How tyrants fall and how.., p.15
How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive, page 15
The raid caused international uproar, but it was only the opening barrage of a long campaign waged by Putin’s regime. In 2012, it escalated as Putin signed the foreign agents law. The law was a frontal assault on the viability of running a non-governmental organisation in the country. It introduced ‘a requirement that organizations engaging in political activity and receiving foreign funding must register as foreign agents, even if the foreign funding they receive does not actually pay for political activities’.20 The American non-governmental organisation Freedom House summarised the situation as follows: ‘Once an “apolitical” organization engages in a critique of government policy, its activities could be deemed political as well.’21 Since that can mean just about anything, nobody was immune and the ensuing regulations were strict. Among other things, ‘foreign agents’ had to let everyone they dealt with know that they were ‘foreign agents’.
Combined with the regime making clear to domestic donors that they should no longer fund such organisations, laws such as this made it more difficult for the organisations to operate. What’s more, whipping up the population against human rights organisations (or traitors funded by the country’s enemies, in this version of events) served another purpose. If enough people are angry enough, some of them won’t stop at posting mean comments on social media; they will throw fake blood at the doors of the organisations or harass their employees. It made life hell for anyone involved with them, whilst the regime retained plausible deniability because the intimidation was carried out by another party.
The coup de grâce came in 2021. Standing beneath Russia’s coat of arms, the two-headed golden eagle, the robe-clad Supreme Court judge Alla Nazarova ordered Memorial to close. Its violations of the foreign agent laws had been ‘repeated’ and ‘gross’, she said.22 And just like that, the Kremlin had used the legal system to restrict the work of a critical non-governmental organisation before killing it altogether. But importantly, it had done it with a thin veneer of legality that made it easier to avoid popular opposition.
Another thing that can help to reduce the probability of mass protests with a comparatively low risk of public backlash is surveillance. If the regime knows exactly who wants to topple them – what they think, who they meet, what they plan – they can take them out of the game before they offer any serious opposition.
During the Cold War, conducting that work was a massive challenge. Agents had to camp outside somebody’s house, tail them, tap their telephone, open their letters and even then they didn’t necessarily have a full picture of everyone the suspect was talking to. That’s why, for example, the secret services of the Warsaw Pact states were so massive. In the Soviet Union, there was roughly one full-time secret police officer for every 600 citizens. The Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police, had an estimated officer for every 180 citizens.23 It was, by most accounts, the largest surveillance organisation in recorded history. Since then, obtaining information about people has become easier. When I talked to a human rights researcher about the way technology enables authoritarian rule, I was told that working out who someone is talking to can be as easy as scraping publicly available social media data. The work that was once done by dozens of agents can now be done by a single engineer – and that engineer can do it for dozens of people at once.
As odd as it may sound, reducing the number of people on the streets can also be achieved by focusing on streets rather than people. Think of the big protest movements that have rocked authoritarian regimes. What do they have in common? For people to challenge their regimes they need a place to come together: Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square in Istanbul, Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv. Even in democracies, people tend to congregate in symbolic places to show their strength: Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Contrast that with Burma. As the journalist Matt Ford has pointed out, the country’s military junta was rocked by demonstrations in 2007, but protests never took hold in the country’s capital city.24
Why? At least in part because the generals had earlier moved the capital from Yangon – an organically evolved coastal city – to Naypyidaw, a planned city, described as ‘dictatorship by cartography’.25 Protests in Naypyidaw were unlikely for several reasons. For a start, barely anyone who wasn’t connected to the government lived in Naypyidaw. But even if there had been more potential dissidents in the city, it’s not clear where they could have gone to protest. As Ford wrote in The Atlantic: ‘Broad boulevards demarcate the specially designated neighbourhoods where officials live, with no public square or central space for residents, unruly or otherwise, to congregate. A moat even surrounds the presidential palace.’26
And while the structure of the capital is a handicap for protestors, it allows the generals’ security forces to move around without being impeded by annoying residents. Perhaps you remember the video that went viral of a fitness instructor dancing, inadvertently made in front of a military convoy during the 2021 coup d’état in Burma? That was Naypyidaw.
Some opposition movements sustain themselves without the need for individual leaders. Others slowly evolve beyond them as they become more powerful. But either is difficult to achieve under tyranny because tyrants make it so difficult to come together and organise anything. Under those circumstances, prominent individuals can become the opposition’s best hope of achieving real change. That’s a weakness that can be exploited by tyrants because they can change the entire board simply by taking an individual piece off it.
Such targeted repression can take many forms: intimidation, harassment, detention, imprisonment, forced exile or even physical attacks; in the most extreme form, murder. Since targeting well-known activists inevitably leads to higher costs for the tyrant, the danger is particularly acute for dissidents and opposition figures who present a threat to the regime if they don’t have a large public profile to protect them against the worst.
The advantage of targeted repression, from the tyrant’s point of view, is twofold. First, there’s a risk of backlash but in many cases this is lower than the risk of backlash from targeting a larger group of people. Second, it’s a direct way to make an example out of someone to deter others, so aiming at one may silence many.
