Against the background of today’s global events, figures of famous dictators from the last century loom large. In Spain, Francisco Franco was one, to be sure, yet his dictatorship never got drawn into World War II on Hitler’s side and, thanks to his shrewd maneuvering, Spain remained neutral until the end.

The result? Spain has retained its territorial integrity and is now a democracy.

Remember, it took the atom bomb to loosen the grip of Nazism on Axis member Japan and bring the country into the democracy camp.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini was a dictator, but he too held out against joining the Axis for as long as he could. He only caved in — as Giuseppe Volpi, Mussolini’s finance minister and member of his inner circle, recalled in private — after he had been reliably misinformed that the American automotive industry could not be converted to tank production quickly enough to make a difference in the war in Europe.

What followed was a bumpy ride for Italy, but the result is the same.

It has retained its territory and is now a democracy.

After the war, with Nazism in ashes, it was Josip Broz Tito’s turn in Yugoslavia to maneuver, with the country eventually wriggling out of Stalin’s embrace much like Franco wiggled out of Hitler’s.

Though Yugoslavia did not later retain its territorial integrity, its constituent parts are now democracies, all of them in line to join the European Union.

Territorial integrity is such a big issue because today’s Russia, led by a totalitarian tyrant with global ambitions who is often compared with both Hitler and Stalin, has been using the tactic of gouging out bits of its neighbors’ territory to set up enclaves that work to destabilize them and make them vulnerable to manipulation.

Russia’s neighbors, of course, were once Moscow’s satrapies  constituent "socialist republics" of the old USSR — and the Kremlin supposes that this gives it the right to control them. So Abkhazia and North Ossetia were carved out of Georgia, Transnistria from Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh, with the use of Armenia as a Russian proxy, from Azerbaijan, and there is talk of Russian annexation of the northern provinces of Kazakhstan.

The most notorious examples of this Kremlin tactic, of course, are the unrecognized Donetsk and Lugansk "people’s republics" in Ukraine, slated to accede to Russia if it makes progress in the war.

Moldova and Georgia cling to the European Union — membership of which they are seeking — and ultimately rely on the might of NATO to protect them from Moscow’s encroachment.

Just the other day, Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili marked the anniversary of the Russo-Georgian 2008 August War, which lost the territories to Russia, by speaking of "Russia’s relentless policy of armed aggression and occupation."

The European road is not open to Kazakhstan, which the Kremlin is keeping its beady eye on because, apart from its oil riches, that country is the world’s number one producer of uranium.

Unfortunately for Moscow, Kazakhstan is ruled by a dictator whom the Kremlin itself had recently helped bring to power, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who has now unleashed what can only be described as an open revolt against Moscow’s control.

Not only did Tokayev declare publicly to Vladimir Putin in June that he does not recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk "formations" in Ukraine, he has since made it clear that Kazakhstan will be undermining Putin’s energy blackmail of the West by supplying Europe with oil.

Tokayev’s challenge to Moscow, it is rumored, is tacitly supported by China’s totalitarian ruler Xi Jinping, who has plans of his own for this major uranium producer.

Like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his ally and neighbor across the border, Azerbaijan’s benign dictator Ilham Aliyev is walking a tightrope between Russia and the West.

The Kremlin had been using neighboring Armenia as a proxy to fuel the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict — smoldering ever since the early 1990’s when Armenia’s armed forces occupied this enclave on Azerbaijan’s soil, though with a large Armenian population — on the premise that this would allow Moscow to control both sides.

Instead, in a disastrous surprise for the Kremlin, two years ago Aliyev started a war to win back Azerbaijan’s territory and famously, with the help of the Bayraktar drones supplied by Turkey, won it in a matter of weeks.

In a feeble response to the blitzkrieg, Moscow introduced some 2000 "peacekeeper" troops to the Azeri-Armenian borderlands.

The political minefield that is Nagorno-Karabakh — incidentally, it is now quite literally a minefield, the Armenians having been unwilling or unable to provide Azerbaijan with the coordinates of the hundreds of thousands anti-personnel and anti-tank mines which they laid throughout the region before withdrawing — is typical of the new reality that Moscow is facing.

As the old USSR came apart at the seams and loosened the stranglehold on its satrapies, so today the Kremlin’s dominance over what it regards as its historic sphere of influence is waning.

It is waning, oddly enough, not thanks to some internal intrigue or a plot against Putin, and still less due to pressure from the West, though admittedly its financial, military, and sanctions support of besieged Ukraine is playing a part.

It's waning because the regional dictators, emulating Franco and Tito, are rebelling against the global totalitarianism of the Kremlin. In so doing, they are not only saving their countries’ territorial integrity and political independence, but making them safe for democracy in alliance with the free West.

Andrei Navrozov, is a writer and a poet. He was born in Moscow in 1956, and is the grandson of playwright Andrei Navrozov and son of  essayist and translator Lev Navrozov.