Don’t Count the Dictators Out

Two thousand twenty-two was not a good year for the world’s leading autocracies. In November, Chinese President Xi Jinping confronted the largest antigovernment demonstrations since the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. Provoked by Beijing’s stringent “zero COVID” policies, protesters across the country made overtly political demands, calling for Xi’s resignation and an end to one-man rule. These protests erupted just when the Chinese economy was experiencing its lowest growth rate since 1976. The government responded by suddenly abandoning its zero-COVID program—a signature Xi policy—and letting the virus spread rapidly through the population. The reversal, and the estimated one million deaths that followed it, further eroded public trust in the regime.

Iran confronted even greater challenges. In September, the death of a young woman named Mahsa Amini while in police custody for “improperly” wearing her hijab sparked months of nationwide protests that targeted the heart of the regime’s revolutionary identity. Thousands of protesters in more than 100 cities called for the death of the country’s aging supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and an end to the Islamic Republic itself. At the end of the year, opposition activists organized a three-day general strike that nearly shut down the country—actions reminiscent of those that preceded the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979. Although the protests have since died down, large numbers of Iranian women continue to refuse to wear the hijab.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had perhaps the worst year of all. His invasion of Ukraine has been an utter disaster. The Russian army has been forced to abandon efforts to take Kyiv and has retreated from positions it gained earlier in eastern and southern Ukraine. The war has triggered unprecedented Western sanctions, resulted in roughly 200,000 Russian casualties—far larger than the number killed and wounded during Russia’s decadelong occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s—and caused hundreds of thousands of citizens to flee the country. Russia’s geopolitical influence is in dramatic decline. Almost overnight, Europe cut its dependence on Russian energy supplies, and Moscow has been forced to abandon efforts to influence neighboring countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

After more than a decade in which, as the journalist Anne Applebaum observed, “the bad guys” were winning, the world now seems to be turning against autocracy. Three of the biggest bad guys appear to face unprecedented challenges to their power, giving democracy the edge in the global contest with autocracy for the first time in years. But the threats to autocratic power are less significant than many hope: these three dictatorships, in particular, have hidden sources of resilience, rooted deep in their revolutionary pasts. Revolutionary origins—and in the case of Russia, the surviving legacies of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917—have helped all three governments survive economic downturns, policy disasters, and sharp drops in popularity and will likely continue to strengthen them for a long time to come. Any effective strategy for countering them requires an understanding of their true nature and unique sources of resilience.

MORE ENEMIES, MORE UNITY

Today’s most durable autocracies were born of social revolutions, which—in contrast to conventional power grabs—occur when activists backed by mass mobilization seize control and try to remake the state in order to radically transform the way people live, such as by eliminating private property or imposing religious rule. Although such revolutions have been extraordinarily rare—just 20 since 1900—the revolutionary autocracies they produced have had an enormous influence on world politics: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Islamist terrorism, and the rise of China were all fueled by revolutionary autocracies. Today, such governments and their successors—a list that includes not just China, Iran, and Russia but also Afghanistan, Cuba, Eritrea, Rwanda, and Vietnam—present some of the most serious challenges to the U.S.-led liberal world order.

These regimes tend to be far more durable than their nonrevolutionary counterparts. Such durability results from the distinctive way they consolidate power. In contrast to many autocrats, who seek to broaden popular support and cultivate international legitimacy when they come to power, leaders of revolutionary regimes alienate large swaths of their countries’ populations and antagonize neighboring countries and world powers. The Bolsheviks sought to export communist revolutions to the rest of Europe and Asia, tried to eliminate the bourgeoisie as a class, terrorized aristocrats, seized their property, and turned over their mansions to former servants. In 1917, about 50 upper-class Russian military cadets were tied up, brought to a factory, and flung into a blast furnace. Similarly, during his struggle for power in China, Mao Zedong famously declared that “a revolution is not a dinner party” and encouraged peasants to humiliate and destroy the old landowning class. In Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini imposed strict rules on female dress, supported the seizure of American hostages, executed thousands of his opponents, and called for an Islamist revolution throughout the Persian Gulf.

