The Atlantic In Poland, Russia, and other countries, rulers are anointing their own plutocrats—and ensuring their own self-preservation. 6:30 AM ET About the author: Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of In 2015, Daniel Obajtek was the county commissioner of Pcim, a tiny district south of Kraków and north of the Polish-Slovak border. “County commissioner” is perhaps a grand-sounding title, but I can’t find a better one. In Polish, the term for the job he held is wójt, an old-fashioned word that means something like “village headman.” It signifies that you run something very small. Pcim, population 4,900, is very small.