Recent events in the South Caucasus show how the authoritarian playbook is exported and adapted to suit local contexts. From Armenia’s clergy allegedly plotting coups, to Azerbaijan raiding Russian state-funded media offices as retribution, to Georgia’s mass arrests of opposition leaders, the region revealed how authoritarianism and resistance to it adapts and spreads through digital-age tactics.

The three nations of the South Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, have long occupied a place of strategic and symbolic importance for Russia. The region is a vital transit corridor linking Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, making it a coveted prize for energy routes and geopolitical influence. For Moscow, the South Caucasus has always been more than a neighboring periphery, it is an enduring obsession. And perhaps more so now, as Russia’s position in the Middle East has weakened following setbacks in Syria and its diminished sway in Iran. Today, the Kremlin’s desire to assert control in the South Caucasus is as strong as ever. Yet in each of these three countries, Moscow’s efforts to shape events and narratives are meeting unprecedented resistance. The divergent responses—ranging from defiance to accommodation—highlight how the authoritarian playbook is being adapted, contested, and exported across the region.

So what constitutes this playbook? Legal weaponization through foreign agent laws, criminalization of dissent with disproportionate penalties, systematic impunity for state violence, economic warfare against independent media, and international narrative manipulation. Below are three examples:

Armenia: Hybrid war and the Kremlin’s shadow

Armenia, once Moscow’s closest ally in the South Caucasus, has openly expressed disillusion with years of Russian inaction during regional crises. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan now warns of “hybrid actions and hybrid war” from Russian circles, without directly blaming the Kremlin, while the EU and France step in to support his decision to jail clergymen in defence of Armenian democracy. The clerics were accused of plotting a coup. Fingers were also pointed at Russian-Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan, the alleged orchestrator. It was, in one analyst’s words. Moscow’s “Ivanishvili 2.0 operation”, a reference to Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder and de facto leader of Georgian Dream, Georgia’s ruling party since 2012. Georgian Dream, under Ivanishvili, has steered Georgia in an increasingly illiberal and pro-Russian direction. But for a couple of years now, the Armenian government has been gradually distancing itself from Russia, hedging its bets rather than relying on Moscow to guarantee security. In the aftermath of the alleged coup attempt, Armenia’s Foreign Minister bluntly told Russian officials that they “must treat Armenia’s sovereignty with great respect and never again allow themselves to interfere in our internal affairs.” Pashinyan has of late made conciliatory gestures towards both of Armenia’s arch-rivals, Azerbaijan and Turkey. The loss of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan — while Russian peacekeepers stood by — largely drove Armenia toward European integration as an existential necessity. Armenia's experience with alleged coup plot, and its possible Russian backing, shows how the playbook adapts to different political contexts, exploiting religious institutions and diaspora networks to destabilize governments that drift from Moscow's orbit.

Azerbaijan: Asserting independence, testing the edges 

The raid on Russian state media offices in Baku last  week sent an unmistakable message about the limits of Moscow’s influence in the region. The targeting of Sputnik journalists came after violent police action in Russia in which two Azerbaijani nationals were killed, an incident Baku condemned as ethnically motivated. For years, Azerbaijan has been systematically moving out of Moscow’s orbit, growing closer to Turkey and unafraid to assert itself in disputes with Russia. The arrests of Russian journalists represent more than bilateral tensions; they signal how even traditionally Moscow-aligned states now calculate that defying Russia carries fewer costs than submission. Russia’s response — summoning the Azerbaijani ambassador and protesting the “dismantling of bilateral relations” — revealed Moscow’s diminished leverage. Azerbaijan’s confidence stems from military victories in Nagorno-Karabakh, increased energy exports to Europe, and strategic ties with Turkey that provide alternatives to a subservient partnership with Russia. Azerbaijan's bold move illustrates another dimension of the regional dynamic: how countries with strong alternative partnerships can successfully resist Russian pressure tactics, even when those tactics include media warfare and diplomatic intimidation.