At first glance, such behavior seems irrational. Attacks on powerful interests almost always cause violent conflicts that can destroy nascent revolutionary regimes. In China and Russia, such attacks helped precipitate deadly civil wars; in Iran and Vietnam, they resulted in bloody external wars. In some states, as in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, such conflicts wiped out the revolutionary regimes that started them. But what didn’t kill these regimes made them stronger. For those able to survive, ferocious struggles for power made them uniquely durable. Persistent existential threats united the regimes’ elites. Furthermore, violent conflict wiped out alternative centers of power—including other political parties and churches—ensuring weak opposition for years to come.

These early conflicts also forced the regimes to build new and powerful security forces, such as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Russia’s Cheka (later called the KGB), that suppressed all opposition. And since revolutionary governments created their own armed forces rather than inheriting an existing army, they could fill the military with pro-regime spies and officers, which made it much harder for soldiers and their superiors to carry out coups. Finally, because civil wars often destroyed existing economic structures, they created opportunities for authoritarian governments to penetrate deep into the economy—allowing autocrats to promote economic development without falling victim to the strong independent forces that have fostered democracy in other countries.

CHINA’S LONG MARCH TO SECURITY

From one perspective, the roots of authoritarian resilience in China might seem obvious. China is a global military and economic power with a GDP more than 43 times as large as it was in 1978. Within a generation, Chinese living standards have risen dramatically, giving families access to consumer goods they could not have imagined just a few decades ago. Even with recent COVID-19 missteps and slower growth, many Chinese citizens have clear reasons to support the one-party state.

Yet such remarkable economic achievements provide an incomplete explanation for the regime’s durability. For one thing, China’s extraordinary economic performance was only possible because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had earlier managed to unify the country. In the first half of the twentieth century, China had a weak, fragmented state akin to contemporary Afghanistan. The central government barely touched most of its territory, and large sections of the country were under the sway of competing warlords, imperial powers, criminal gangs, and secret societies. Before it could become an economic and military powerhouse, China first had to create a modern, unified state.

Second, the kind of spectacular economic development witnessed in China can be a double-edged sword for dictators trying to maintain a tight authoritarian grip. Rapid economic growth increases support for the government but can also sow the seeds of democracy. Economic development frequently threatens dictators by fostering the rise of independent sources of commercial, social, and political power that make it harder for leaders to monopolize control. Today, there are virtually no dictatorships in wealthy, developed countries. Setting aside Middle Eastern countries that draw incomes from natural resources—which generate fabulous wealth without the social changes associated with economic development—all but three of 54 countries the World Bank classifies as “high income” were ranked “free” by Freedom House in 2022. (The three outliers are Hungary, a competitive authoritarian regime, and the tiny states of Brunei and Singapore.)

This pattern would seem to spell trouble for the leadership of the CCP. By bringing millions out of poverty and creating a large middle class and influential business leaders, economic development in China has the potential to generate alternative centers of power that can fuel strong demands for political change. Indeed, economic development drove democratic transitions in nearby South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s. Observers have long predicted that economic expansion in China would similarly lead to democracy.

But the Chinese regime’s origins in violent social revolution have allowed it to overcome a history of state failure, as well as the unintended consequences of economic change. The CCP’s long and violent struggle for power between 1927 and 1949 produced the unified state necessary for rapid growth but also ensured that economic development would not generate a strong civil society. When Mao became the leader of the CCP, his insistence on combining a struggle for power with radical social change meant that during the civil war and shortly after its end, the party carried out large-scale land reform that wiped out entrenched elites and local groups that had weakened the Chinese state for so long. These measures, and the devastation of war, permitted the CCP to penetrate parts of society that had rarely been subject to direct state control before. Although China would undergo traumatic upheaval at the hands of Mao for several decades after 1949, the unification and strengthening of the Chinese state during the revolutionary struggle created the conditions for China’s eventual rise as a global economic power beginning in the 1990s.

