Today's historic prisoner release from Russia was thanks to the diplomatic work of a group of democracies,

freeing over a dozen people from the autocratic regime of Vladimir Putin.

But as William Bringham reports, a new book examines how autocracies are gaining

power and what they're doing with that power.

In her new book, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum punctures the commonly held image of an isolated autocrat.

Instead, she documents the often interconnected ways these strong men rise to power,

how they bolster each other, and then work in tandem to undermine democracy.

The book is called Autocracy Inc. The dictators who want to run the world and an apple bomb joins us now.

Welcome back to the news hour.

Thank you.

Can we start with the definition because people throw out

socialist fascist communist often without knowing what those terms really mean.

What is an autocrat and who are the autocrats out there that we would know?

An autocrat is someone who seeks to rule with no checks and balances, with no checks on his authority, with no judges, no media, no intermediary

figures or institutions, who wants to control everything that happens in the state and to make all of the decisions.

And the autocrats who I'm most interested in are the ones who not only want to have that system at home, but who are interested in protecting people

who want to create those systems abroad.

So the book is mostly about Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and a host of others,

Zimbabwe, Azerbaijan.

There's a list of them.

And increasingly, they operate as a network.

They seek to protect each other

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