Audacious autocrats wield the tool of ‘transnational repression’
When Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist and Soviet NKVD assassin, died in Cuba in 1978, his last words included “I hear it always. I hear the scream.” The scream occurred in 1940 when Mercader lodged an ice ax in Leon Trotsky’s skull at Trotsky’s exile home in Mexico City. During Mercader’s 20-year imprisonment, Stalin awarded him the Order of Lenin. After his 1960 release, the Kremlin brought him to Moscow to receive the Hero of the Soviet Union award.
This murder is perhaps the most notorious example of what a Freedom House report (“Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach”) calls “transnational repression.” The practice involves an arsenal of tactics today employed by increasingly audacious autocrats.
Perhaps Vitaly Shishov, 26, decided during a morning run this month in Kyiv to hang himself in a park. Authorities, noting his battered face, are doubtful. Shishov was living in Ukrainian exile from Belarus, where he had organized protests against the increasingly repressive Alexander Lukashenko, now in his 27th year wielding illegitimate power.
In May, a Belarusian fighter jet forced an airliner flying from Greece to Lithuania to land in Belarus so that a Belarusian dissident could be seized. At the Tokyo Olympics, a Belarusian sprinter narrowly escaped being forcibly flown home to an unpleasant fate after she criticized her coaches, for which Belarusian media branded her a traitor. Lukashenko’s son chairs Belarus’ Olympic Committee.
In July 2020, a Chechen exile, a critic of the Chechen regime, was shot dead in a Vienna suburb. He was the fourth Chechen killed in an apparent assassination in Europe last year. In 1992, Iran’s Islamist regime ordered the killing of three dissidents and their translator in Germany. This past month, the United States indicted four Iranians for a plot to kidnap a U.S. resident and citizen, a writer the Iranians planned to lure to a third country.
Vladimir Putin, who was formed, or deformed, in the KGB, successor to the NKVD, has continued the tradition that produced Mercader. In 2006, a former Russian intelligence officer was murdered in London, poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope whose probable provenance was the Russian government. In 2018 in England, another former Russian intelligence officer and his daughter survived an assassination attempt using sophisticated nerve agents.
Rogue regimes limit the mobility of dissident citizens abroad by canceling their passports, thereby making them vulnerable. Freedom House says Turkey has taken more than 58 people in renditions from 17 countries. Turkey calls this a “global purge.” The 2018 murder in Turkey, by Saudi agents, of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi was directed from the highest level of Saudi Arabia’s government because assassinations have multiplier effects, demonstrating to a nation’s diaspora that no one is beyond the reach of ruthless regimes.
Today’s autocrats — Neanderthals with digital competencies — will not stop. Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov has said to Chechens abroad: “I know all the youth who live in Europe, every Instagram, Facebook, every social site, we record all of your words and we note them, we have all of your information, who, what, we know it all. This modern age and technology allow us to know everything and we can find any of you.”
Afghanistan, the graveyard of the reputations of many of today’s most senior U.S. military leaders, signals the world’s accelerating descent into a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” It will intensify the autocrats’ belief that they can inflict transnational coercion with impunity.
Afghanistan’s plummet into bottomless agony revives the Vietnam-era axiom that while it is dangerous to be the United States’ enemy, it can be fatal to be its friend. When a great order-sustaining power loses a war, however benighted the conception and conduct of the war were, the repercussions radiate. One of which will be the increased confidence of evil regimes, including the one watching gleefully in Beijing.
China is acquiring the charisma that comes from the strange strength of barbarians who are incapable of embarrassment. Freedom House says China “conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression,” which Beijing calls the “overseas struggle.” In April, the New Yorker reported on a proUyghur protest at a Chinese embassy, during which a Uyghur refugee was approached by a woman speaking Mandarin. She said: “If you get poisoned, do you know how to treat yourself? ... The Chinese government is very powerful. You could die in a car accident, or get poisoned.” The overseas struggle had come to Connecticut Avenue in Washington.