Moreover, China’s transition to communism obliterated alternatives to the ruling party and cleared the way for totalitarian rule. The party now infiltrates every nook and cranny of Chinese society, including both foreign and domestic businesses. The pervasive presence of pro-government institutions has made it very difficult for independent forces to organize. Partly as a result, economic growth has failed to strengthen independent democratic forces the way it did in South Korea and Taiwan. Despite its wealth, China has one of the weakest civil societies in the world. Thus, in the rare instances when protests have emerged—as in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the anti-zero-COVID protests in November 2022—such efforts have been hampered by disorganization and lack of coordination. Although no authoritarian regime is invincible, China remains perhaps the most durable autocracy on the globe and can withstand strong popular discontent and economic turbulence.

TENACITY AND TURMOIL

Iran’s revolutionary leaders went to war against the world after they seized power in 1979. They immediately imposed clerical rule and nearly plunged the country into a civil war against anticlerical leftist insurgents. This instability encouraged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to invade, leading to the brutal eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Meanwhile, the government demonized both the United States and the Soviet Union and became a major sponsor of terrorism in the region. These struggles ultimately strengthened the regime. Above all, the fights against Iraq and leftist insurgents transformed Khomeini’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), founded in 1979, from a ragtag group of ill-trained and ill-equipped street fighters into one of the most powerful security forces in the world, with about 150,000 troops that blanket the country. These conflicts also strengthened the Basij, a militia created in 1979 to defend the revolution against internal and external enemies. Members of the security forces have mainly been recruited from poor, highly religious families in the countryside. Like zealots of any religion, many believe their cause is worth any kind of sacrifice and violence.

Revolutionary ideology is not the only glue holding the Iranian regime together. As many analysts have pointed out, the IRGC is corrupt and has an enormous economic stake in the survival of the Islamic Republic. But material incentives are often not enough. In many other autocracies, members of security forces who have had a stake in the survival of the existing regime have nonetheless defected to avoid being on the losing side when the regime came under pressure. During the Arab Spring in 2011, for example, the Egyptian military deserted President Hosni Mubarak, causing him to fall from power. Security forces in Serbia similarly turned on President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, when mass protests called for his ouster. By contrast, when the clerical regime in Iran has encountered far-reaching challenges, the IRGC and other state actors have stood behind it.

And things have gotten very tough for Iran’s leaders over the past decade. The regime has confronted repeated nationwide protests. In 2009, after incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner, appeared to steal the presidential election from the reformist challenger Mir Hussein Mousavi, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets and protested for months. Then, in the 2010s, increasingly severe international sanctions caused runaway inflation and skyrocketing poverty. Such conditions provoked repeated waves of protests across the country. In late 2019, protesters denounced Khamenei and set fire to numerous government sites, banks, gas stations, and security bases. And the huge demonstrations in the fall of 2022 gave expression to an even wider variety of grievances against the regime, including dissatisfaction over the economy, outrage over Islamic policies, and the regime’s use of violence.

Yet the government has responded to each of these popular threats with the same brutality and intransigence. In 2009, the government answered protests by imprisoning and executing dissidents and holding a series of high-profile show trials of opposition activists. In 2019, police shot and killed protesters on the street. And in 2022, the Basij and the IRGC once again acted as the regime’s main line of defense, killing protesters and minors, invading schools, and making thousands of arrests.

The Iranian case illustrates the critical importance of unity at the top to authoritarian survival. Historically, dictators’ greatest threats have come not from mass protests but from political allies and subordinates in their own militaries. Unlike opposition activists, such insiders have the coercive muscle and the control over key state institutions that are needed to seize power. Given the mismatch in power between most governments and protesters, it is virtually impossible for challengers to succeed if there are no high-level defections from within the government. Indeed, successful opposition in autocracies has frequently been led by politicians who deserted the regime. In numerous countries—including Romania in 1989, Kenya in 2002, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005—dictators fell in part because their allies abandoned the ruling party en masse to join the opposition. For example, Zambia’s dictatorship disintegrated in 1991 when massive protests and economic collapse moved key government supporters to abandon the regime. As one defector explained, “Only a stupid fly . . . follows a dead body to the grave.”