Georgia: The authoritarian laboratory 

Georgia presents the starkest illustration of both the Kremlin’s enduring shadow and the systematic deployment of authoritarian tactics. The ruling Georgian Dream party has implemented what Transparency International calls a “full-scale authoritarian offensive,” with eight opposition figures jailed in just a single week. The crackdown follows months of mass protests against the foreign agent law — a carbon copy of Russian legislation designed to crush civil society. Among those arrested is Nika Gvaramia, the former head of the country’s leading opposition TV channel, who spent a year in prison, received the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award, and emerged to found his own political party. Now Gvaramia faces another eight-month sentence plus a two-year ban from holding office, an example of how the repressive state systematically eliminates viable opposition while maintaining a veneer of legal process. 

The foreign agent law itself has become a remarkably successful Russian export — a tool used from Nicaragua to Egypt to stigmatize independent civil society as “trojan horses” serving foreign interests. In Georgia, the law forces organizations receiving over 20% foreign funding to register as entities “pursuing the interests of a foreign power,” enabling harsh monitoring requirements and the systematic isolation of critics.

Since Russia pioneered the foreign agent model in 2012, it has been adopted by countries including Nicaragua, where it has been used to shut down over 3,000 civil society organizations, and Hungary, where officials explicitly cited the US FARA law as justification when facing international criticism. The model's appeal to authoritarian leaders lies in its appearance of legitimacy — claiming to mirror democratic precedents while systematically dismantling civil society. The chilling effect extends beyond legal restrictions.

Physical attacks on journalists have become routine, with not a single perpetrator facing accountability. Instead, the state's message is unmistakable: challenge us, and you will pay. According to the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, economic pressure has become a critical threat to media freedom globally, with the economic indicator hitting an “unprecedented, critical low” of 44.1 points — Georgia exemplifies this trend through its systematic economic warfare against independent outlets.

Mzia’s story 

The story  of one Georgian journalist Mzia Amaghlobeli, founder of two independent newsrooms Batumelebi and Netgazeti, is a textbook case of how modern authoritarianism operates through seemingly proportional responses to manufactured crises. 

Amaglobeli was taken into custody for placing a solidarity sticker reading “Georgia goes on strike” and subsequently slapping Police Chief Irakli Dgebuadze after hours of degrading treatment, including watching colleagues being beaten by police. 

Amaglobeli was arrested for assaulting a police officer, but many suspect her journalism was the real target. The charges against Amaglobeli — from “distorting a building’s appearance” for the removable sticker to “attacking an officer” — could mean seven years in prison. Evidence has been manipulated, timelines don’t match, and the authorities’ narrative shifts with each wave of international criticism. During detention, she was subjected to degrading treatment — insulted, spat upon, and denied access to water and toilets.

“It’s not only her being on trial, it’s independent media being on trial in Georgia,” said Irma Dimitradze, Amaghlobeli’s colleague who is now leading the global campaign to free her. She was speaking at Coda’s annual ZEG Fest along with Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists; human rights barrister Caoilfhionn Gallagher, and Nobel laureate and co-founder of Rappler Maria Ressa. All three argued that the systematic nature of the persecution of Amaglobeli reveals the broader strategy that’s similar the world over. Her case demonstrates how authoritarian systems create conditions where any human response to injustice becomes criminal evidence. 

As Caoilfhionn Gallagher put it: “You are not dealing here with a rule of law compliant system... there’s a whole series of absolutely farcical things which have happened in this case so far. The criminal investigation was headed by the officer who was the alleged victim. I mean these are…you couldn’t make this stuff up, really... it is clear that in Georgia you are not going to get a fair trial. She hasn’t had due process yet and really what's going to make the difference here is ensuring that the world is watching and that there's a proper international strategy.”

After a 38-day hunger strike, Amaglobeli remains defiant, standing for hours in court, refusing to sit, determined to show she cannot be broken. Her symbolic gesture of holding up Ressa’s book, “How to Stand Up to a Dictator”, during court appearances has become an icon of resistance. 

