Savvy strongmen: How authoritarians got smart

CNN.com/ William J. Dobson is the politics and foreign affairs editor for Slate and author of "The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy."

He had witnessed the errors of 20th century dictatorship firsthand as a KGB agent stationed in Dresden during the last years of the Cold War. The young Soviet officer was shocked at how "totally invasive" the East German police state's surveillance was of its own citizens.

In 2000, reflecting on those years on the eve of his first term as Russia's president, Putin said, "I only regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed."

More than a decade later, something different has risen to replace the totalitarian models of old. Modern strongmen are more sophisticated and cunning then their twentieth-century predecessors.

These savvy authoritarians eschew the most heavy-handed methods -- mass executions, disappearances, brutal crackdowns -- as an extreme last resort. Instead, subtle forms of coercion are preferred. Rather than have its activists roughed up, a human rights organization is more likely to be shuttered for fire-code violations.

These regimes are fluent in the language of democracy and human rights, and may even establish human rights commissions -- despite being the chief perpetrators of any abuses. Laws are written in vague terms and then applied capriciously against those who question the regime's ways.

And fear is always a potent weapon. "My father used to say that he would rather live in a dictatorship like Cuba," one Venezuelan activist told me. "At least there you know if you criticized the government, they would put you in prison. Here they rule through uncertainty."

Of course, elections are de rigueur in modern dictatorships -- and not the absurd sham polls of the Soviet Union that always left Brezhnev with 99 percent of the vote. Today the ballot stuffing usually stops at 70 percent. Everyone understands that it is better to appear to win a genuine election -- which means you need the opposition to win some votes -- than to participate in a clear charade.

There is something Darwinian about the way that authoritarianism has evolved. Because, in many ways, it has never been harder to be a dictator.

In the past 20 years, the democracy promotion business boomed. Many dictatorships lost their chief lifeline with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The internet, satellite communication, and smart phones make it incredibly difficult for a regime to keep its worst crimes secret. In 1989, the Chinese Communist Party tried to strong-arm CNN off the air before they mowed down protesters on the roads leading to Tiananmen Square. If people assembled in the square today, the regime's response would be captured on a thousand iPhones. More >>