Iran’s governing elite, however, has remained steadfast during similarly far-reaching economic crises and other pressures. Even reformers—insider politicians with more moderate positions on some social and political issues—have resisted breaking from the regime. At one time, opponents of clerical rule looked hopefully to figures such as Mohammad Khatami, who served as president from 1997 to 2005, and Mousavi in 2009, but these leaders refused to make a full break with the theocratic system. Indeed, a week after protests broke out in 2009, Mousavi called for a halt to demonstrations and urged supporters to remain loyal to the Islamic Republic. Such loyalty to clerical rule has helped deprive the opposition of the organization and leadership it needs to channel the country’s immense popular discontent into a more serious challenge to the regime. Thus, the recent protests were largely leaderless. Although repeated protests, popular discontent, and economic crisis clearly make the regime vulnerable, the government is unlikely to fall without cracks at the top.

PUTIN’S HIDDEN INHERITANCE

Unlike communist China and Islamist Iran, Putin’s Russia is not a revolutionary regime. The Soviet Union collapsed long ago, and Putin came to power via an election rather than by violent struggle. But Putin’s autocracy has benefited immeasurably from the legacies of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. First, the long era of Soviet totalitarian rule effectively prevented a strong civil society from taking hold. The state that emerged from the revolution wiped out or infiltrated even the most rudimentary forms of civil society, including opposition parties, trade unions, churches, and other organizations outside the reach of the state that could have provided a foundation for democracy. Although independent economic and social forces began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s, they remained relatively weak, partly because the most profitable sectors of the economy continued to be vulnerable to state interference. As a result, Russia’s opposition has lacked both organization and potential sources of financing.

Second, Putin’s control of Russia has been bolstered by an extensive and effective security service that can be traced directly to the political police created in 1917. It became the most powerful security force in the world, with agents in virtually every apartment block and every enterprise. Although Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the ruling apparatus of the Communist Party, he left the KGB—where Putin began his career—largely untouched. The KGB was formally abolished in the 1990s and divided into several agencies, but its core functions and personnel were retained in what became the FSB (Federal Security Service). Today, the FSB is a bulwark of Putin’s autocracy. Far larger than such organizations in many other countries and backed by millions of informers, the FSB penetrates substantial portions of Russian media, business, and civil society. According to the scholar Kevin Riehle, in a recent study of Russian intelligence, Russia now has more security personnel per capita than it did under Soviet rule. The FSB has targeted major anti-regime leaders such as Boris Nemtsov, who was brazenly assassinated in Moscow in 2015, and more recently, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Alexei Navalny, both of whom have been imprisoned. Organized opposition is now very weak in Russia. Independent forces, weakened by 70 years of Soviet totalitarian rule, have been no match for Putin’s massive security apparatus.

Russia’s revolutionary legacy has also benefited Putin by reducing the likelihood of a military rebellion, even amid such a disastrous campaign as the war in Ukraine. Defeat on the battlefield, especially when it can be blamed on poor decisions by a country’s leader, has often sparked military coups. Indeed, Russia’s humiliation in the first months of its war led many to suggest that Putin might be overthrown by his armed forces. But as the political scientist Adam Casey has pointed out, Putin’s regime has retained the Soviet practice of infiltrating the military with counterintelligence officers. This a difficult feat in most autocracies, which tend to inherit rather than create their own militaries. But the Soviets had no such hurdle, and the revolutionary legacy has given Putin the capacity to identify potential military opposition, making it much harder for the armed forces to challenge him.