“We know,” said Ressa, “that journalism around the world is under attack.” With 72% of the world’s population living under authoritarian rule, added Ressa, “the time to protect our rights is now.” Gallagher spoke about the “power of international solidarity,” how what authoritarians fear is “journalism with a purpose, with an editorial line which is designed to undermine the false narratives and the gaslighting on a grand scale.”

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"What do we even do when the Justice Department ignores court orders?" reads one text from an American friend on my phone. “None of this feels real,” says another.

As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump's Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin's Gulag survivors. By then, Russia's state media was actively rehabilitating Stalin's image, recasting the Soviet dictator as an "efficient manager" who had made necessary sacrifices for the motherland. We felt an urgent need to preserve the testimonies of the few remaining survivors—men and women in their eighties and nineties whose first-hand accounts could counter this historical revisionism.

It was no longer safe for me to travel to Moscow to work with Oksana on developing the project, so we met in neighboring Georgia, in Tbilisi, my hometown. She arrived dressed every bit as the fashion magazine editor she had once been at Russian Vogue before pivoting to become an opposition activist and journalist.

Over wine one evening, she described the constant cat-and-mouse game she had experienced working with Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption foundation. She talked about how Navalny's team had to constantly reinvent itself, adapting to each new restriction the Kremlin devised. When the authorities blocked their websites, they migrated to YouTube and social media. When officials raided their offices, they decentralized operations. When the government froze their bank accounts, they found alternative funding methods. The space for dissent was shrinking daily, she explained, and with each new constraint, they needed to innovate, come up with fresh tactics to continue exposing corruption in Russia and holding Putin accountable.

"The walls are closing in," she told me, "and most people don't even notice until they're trapped."

Her words have acquired an unsettling resonance as I watch the American political landscape transform. When I draw these parallels to my American friends, I often see a familiar resistance in their eyes. Some will say comparing America to authoritarian states is alarmist, that the differences between these societies are too vast. "These are apples and oranges," they'll argue. But the anatomy of repression—the methods used by the powerful to dismantle democratic institutions—remains remarkably similar across time and borders.

There's a reason why those who've lived under authoritarian systems recognize the warning signs so clearly. For Americans, this trajectory feels unimaginable – a departure from everything they know. But for people like Oksana, those who've witnessed democracy crumble, it's more like going back to the future – a painfully familiar pattern returning in new forms.

Recently, a friend in Georgia received a summons that captured the essence of life in an authoritarian state: show up to a state commission hearing and risk becoming a target, or don't show up and face jail time. A decade ago, this would have been unthinkable in Georgia, a country that once exemplified the possibilities of post-Soviet democratic transformation. But that's the thing about authoritarianism—it advances by turning the unthinkable into the inevitable.

Authoritarianism often takes a precise, technical approach to dismantling democracy. It's not always about sudden, violent takeovers. Usually, democratic backsliding is a careful process of erosion, where each small step makes the once outrageous appear normal. What makes this process particularly insidious is how it subverts democracy's own tools – elections, parliaments, courts, and media – turning them against the very systems they were designed to uphold.

Since Coda's inception, we've been tracking the changing landscape of power: the expanding geography of authoritarianism, the abuse of technology, the rise of oligarchy, and the weaponization of historical narratives. Our unique editorial approach identifies "currents" – the patterns bubbling beneath the daily headlines – allowing us to detect emerging trends before they become apparent. Through this lens, we've observed that while authoritarian regimes deploy varied tactics, three essential elements of the playbook repeat themselves with remarkable consistency across different contexts and continents.

The first move is always the manipulation of memory and nostalgia. Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. His regime didn't just recast Stalin from tyrant to "efficient manager" – it undermined organizations like Memorial that documented Soviet crimes by branding them as "foreign agents" before shutting them down entirely.

