At first glance, today’s populist authoritarians seem different from the dictators of the 1930s because they are all about money, corruption and personal enrichment — whereas those communists and fascists of old were motivated by ideology. It didn’t make their crimes more justifiable, but at least some of them believed in something.
There is no doubt that today’s autocrats are corrupt. Vladimir Putin may give history lessons to the rest of humanity on how to interpret historical events based on a simple principle “Russia always good, everyone else always evil,” and his various cronies may sing an old song about patriotism, the Orthodox faith and the Great Patriotic War, but the essence of Putinism is kleptocracy. Investigations regularly conducted by Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation and other journalists show the phenomenal extent of self-dealing among Russian officials at every level. Robbing Russia blind is the glue that keeps the regime together.
Donald Trump, another icon of modern populism, also cares mostly about money, despite his America-loving statements and the flag waving by his followers. The scale of his corruption was considerably more moderate than Putin’s, for a variety of reasons ranging from institutional — after all, he was not able to become a dictator — to personal. As someone who has spent his life staying one step ahead of Chapter 7 of the US bankruptcy code, Trump goes for the small grift: Trump University, Trump Vodka, encouraging foreign leaders to stay at his Washington DC hotel, etc.
But what about the 1930s’ dictators? Were they really such ideological purists and ascetics who believed in their own slogans and didn’t care about personal wealth? The Soviet propaganda always lauded Vladimir Lenin’s spartan surroundings, and some modern Russian Stalinists contrast the Father of the Peoples’ supposed austerity with the lavish lifestyles of Putin’s officialdom.
My grandfather, who studied at the First Commerce School in Kyiv, was brought to Moscow by a friend in the mid-1920s. That friend had been a Bolshevik in Kyiv and after the revolution got some cushy party job in Moscow. He recommended my grandfather to Alexei Rykov, who at the time was the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (i.e., Soviet prime minister). My grandfather was supposed to do deals that benefited Rykov personally.
In the early days after the revolution, it was done discreetly but by the time Stalin’s purges of his own party gathered momentum in the 1930s, it became quite blatant. The apartments and the valuables requisitioned from the victims were distributed to police and party cadres. There were special distribution centers where all that could be obtained. And of course, much of what was requisitioned from purged Soviet government and party officials had been stolen from previous owners, the pre-revolutionary upper classes, clergy and professionals.
Whether or not Stalin or Hitler had secret numbered accounts abroad, with their identity hidden, their henchmen surely did. Prominent Nazis who managed to escape certainly landed on their feet in South America. But most such accounts will probably never be claimed and will remain in perpetuity in those secretive Swiss banks.
Nazi leaders were certainly keen to appropriate Jewish property. It is well-known that the diamond choker, which Adele Bloch-Bauer wore in her famous portrait “Woman in Gold” by Gustav Klimt (now in the Neue Gallerie in New York), was stolen by Herman Goering and given by him to his wife. The piece of jewelry disappeared after the war.
There is a direct link between autocracy and corruption. It ultimately comes from impunity and a lack of outside control. Independent voices in the media tend to be among the first victims of an authoritarian regime. Soon after the Bolshevik takeover, all independent sources of information in the USSR were shut down and in time Soviet newspapers came to resemble each other to a remarkable degree, publishing the same news items and expressing the identical worldview.
Hitler came to power after the Great Depression, at a time when the economic crisis hit German newspapers especially hard. Still, in 1933 Germany had 4,700 newspapers of which the Nazis controlled less than 3%. But that soon changed, in part because the Nazis seized Jewish-owned publishing houses, and the remainder came under the control of the Propaganda Ministry.
Putin followed the same blueprint. In the 1990s, Russian television stations and newspapers were if not exactly independent — most were mouthpieces of the oligarchs who owned them — at least there was journalism and a plethora of opinions. Putin’s clearing of the political landscape started, not incidentally, with the crushing of NTV.
Trump then has followed in Putin’s footsteps, attacking the mainstream media by adopting the Stalinist term “enemies of the people” and casting doubt on their impartiality. Since Trump, a variety of wannabe strongmen in other countries — notably Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and others — have started using the term Fake News.
The mirror image of the link between autocracy and corruption is a close correlation between democracy and honesty in government. Transparency International, a consulting firm, compiles an annual index of corruption perception, while the Economist Intelligence Unit tracks the level of democracy worldwide. Countries that are near the top of the democracy table — Norway, Sweden, and other Nordic nations, along with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Canada — also tend to be the most transparent and the least corrupt. Likewise, less democratic countries also tend to be more corrupt — with a few exceptions such as Singapore.
A note for Russian Stalinists who are pining away for a strong hand that would supposedly root out corruption in their country: regimes classified as authoritarian are nowhere near the top of Transparency’s table.
In this regard, the United States provides a cautionary tale. In recent years, the two indices for the United States have been moving in lockstep — down. Last year, The Economist classified the “shining city upon the hill”, to use Ronald Reagan’s phrase, as a Flawed Democracy— as it had done over the previous four years. Accordingly, both Transparency and the Economist now allot it a lowly 25th place in their respective tables.
Ukraine has been described — rather unfairly — as a hotbed of corruption. Corruption in Ukraine is bad, but the country ranks higher than Mexico — and certainly is doing better in this respect than Russia. Ukraine’s 79th place in the democracy index (hybrid regime) is nearly halfway from Russia’s 124th (authoritarian).
Nevertheless, pervasive corruption and oligarchy are delaying Ukraine’s development, keeping the people of potentially one of the richest countries in Europe in poverty and perpetuating its dependence on Russia. But corruption will not be defeated unless Ukraine builds stronger democratic institutions. This is why the institutional requirements imposed by the European Union on its applicants are of such paramount importance for Ukraine’s own happy future.
