Putin unbound: How repression at home presaged belligerence abroad

What explains the Kremlin’s scorched-earth strategy? One might think that violent intimidation is just what authoritarian regimes do: the essence of dictatorship is to deter and punish opposition. The twentieth century abounded with brutal leaders. The classic autocrat was a “fear dictator,” who controlled the population through harsh repression, often rationalized by an official ideology. Some, such as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, remain in power.

Yet in recent decades, another model has been spreading. Lee Kuan Yew’s successors in Singapore, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, and Viktor Orban in Hungary began dressing in business suits rather than military uniforms and cultivated an image of worldliness and competence. Such leaders enjoy high approval ratings, sustained in part by friendly coverage on state-controlled or co-opted media, and they hold carefully managed elections that they almost always win. Instead of executing rivals, they mostly harass them with defamation suits and other charges and fines, while demolishing their reputations on television and online. Like so-called spin doctors in democracies, they manipulate information to build support and discredit rivals—that is why, in our recent book, my co-author, Sergei Guriev, and I call them “spin dictators.”

As fear has lost ground to spin, overt repression has become rarer. Politically motivated killings by state agents were common under dictators who came to power in the 1980s; almost two-thirds of those regimes oversaw more than ten such killings per year. But among authoritarian leaders who took office in the first decade of this century, only 28 percent have had rates of politically motivated killings that high. At the same time, fewer recent dictators have jailed large numbers of political prisoners. Indeed, the latest crop of autocrats is not only less overtly violent but also prone to cast their liberal opponents as themselves dangerous revolutionaries or even terrorists.