Autocracy, Inc.

Today's autocrats do not work alone. Applebaum documents how dictatorships that share no ideology nonetheless cooperate across borders, trading surveillance tools, laundering money, and amplifying one another's propaganda as a kind of network rather than a set of isolated strongmen. The book updates the study of authoritarianism for a connected age, and its warning is precise: the autocracies learned to help each other before the democracies did. The companion to Twilight of Democracy, aimed outward.

A historian and journalist whose Pulitzer-winning work on Soviet history turned, in recent books, to the present drift of free societies. Twilight of Democracy examines why intellectuals and elites turn toward authoritarianism. Autocracy, Inc. documents how today's autocrats cooperate across borders as a network rather than isolated strongmen. She writes about how democracies decay from the inside and how dictatorships sustain one another from without.