Global tyranny update: Russia transitions into full-blown dictatorship

A few weeks ago, I posted about Putin's crackdown on the internet, musing that "it is surprising that it took Putin this long to get serious about clamping down." Putin has finally started shutting down access to undesirable content in the form of politically, including personally, inconvenient facts, truths and logic. 

An article in the Economist explains why this is happening now. It includes an interesting description of the difference between an autocracy and dictatorship. The Economist writes in an article, Manacled in Moscow, that Russians are starting to distrust and oppose Putin's authoritarian kleptocracy. Russians were turning away from state TV, radio and print propaganda to online content that was still free and uncensored. In response, Putin is moving toward full blown police state dictatorship, including a crack down on the internet. 

The drop in Putin's trust has been significant, going from about 60% in 2015 to about 30% in 2020-2021.

Two points the Economist touches on merit mention, (i) autocracy vs dictatorship, and (ii) the enormous value to authoritarians of keeping a society ignorant, which amounts to lying by omission:

Vladimir Putin has shifted from autocracy to dictatorship. 

Grigory Okhotin of ovd-Info, a media and human-rights organisation that monitors political repression and provides legal help to its victims, notes a shift in the government’s tactics. Once it wanted to contain, and by doing so deter, political threats. Now it wants to eliminate them. Political power has shifted from civilian technocrats to militarised and often uniformed “securocrats” happier with violence. The regime has moved from being a consensual autocracy supported by co-option and propaganda to a dictatorship resting on repression and fear.

Though Mr Navalny had support in Moscow and some other places, only 20% of Russians approved of him. But 80% now knew who he was. One of the key assets of any autocracy—the apparent absence of any alternative—had been lost. The Russian elite started to talk about succession. So Mr Putin changed the constitution to let himself stay in power indefinitely and reinforced that change with repression.

In 2019 Mr Putin signed a “sovereign internet” law which forced internet providers to install special equipment that allows the state to block, filter and slow down websites. Gregory Asmolov, an expert on the internet at King’s College London, says the goal is not to build a Chinese-style firewall but to influence people’s choices. If people don’t know what they are missing, they will not look for it.

For now the Kremlin seems to have succeeded in applying enough repression, and thus generating enough fear of worse to come, to accomplish its needs. But the screw continues to be turned. .... And Russia’s securocrats are not going to pack their bags and go home when they control a significant and growing chunk of public expenditure. More than 10% of the national budget is spent on internal security. There are a third more police and security staff than active-duty soldiers.

This 15 minute video, How Putin is Silencing his Opponents, describes what Putin is doing to Russians and how he is doing it.

This is just one example of how much worse the situation can get if American authoritarians take control here and are able to complete to their satisfaction the ongoing destruction of democracy the rule of law, free and fair elections, etc.