NO REVOLUTION IS FOREVER

Of course, even the most powerful revolutionary autocracies do not last forever, and China, Iran, and Russia are not invincible. The regimes in Tehran and Moscow are more vulnerable than the one in Beijing. Until now, the Iranian regime has remained cohesive despite economic crisis and popular unrest, but that does not mean it can do so indefinitely. If the economy continues to worsen and dissatisfaction grows, cracks may eventually begin to form within the regime. The potential for splits will likely increase in the medium term as the original, fanatical generation of revolutionaries who came of age during the struggle for power dies off. As in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, the younger officials who replace them may be less ideological and therefore more likely to defect in times of crisis. Furthermore, Khamenei, who is in ill health and 84 years old, has not named a successor. It is possible—albeit unlikely, given the strength of hard-line forces—that his death might catalyze divisions within the regime.

The Russian government’s vulnerability comes from the regime’s concentration of power in one man’s hands. Today, Putin rules largely unconstrained by other institutions or actors. His regime was not built on the kind of ideology that in revolutionary Iran has motivated intense loyalty and sacrifice, nor on an established ruling party such as the one in China, which would provide a source of durability beyond a single leader. Because everything depends on Putin, his eventual death or incapacity may throw the regime into disarray. It is anybody’s guess who might succeed him. Such uncertainty is common in personalist regimes. At the same time, given the balance of forces between state and society, it is unlikely that such a transition will result in democracy, at least in the near term.   

The Chinese regime remains stronger than its Iranian and Russian counterparts. China’s economy is obviously in much better shape than Iran’s. And although Xi’s power is less constrained than that of his recent predecessors, his rule is far less personalized than Putin’s. Xi’s regime remains grounded in a strong and institutionalized party-state bureaucracy that has no equivalent in Russia. Certainly, China is not without its problems. In addition to low economic growth and ill-considered COVID policies, extensive corruption has in recent years led some observers to argue that the CCP is “atrophying,” “fragile,” and in a period of “late-stage decay.” Xi’s intense anticorruption campaign over the last decade has seemingly reduced, but by no means eliminated, government malfeasance. Regardless, the regime’s powerful bureaucracy, extraordinary repressive capacity, and weak civil society will likely insulate the government from future corruption scandals or other crises.

Confronting revolutionary governments is complicated. Hard-line strategies from regime opponents in the West often reinforce cohesion and provide autocracies with convenient scapegoats. Indeed, decades of sanctions against Cuba have arguably helped solidify and legitimize the regime founded in 1959 by Fidel Castro. Furthermore, open confrontation with a country as economically and politically powerful as China is untenable.

Yet the West is far from powerless. Although increasingly severe economic sanctions imposed on Iran since the early 2010s have not caused the regime to collapse, they have nonetheless weakened it by fueling an economic crisis, which has led to popular dissatisfaction and repeated protests over the last decade. In Russia, unprecedented sanctions have so far failed to destabilize Putin’s regime, but they have isolated him internationally, reduced Russian growth, and possibly decreased the country’s capacity to wage war in Ukraine.

Putin’s actions in Ukraine starkly illustrate the dangers of failing to confront powers that challenge international liberal norms. A desire to avoid conflict led Germany and other Western powers to accommodate Russia’s perceived geopolitical interests and pursue engagement even after Russia invaded and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. Yet such efforts did nothing to curb Russia’s regional ambitions, and the relatively mild Western response almost certainly encouraged Putin to invade the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Today, all but a few European countries recognize the need to challenge Russia head-on.

Revolutionary autocrats and their successors present one of today’s most intractable challenges to international order. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine despite Russia’s close ties to Europe demonstrates that economic linkage and common material interests are not sufficient to preserve the liberal world order. Democracies must instead unite and mount a defense of democratic values—providing military support for democracies under attack, as well as diplomatic and material assistance for those opposing dictatorship. Although these efforts will not topple revolutionary dictatorships in the short term, a more proactive and coordinated resistance to autocracy will better equip the West to contain and perhaps even defeat them in the long term.