For Oksana, like many others on our team, the Gulag documentary project was deeply personal. Her family had directly experienced political repression under Soviet rule. For the Russian-language version, she chose a different title than "Generation Gulag." She called it: "The Repressions Don't End."

This same pattern is visible in the United States, where the "Make America Great Again" movement taps into a yearning for an imagined past—one in which power structures went unquestioned and concepts like racial equity didn't "complicate" the natural order. This isn't just a political slogan; it's a carefully crafted narrative that creates social conditions that make challenging the mythical past dangerous. 

We've seen this play out in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, where school textbooks have been rewritten to glorify the country's imperial past and minimize its complicity in the Holocaust. In India, where Narendra Modi's government has systematically reshaped history education to center Hindu nationalist narratives and diminish Muslim contributions. And in Florida, where educational restrictions on teaching African American studies and racial history follow the same playbook – controlling how societies understand their past to make it easier to reshape their future. 

But rewriting the past is merely the first act. The next phase is to transform this nostalgia into a weapon that redefines loyalty to the nation. Once the mythical golden age is established, questioning it becomes not just disagreement but betrayal. In Russia, this meant that anyone who questioned the revered myths about Soviet glory suddenly became suspect – a potential traitor or foreign agent.

As Oksana traveled across Russia filming interviews with Gulag survivors, many said how distraught they were to see that at the end of their lives, the narratives they thought had been discredited were gaining traction again. The perpetrators of the crimes against them – their executioners, their prison guards – were being glorified once more in state media and official histories.

It's the ultimate form of injustice, echoing what many of my Black American friends tell me they feel today as they watch decades of hard-won progress toward equity being reversed. After fighting so hard to dismantle statues of Confederate generals and slave owners, they now witness white supremacist narratives being rehabilitated and those who challenge them branded as unpatriotic.

Of course, these aren't direct comparisons. Each country follows its own path. Perhaps America's market economy will prove resilient against authoritarian capture. Perhaps its institutions will withstand the assault better than their counterparts elsewhere. Perhaps the federalized system will provide firewalls that weren't available in more centralized states.

But, thinking back to countless conversations with friends who lived through authoritarian transitions, I'm reminded of how gradually the water heats around us all. Each small capitulation, each moment of silence stems from a perfectly reasonable thought: "Surely it won't affect me personally."

Among the 35 victims of Stalin’s Gulags that Oksana interviewed was Irina Verblovskaya. It was a love story that landed Irina in jail "I never thought they would come for me," she told Oksana, her voice steady but her eyes still showing the pain of decades-old wounds. She never thought she was political enough to be noticed. 

American friends often ask me what to do, how to respond once these patterns of repression become evident. I hesitate to answer with certainty. The cases I know most intimately are cases of failure. Nearly everything my dissident parents fought for in Georgia has been reversed in my lifetime. Yet paradoxically, their fight continues to inspire – precisely because it never truly ended. In Tbilisi today, people have stood in the freezing cold for more than a hundred nights, protesting laws that mirror authoritarian Russian legislation.

After years covering wars and political crises, I've noticed that soldiers on the ground often understand which way a battle is turning before the generals do. A taxi driver frequently has a better grasp of city dynamics than the mayor. My first rule is to always listen to people in the thick of it, to pay attention to those who may be at the margins of power but who are the first to feel its effects. Our failure is rarely in lacking prophets, but in refusing to heed their warnings.

Who are America's prophets today? They're the people routinely dismissed as alarmists – constitutional scholars warning about judicial capture, civil rights leaders identifying voter suppression patterns, journalists documenting the normalization of extremist rhetoric, and immigrants who recognize repressions they became familiar with in the countries they fled. Their warnings aren't political hyperbole – they're based on rigorous research, reporting and lived experience. And just as they are the first to detect the warning signs, they're often the first people to be targeted when the final act of the play unfolds.