Targeted repression like this has always happened, but it’s changed over the last couple of decades. In the past, fleeing abroad offered significant (albeit not perfect) protection. Opponents could still be found and killed in a faraway place, but that was costly and difficult.
In the twenty-first century, tyrants can follow their enemies abroad with relative ease. Transnational repression has moved from being an exception to being the norm, and the assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018 was only the tip of the iceberg. Not only is it easier to travel long distances to visit friends or faraway places, it is also easier for autocratic hit squads to track and murder dissidents.
But often, tyrants don’t even need to send their own thugs to follow dissidents abroad, because fellow authoritarian leaders will do the job for them. A recent report on transnational repression found that ‘most acts of transnational repression are undertaken through co-optation of or cooperation with authorities in the host country.’27 Sometimes, that can take the form of an explicit deal wherein one regime takes care of foreign dissidents within its borders in exchange for another doing the same.28 Other times, dictators don’t even have to ask.
But let’s say, despite all this, people still protest. If neither beatings nor snipers are the solution, what is? What exactly can tyrants do to prevent their fall? The answer is depressing: they need to go big. If tyrants are going to use severe repression, including bullets, they need to be ready to go all the way. Otherwise, they risk ending up in an escalating cycle, where the repression doesn’t do its intended job, protests grow and they have the worst of all worlds.
Some tyrants have, unfortunately, been willing to commit to the ‘go big’ approach. The most effective way to avoid a backlash when using force is to be so brutal that the barriers to participation increase disproportionately to its mobilisation effect. Put bluntly, people don’t join protests if they think they will die. And as the risk of death increases, the participation advantage of popular protest evaporates into thin air.
That’s a strategy more than one tyrannical regime has pursued. On 3 June 1989, a Chinese woman named Jia was looking down at a burning bus on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in central Beijing.29 Having climbed onto the base of a lamp-post to get a better look at the carnage, her heart beat fast. Without being organised or ordered by any leader, the residents of China’s capital had brought out whatever they could find into the street in an attempt to halt the advance of the People’s Liberation Army. Earlier that evening, Jia had even seen some men roll a milk cart into the street. They thought if they smashed the bottles, the glass might puncture the tyres of the approaching military vehicles.
But faced with the overwhelming might of the Chinese military, they didn’t stand a chance. As the soldiers advanced, they fired indiscriminately at peaceful protestors. Jia jumped down from the lamp-post and ran. Before long, a man waved her into an alley where dozens of people were hiding from the troops. Hiding there, Jia could see tank after tank rumble by. In that moment, she asked herself what would happen to the students. ‘Are the soldiers going to shoot them as they did us?’30
They did. The army had poured into the city from all four directions. Armoured vehicles cleared barricades and the violence went on for hours with extreme brutality. Students, other protestors and innocent bystanders were beaten and shot. Some were even crushed by Type 59 main battle tanks.31
Lu Jinghua, a twenty-eight-year-old, was in the square when the tanks rolled in. ‘I heard bullets whizz past and people getting shot. One body fell by me, then another. I ran and ran to get out of the way. People were crying for help, calling out for ambulances,’ she said. ‘Then another person would die,’ she added.32
The scene the following morning was harrowing. The Avenue of Eternal Peace ‘echoed with screams’.33 The corpses of dead protestors were carried away by friends. Some of the wounded were thrown onto bicycles or rickshaws. As people ran next to them to make sure that they would find their way through the crowds, some cried.
The first Chinese report spoke of 241 dead including twenty-three soldiers. According to multiple outside observers in the city at the time, the true number of dead is likely to have been much higher – perhaps even somewhere around 2,600 to 2,700.34 But it wasn’t just the dead. The soldiers had shot so many protestors that some doctors had run out of blood with which to treat the wounded.35
But even that wasn’t sufficient, because protests quickly spread to 181 cities across the country.36 It was a crucial moment for the Chinese Communist Party. China’s regime had gone all out on repression. Would they be willing to see it through to the gruesome end?
The answer came soon, as brutal crackdowns took place across the country. In the provincial capital Chengdu alone, ‘at least 100 seriously wounded people’ were carried out of one square, according to American officials.37 And that is just a single square in a single city. With protests being put down around the country, it’s impossible to tell how many people were killed by their own government.
The depressing truth is that it worked. On 9 June, some three weeks after the government had declared martial law, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, Deng Xiaoping, gave a speech to military commanders in Beijing. In that speech, he thanked the People’s Liberation Army for quelling the rebellion that aimed to ‘overthrow the Communist Party and topple the socialist system’.38 In that moment, millions of people certainly opposed the regime. But the regime survived and continues to survive. Ruthless repression can work, but it requires a total commitment to horrific brutality.
