Excitement, hope, fear. These are the emotions when a dictator falls. In Bucharest in the weeks after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989, Romanians oscillated between the sheer thrill of being able to talk freely to a foreigner after decades of communist tyranny and fear that doing so might still lead to trouble.
In Baghdad in April 2003, US marines helped topple the huge statue of Saddam Hussein that stood incongruously in the middle of a traffic roundabout. It was the end of Saddam’s regime — but when a woman called Mey saw the Americans approach, she told me: “This is not the finish, it is just the beginning.”
Law and order would break down within hours and she correctly feared, as a Christian, that the forces of radical Islamism would now be unleashed and her ancient community would be doomed.
Exactly how men such as Ceaușescu and Saddam are toppled is the subject of How Tyrants Fall, a compelling book by German political scientist Marcel Dirsus. When he discusses tyrants though, it is clear that he is thinking mainly of the proverbial men on horseback. Understanding what makes these men tick (and they are all men) is vital if we are to know how to fight them. However, as Anne Applebaum argues in Autocracy Inc, modern autocracies have evolved and hence that struggle is now far more complicated than ever before.
In her excellent book, the American Pulitzer Prize-winning author argues that a key difference between today’s autocracies and the ones that killed tens of millions in the 20th century is that the despots of today have no real ideological raison d’être to even justify their existence. Rather they resemble history’s emperors and monarchs whose job was to keep their people down, share enough wealth around to give their elites a stake in their survival and to grow their fiefs.
The internet and the wealth that today’s autocrats seek to invest in our countries has also provided them with far more insidious ways of infiltrating and weakening our societies from within than was available to previous generations of dictators.
In that sense Francisco Macias Nguema, who ruled Equatorial Guinea from 1968 until his overthrow and execution in 1979, was very much an old-style tyrant. Dirsus, whose book is replete with gruesome colour, writes that Nguema used to say, “in politics, the victor wins and the loser dies”. He was not just bloodthirsty, but psychotic. He killed members of his own family before being eventually deposed by his nephew. The significance of this for dictator researchers is that Nguema counts among the 473 authoritarian leaders who lost power between 1950 and 2012, of whom 65 per cent were removed by regime insiders.
Dirsus is good on data. He notes that 57 per cent of successful non-violent campaigns against despots or authoritarian leaders have led to democracy. Meanwhile for those that involved violence, that number was less than 6 per cent. Between 1950 and 2012, however, only 20 per cent of fallen autocrats were followed by democracy. “There’s no single answer to tyranny, no button to press to make the problem go away,” he says sadly.
Given the breadth of his study, that conclusion is not surprising. But is it then realistic to discuss Nguema, the Gulf potentates and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán all in the same book? On the basis of any checklist you might like to create of what you need to run a country, including options for free elections, respect for human rights and so on, then Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would count as a tyrant. In Dirsus’ book he does not merit a mention, although Saudi Arabia is described as a country where the regime has worked hard to “coup-proof” itself.
Orbán, by contrast, is not an opposition-murdering despot. But still, Freedom House, an American think-tank that compiles an annual list of where countries stand in terms of political and civil rights, now ranks Hungary as only “partly free”. This is thanks to Orbán’s consolidation of control over the judiciary and media and so on.
Today, Orbán has few friends in other western governments and has done all he can to frustrate and slow aid for Ukraine. This month, he was received as an honoured guest in Moscow, Beijing and Mar-a-Lago. So why are we friends with the Saudis and the Emirates, which are “not free”, according to Freedom House, and which make Hungary look like a model democracy?
Applebaum is clear on this. Unlike the Russians and Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans and the rulers of Venezuela, they “mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world”. The world may be changing but this is straight 21st-century speak for Franklin D Roosevelt’s possibly apocryphal remark that Nicaragua’s then dictator Anastasio Somoza “may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”.
As for Hungary, Applebaum describes it as one of the “softer autocracies and hybrid democracies” alongside Singapore, India, Turkey and the Philippines. They “sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t.” This is a category that encompasses scores more countries, especially in the global south, which western leaders have singularly failed to rally to the cause of democratic values.
While Dirsus is mainly interested in classic one-man band tyrannies, Applebaum is not. Indeed, she says that “nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services — military, paramilitary, police — and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.”
To a great extent it was ever thus but today, she argues, there is a big difference from the past. “This group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.”
These people, she says, “share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth,” they “showcase their greed” and “often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures”.
So, today North Korea and Iran sell weapons to kill Ukrainians but not everything these diverse regimes do together is for cash. Chinese soldiers exercise on the Polish border alongside Belarusians, for example, and on Elon Musk’s X you can find British useful idiots working for Iran’s PressTV pumping out Russian lines about why Ukraine should just surrender.
In the 1970s and ’80s, when communist Cuban troops were sent to fight for Marxist-Leninist guerrillas in Angola, who in turn were fighting guerrillas backed by the US and troops from apartheid South Africa, there was at least an ideological rationale for that.
But the fact that modern autocrats seem to be more interested in wealth does not necessarily mean they have no beliefs whatsoever. Putin clearly believes to the depths of his soul that Ukraine has no right to an independent existence.
While Dirsus is good on why fully fledged tyrants who fall actually fall it is something of a cop-out to state: “In the end, whether through natural death or violent removal, every tyrant does fall.” Since the likes of Stalin, Mao and Franco all died of diseases of old age it would be good to know why some of the worst tyrants survive rather than sweep them under the autocratic carpet.
Maybe the answer is that “ruthless repression can work, but it requires a total commitment to horrific brutality,” says Dirsus. Hence, the Chinese Communist party ensured its survival with the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych failed to crush the 2014 revolution because a little over 100 dead protesters served only to radicalise the opposition rather than cow it.
It is not all gloom though! “We can stop them,” says Applebaum. Today we need an international coalition to fight the international kleptocratic underpinnings of the autocrats and to work with activists from the countries under their thumb, she says. They know more than we do about how their money is stolen and “how to communicate that information”.
We also, she adds, need reform of disinformation-spreading social media platforms such as X that are full of “extremist, antisemitic, and pro-Russian narratives”. We need to reduce our dependence on trade with Russia and China, she says, because these business relationships are “corrupting our own societies”.
What Applebaum wants is a tall order. But let’s not succumb to defeatism, she says, pointing out that there was no international coalition to aid Ukraine until Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Given the rise of Putin-friendly leaders across the west it is going to be hard.
Above all, Applebaum’s book is a call to arms, to defend our societies which, as she says pointedly, can be destroyed not just from the outside but “from the inside, too, by division and demagogues”. They can be saved though. In other words, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — for liberal democracies. Otherwise we are on the slippery slope to losing our freedoms.
How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive by Marcel Dirsus, John Murray £22/$29, 304 pages
Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum, Allen Lane £20/Doubleday $27, 240 pages
Tim Judah is author of ‘In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine’ (Penguin)
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