The last, game-winning tactic from the authoritarian playbook is the criminalization of dissent. This process begins with words – the increasing use of terms like "enemy of the state", “threat to national security”, or "treason" to describe one’s political opponents. See how these labels proliferate in the far-right media. Note how disagreement is increasingly framed as betrayal. To anyone who has lived through authoritarianism, this language isn't merely rhetoric – it's preparation. Project 2025's blueprint for reshaping the Justice Department follows this pattern – creating systems where political loyalty supersedes institutional independence. 

The mechanisms may have evolved but the fundamental approach remains unchanged. In Russia, no one embodied this three-act progression more clearly than Alexei Navalny. In 2014, he was still able to mobilize hundreds of thousands in Moscow's streets against Putin and the Kremlin’s corruption. His warnings about Russia's growing authoritarianism were largely dismissed in the West as exaggerated. Yet the noose tightened around him – first arrests, then poisoning, imprisonment, and eventually death. He posed too great a threat, and the system couldn't tolerate his existence.

That night in Tbilisi in 2019, Oksana talked a lot about what it was like to work with Navalny's team, to mobilize Russians against Putin. We argued about whether or not Navalny was racist. For all his bravery fighting corruption, Navalny had made derogatory remarks about people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, calling Georgians "rodents" that should be "exterminated." Like her, I had grown up with the Soviet collapse as the backdrop of my youth—we were the same age—but my experiences came from a Georgian movement that fought not just the Soviet system but Russian colonialism too.

Our wine-fueled argument eventually settled into a consensus that Western liberal democracy, for all its flaws, remained the best system available—the fairest and freest option we knew. It's only now that I recognize my own slight condescension toward her because she was proudly an activist. After years working in Western media, I had been almost vaccinated against the idea of being an activist myself—journalism had to be pure, objective, detached.

I was wrong. Oksana understood something I didn't yet grasp: in environments where truth itself is under assault, journalism inevitably becomes a form of resistance. For her, this wasn't theoretical—it was daily reality. The boundary I so carefully maintained was a luxury she couldn't afford, and it is now one I no longer believe in.

The Final Warning

A year later, after we filmed about 30 interviews with survivors of Stalin’s purges all across Russia, Oksana went back to show a few of them the result of our work. We have a video of Oksana visiting Olga Shirokaya, a 96-year-old Gulag survivor who had been arrested when she was 27. They sit down on Olga’s couch to watch the film, Olga's eyes widen as she sees her own story reimagined through animation. 

"I feel like I can breathe again," she tells Oksana, her voice trembling. "I didn't think in such a short piece you could so truthfully find the essence of all the things I told you."

I'm haunted by that footage now. Oksana sits there, bright and elegant, while this survivor of Stalin's terror watches her own testimony. By then, Navalny was already in prison. The full scale invasion of Ukraine  was just weeks away. Did Oksana sense what was coming? Did she know she was documenting not just Olga's past, but her own future?

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oksana left Russia. She went to Kyiv to report on the war for an independent Russian outlet – her final act of resistance. On March 23, almost exactly a month since the war had begun, while documenting civilian damage from Russian bombing, Oksana was killed in a Russian missile strike. She was 42.

"The Repressions Don't End" wasn't just the title she chose for the Russian version of our documentary project. It was how she understood history's patterns – patterns that would claim her own life.

We've seen this movie before across different contexts and continents. The script is familiar, the plot mostly predictable. But we don't yet know how it ends – especially in a country with America's democratic traditions, constitutional safeguards, and decentralized power structures.

And so, when friends ask me "what do we do," I tell them: Look to those who've been there before. Democracy isn't saved through grand gestures, but through thousands of small acts of courage. Through showing up, speaking up, and refusing to turn away from what is happening before our eyes. Through recognizing that the authoritarian playbook works precisely because each small tactic seems too minor to resist. 

We've seen this movie before. But we're not just a passive audience—we're also actors. And we still have the power to change the ending.

All illustrations and videos in this article are from Coda Story's Generation Gulag

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