After the protests had been crushed, the regime sent a further chilling message to anyone who might consider challenging it. Soldiers who shot innocent civilians were given praise and promotions. Two went on to become minister of defence and one later joined the powerful Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. There was no mistaking the signal being sent. Challenge us, and we will kill you. Then, we’ll find the person who fired the lethal shot and we will pin a medal on their chest and call them a hero. The choice is yours. Sensing an existential threat to its survival, the Chinese regime hadn’t taken half measures as the Ukrainian government did decades later. Soldiers were needed, not policemen. Even guns weren’t enough, it had to be tanks.
But if shock and awe, using maximum force, is the best way to stay in power when faced with popular discontent, why doesn’t every dictator order tanks onto the street? The short answer is that they can’t.
The long answer I found much closer to home. In 2023, I drove east to Leipzig to meet sixty-four-year-old Siegbert Schefke. When I got there, he told me that everyone has five or six days in a lifetime where you remember everything: every detail from the moment you get up in the morning to the moment you go to bed at night. For Schefke, 9 October 1989 was one of those days.
Schefke was for years a dissident, and the GDR regime did what it could to make his life miserable. Codenamed ‘Satan’ by the fearsome Stasi, he was constantly under observation. Interrogations, some extremely long, were frequent. Then, a day after attending a vigil for a political prisoner, the state-owned company at which he worked told him that he was going to lose his job. But instead of getting him to back down, it only radicalised him. He became a full-time revolutionary.39
By autumn of 1989, the Socialist Unity Party, which had ruled East Germany since 1949, had already been dealing with popular dissatisfaction for months. Now a major protest was planned in Leipzig and the authorities were on high alert. Before the big day, the regime desperately tried to prevent people from attending. Among other things, they threatened that a Tiananmen Square scenario could be repeated if the population defied the regime’s orders. On the day of the planned protest, Schefke woke up in Berlin. His immediate problem were the Stasi agents who followed his every move. He managed to climb onto the roof of his building unseen, before he boarded a tram and then changed to a borrowed car. It worked. After arriving in Leipzig, Siegbert and his friend Aram looked for a place from which they could film the demonstration. It wasn’t easy because the city was crawling with security forces.
In their desperation, they eventually asked a local pastor whether they could set up their equipment on top of his church’s bell tower. Their request was followed by ten seconds of silence. ‘Of course that’s possible,’ the pastor finally said.40 A moment of relief, and up they went. The floor of the tower was covered in bird droppings, but the view was perfect.
We don’t know how many members of the regime’s security forces were in Leipzig that day since troves of documents were ‘lost’ when the German Democratic Republic collapsed, but what the historian Mary Elise Sarotte could find paints a terrifying picture of the forces Leipzigers had to fear: ‘Fifteen hundred army soldiers appear to have been present. An unclear number of Stasi agents and employees had been activated. More than three thousand police officers would be on duty.’41
North of the city centre, ten armoured personnel carriers were waiting to engage with their motors running.42 All of them were equipped with live ammunition powerful enough to shoot down planes three kilometres away. The regime was ready.
As tens of thousands of peaceful Germans marched in defiance of the Socialist Unity Party, the regime had a decision to make: would they give an order to shoot?
On the morning before the showdown, three high-ranking local party leaders joined forces with a celebrated conductor, a theology professor and a cabaret artist to appeal for non-violence on both sides. That appeal was read not only in the churches where the protestors gathered before their march but also to security forces and on the local radio. ‘We urge you to exercise prudence so peaceful dialogue becomes possible,’ it said.43 That intervention was so important because it signalled that the regime was split. There was no uniform desire among elites to crush the opposition.
There were signs of rupture within the security forces as well. Morale in the party’s local militias was so low that a good many of its reservists simply didn’t show up.44 Among those who did, many openly questioned the orders they were given. Berlin had indicated that protests would not be allowed to go ahead. But what if there were women and children in the crowd? Who would take responsibility after innocent people were gunned down, their blood running in the streets? As protestors talked with security forces throughout the day, soldiers and policemen sympathised with the people they were preparing to kill.45
These dynamics explain why tyrants usually try to maximise their chance of ‘success’ by bringing in troops from the outside when they crack down on civilians. The closer the oppressor is to the intended victims, the more uncertain things become because even the most loyal supporters of a regime cannot be expected to kill their neighbours, friends or family. And how could soldiers be so sure that this isn’t what was about to happen? They were facing a crowd of tens of thousands – there was no telling who exactly would be standing in front of their barrels.
Regime planners were aware of the problem, not least because even the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had struggled with insubordination when quelling protests on Tiananmen Square. Local units, which had most contacts among the population of the city, were deliberately deployed as the last line of defence rather than being on the front lines where they could cause trouble.46
Under those circumstances, one of the regime’s key concerns had to be whether an order to shoot unarmed protestors would even be carried out if it were given. Dictators may want to order a brutal crackdown, but someone has to fire the guns. If the people carrying the guns sympathise with the people they are supposed to shoot, a bad situation could spiral out of control and become catastrophic. And indeed, this is how popular resistance can succeed: either the regime looks weak or it risks crumbling under the weight of its own repression.
