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BREAKING DOWN DEMOCRACY: Goals, Strategies, and Methods of Modern Authoritarians

research due to alleged foreign funding, while ignoring foreign funding for a quasi-political charity sponsored by the Orthodox Church.⁹

In fact, most of these laws are unnecessary. In a state like Russia, China, or Iran, the authorities already have ample latitude to deregister and ban any organization, and to prevent foreign organizations from doing business with domestic partners. A legal system that is flexible enough to serve the evolving needs of the regime and target virtually any adversary is a hallmark of modern authoritarianism. But the NGO measures give an added veneer of legality to what is essentially arbitrary rule.

The repeated adoption of new laws also gives the leadership the opportunity to showcase emotional propaganda that stresses the subversive nature of foreign or independent domestic civil society organizations, reinforcing the idea that the motherland is threatened by hostile encirclement and political infiltration.¹⁰

Foreign agents
In 2012, Russia adopted the so-called foreign agents law. It requires NGOs that receive foreign funding and engage in what the authorities define as political work to register as "foreign agents," a term that, in Russian, is synonymous with foreign spy. Subsequent amendments allow the Justice Ministry to register groups as foreign agents without their consent. As with many other Russian laws, the standards for enforcement are entirely political. The designation is applied principally to NGOs that seek political reforms or criticize the Kremlin’s antidemocratic direction, though the authorities’ reasoning in many cases is difficult to fathom. State-friendly organizations have generally been left alone.

Memorial, the human rights organization founded to carry forward the ideals associated with Andrey Sakharov, was one of the first groups to be unilaterally registered as a foreign agent by the Justice Ministry in 2014. In 2015, the ministry accused Memorial of "undermining the foundations of constitutional order" by describing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as aggression and by asserting, correctly, that active duty Russian troops were taking part in the conflict.¹¹

As in most countries, including some democracies, civil society organizations in authoritarian climates are largely funded by governmental or foreign entities. There is little tradition of private philanthropic funding

for NGOs, and even if there were, few wealthy Russians or Iranians would risk reprisal from the authorities by donating to regime critics. Consequently, organizations that lose access to foreign funding typically have no domestic alternative and must curtail their operations or give up their political independence.

In Russia, even NGOs with politically anodyne missions have been targeted as foreign agents, as the regime seeks to deter any civil society activity that could challenge official policies or foster international ties without state approval. One such organization was the Northern Nature Coalition, which protects old-growth forests and had protested certain development projects. Another was Young Karelia, which sponsors puppet shows for children in Karelian—a language closely related to that spoken in neighboring Finland. The latter group was declared a foreign agent in part because of a $10,000 grant from the United Nations.¹²

The undesirables
Once it was the CIA that dictatorships reflexively blamed when under pressure. More recently, the target of attack is a group of prodemocracy foundations, mostly American, that encourage political reform through nonviolent methods. According to the denunciations of officials from Russia, China, Venezuela, and other repressive states, the National Endowment for Democracy and the organizations associated with philanthropist George Soros present a danger to the status quo that rivals NATO or Western intelligence agencies.¹³

In 2015, Putin signed a law that allowed the prosecutor general to declare foreign organizations "undesirable" if they are deemed to pose a threat to the country’s security, defense capability, or public order. The measure empowered the authorities to shut such entities’ offices in Russia, ban Russian groups from working with them, and freeze their assets.

While the law has been used to expel foreign prodemocracy organizations, the real targets are Russian citizens. This is made clear by a section of the law that calls for heavy fines and jail terms of up to six years for Russians who collaborate with organizations on the undesirable list. Conceivably, a Russia human rights advocate who attends a seminar in Poland or Germany sponsored by the International Republican Institute—one of the groups added to the list in 2016—could be prosecuted once back in Russia.¹⁴

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