From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum dismantles the 20th-century image of the lone dictator to unmask a far more menacing 21st-century reality: a transnational network she terms ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ She reveals a global alliance of strongmen from Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran operating not as an ideological bloc but as an agglomeration of companies. Bound by a brutally pragmatic goal—preserving the opulent personal wealth their 20th-century predecessors hid while depriving their citizens of any public voice—they collaborate to survive. Exchanging financial support, the tools of repression like surveillance technology, and propaganda, they ensure mutual regime survival and grant one another impunity on the world stage. This chilling success prompts the book’s pivotal investigation: where did the autocrats’ belief that they are winning originate, how did the democratic world inadvertently consolidate it, and how can democracies now unite to defeat this challenge? Dedicated ‘For the optimists,’ the book is a call to action for those unwilling to concede the future of global freedom.
