murdered journalists and
political opposition leaders, the invasion of neighboring
states, brutish counterinsurgency campaigns in
the North Caucasus, the emasculation of a once-vibrant
media sector, rigged elections, and much more.
If they choose to shower him with praise, political
leaders like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Donald
Trump should be forced to account for the realities of
Putin’s appalling record. The same is true for any politician
who praises dictators in the Middle East, Asia, or
Africa.
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Freedom House
To human rights organizations: Human rights groups
operating from the safety of democracies should be
more aggressive in publicizing the plight of political
prisoners. The defense of jailed dissidents was a major
factor behind the rise of the modern human rights
movement. Political prisoners became a lower priority
as their numbers declined after the Cold War, but
today there are more than a thousand in China alone,
and many others in Venezuela, Iran, Azerbaijan, and
elsewhere. It is past time for the phrase “prisoner of
conscience” to again become an important part of our
regular political vocabulary.
Furthermore, human rights organizations need
to develop strategies that address the varied and
sophisticated methods of repression used by modern
authoritarians. There should be better efforts to
identify individual perpetrators of abuse, document
their culpability, and expose their actions. Among other
benefits, such work would feed into governmental
mechanisms for imposing sanctions, like the United
States’ Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability
Act, which allows visa bans and asset freezes
for foreign officials who are personally involved in
egregious human rights violations.
To the free world: All democratic governments should
make support for civil society in authoritarian and
illiberal environments a bigger priority. This is especially
urgent given that laws and regulations designed
to neutralize nongovernmental organizations, which
were first adopted by Russia, are now being taken up
in countries like Hungary and Poland.
Democracies will also have to push back against
Chinese censorship. The sheer size of China’s economy
gives Beijing the clout to insist on unreasonable,
nonreciprocal, and often antidemocratic concessions
from trading partners, the most prominent of which
is the state’s right to determine what its people can
read, watch, or circulate via social media. The Chinese
leadership expects the rest of the world to accept its
brand of censorship as the normal state of affairs in
China, and it is increasingly extending its demands
beyond its borders, affecting the information available
to global audiences.
Chinese censorship practices should be challenged at
international forums and in bilateral meetings. Democratic
governments should speak out when their own
academics, artists, media companies, and corporations
are subjected to censorship or blocking by the
Chinese authorities. As long as Beijing maintains its
current policies, democracies should take measures
to prevent their own media, entertainment, and other
information-related corporations from falling under
the control of Chinese companies that support or
benefit from censorship.
Finally, the free world must keep faith with states
whose democratic goals are under threat from large
and aggressive authoritarian powers. A prime example
is Ukraine. That country represents the absolute
front line in the global struggle for freedom. Building
democracy in an inhospitable neighborhood is always
difficult, particularly when your most powerful neighbor
is determined to steal your land and wreck your
home. Kyiv has made impressive strides; indeed, it has
gone much further along the democratic path than it
did after the Orange Revolution in 2005. But it still has
hard work ahead, and it remains in serious danger. A
positive outcome in Ukraine would not by itself erase
the broader gains secured by the world’s autocrats
over the past decade, but it would be a pivotal defeat
for their campaign to sow chaos and disunity among
those who still live or aspire to live in freedom.
1. “Big Data, Meet Big Brother: China Invents the Digital Totalitarian State,” Economist, December 17, 2016, http://www.economist.
com/news/briefing/21711902-worrying-implications-its-social-credit-project-china-invents-digital-totalitarian.
2. Feliz Solomon, “Vladimir Putin Just Signed Off on the Partial Decriminalization of Domestic Abuse in Russia,” Time, February 8,
2017, http://time.com/4663532/russia-putin-decriminalize-domestic-abuse/.
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