How tyrants fall and how.., p.5
How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive, page 5
Leaving the treadmill is technically possible, then, but the stakes are high and few are willing to take the gamble. Faced with the choice between running, reaching to pull the plug or trying to jump, most tyrants will choose to keep running. But as they’re on that treadmill, the moving surface isn’t all they have to worry about. As they move, they constantly have to watch their backs because the people closest to them usually pose the greatest danger.
2
The Enemy Within
You should also know that these enemies are here. They are not to be found abroad. They are close to us and even within our ranks.1
Hissène Habré, president of Chad
On the night of 28 June 1762, Catherine was asleep at Monplaisir, a summer villa at Peterhof Palace. Sitting just metres above the waters of the Gulf of Finland, it was a tranquil retreat outside the hustle and bustle of imperial St Petersburg.2
Suddenly, a man stormed into Catherine’s bedroom. ‘The time has come! You must get up and come with me!’ the soldier said. Not yet fully awake, a confused Catherine replied: ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Passek is arrested,’ he said.3
Catherine was now playing against time. Captain Passek was in on her plot to overthrow her husband, Tsar Peter III of Russia. If Passek were tortured, her involvement wouldn’t remain secret for long. And if she were to be found out, her journey to the scaffold would follow swiftly.4
The last couple of years had been difficult for Catherine. The tsar had long alienated his wife, and Catherine eventually became convinced that he wanted to remove her and marry his mistress Elizaveta. Peter insulted and humiliated his wife in public.5 He made drunken threats. He lied, deceived and plotted. Catherine’s life was in acute danger.
Months into his reign, Peter had antagonised just about every faction around the court that mattered. Many soldiers were upset because Peter was strangely pro-Prussian. His obsession with Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, was so intense that he forced his soldiers to dress like Prussians.6 Whereas his predecessor had waged war against Prussia with Austria, one of Peter’s first moves was to save Russia’s enemy from certain defeat. He could have marched on Berlin but didn’t. When Frederick offered him lands to stop the war, he refused to take them. Then, with his troops exhausted from a war from which they didn’t seem to gain anything because Peter was unwilling to press Russia’s advantage, he decided to prepare for war with Denmark because Denmark had control over Schleswig. That didn’t really have anything to do with Russia, but, once again, it was one of Peter’s strange obsessions.7 As a result of these events, many of the soldiers were seething.
Unlike Peter, Catherine was exceptionally good at forging alliances with the powerful at court. From day one in Russia, the German princess had embraced the culture. She learned Russian and did her best to take Russian Orthodoxy seriously. She acted, as she put it, ‘so the Russians should love me’.8 And it’s clear that many of those at court did, or at least they preferred her to Peter III. One of their courtiers commented: ‘Sympathy for the empress grew in proportion to contempt for her husband.’9
Clothed in black, Catherine made her way to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards, who were tasked with protecting the royal family. At the barracks, the soldiers kissed her hands, feet and the hem of her dress.10 After arriving at the Winter Palace, priests, senators and palace guards made it clear that they would support Catherine rather than her husband in the struggle for power.11 But even with their support, the problem of what to do about her husband remained. Peter might be away from the capital, but he had access to thousands of troops.
When his wife’s betrayal had first become apparent, Peter was distraught and confused. Should he try to negotiate? One of his generals advised him to march on St Petersburg.12 With the military force he had at his command, he could crush his wife and her co-conspirators; he could then reclaim the throne that was rightfully his. But unlike his wife Catherine, Peter didn’t have what it took. Instead of making the decisive move as counselled by his general, he dithered.
In St Petersburg, Catherine made the boldest move possible. After changing into the green uniform of the Imperial Guards, she mounted a white stallion and herself led her army to dispose of Peter.13 In the end, the only thing she was willing to accept was unconditional abdication – in writing. It was the greatest possible humiliation for her husband.
Less than six months after being crowned emperor of Russia, Peter III was imprisoned at Ropsha, a castle some thirty kilometres southwest of St Petersburg. Less than a week after losing power, he died.
Power is relational. You can’t be a leader if you don’t have followers. But for tyrants, the number of people they must keep happy to stay in charge is small. At the same time, these are also the people most likely to bring them down. The data bear this out: between 1950 and 2012, 473 authoritarian leaders lost power. According to one analysis, 65 per cent of them were removed by regime insiders.14 Often, the real danger isn’t those who openly oppose the leader, but those who see him regularly, smiling while they plot their next move.
To understand how tyrants survive (and fall), think of people in the three groups outlined by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith in their Dictator’s Handbook.15 First, there are the people who matter in theory – the group the leaders are supposed to win over to get control. Second, there are the people who actually matter – the group that leaders need to gain control. And third, there’s an inner core, the smallest group that tyrants cannot rule without.
The people who matter in theory (called the ‘nominal selectorate’ by de Mesquita and Smith) have some say in whether a given leader, tyrant or not, gets to stay in power. In a liberal democracy such as the United States, it can be tens of millions of people since most people above the age of eighteen can vote in presidential elections.
The second group of people is the ‘real selectorate’. The real selectorate consists of the group that actually determines who stays in power. In the United States, that group technically consists of the 538 electors of the Electoral College. Once the people have voted, their representatives choose the president. In modern practice, however, these electors take their mandate from the popular election and vote accordingly. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.
This means that the de facto real selectorate consists of the much larger number of voters in a small number of ‘swing states’ (states where the voting could go either way) that regularly decide the outcome of presidential elections. In addition, there are the lobbyists, donors and other political players who can give you the resources you need to get a meaningful chance of trying to persuade the voters in swing states. To make this more concrete: a voter in Kansas, who is part of the nominal selectorate, is much less important than a voter in Wisconsin because Kansas always goes red (votes Republican) whereas Wisconsin does not. Votes in Wisconsin can make a real difference, whereas votes in Kansas only make a difference in theory. John from Kansas is part of the nominal selectorate, Joanna from Wisconsin is part of the real selectorate.
Then, you have the winning coalition. The winning coalition consists of the smallest number of people from the real selectorate that you need to assemble in order to take or maintain power. In the case of America, this would be the smallest number of voters in swing states needed to win the Electoral College.
The size of all these groups varies hugely depending on the system of government. Most dictators don’t need to worry about electoral colleges; some don’t even have to worry about voters. The more authoritarian the regime, the smaller these three groups tend to be. At Peter’s court in eighteenth-century Russia, the real selectorate was tiny and so was the winning coalition. All it took for Catherine to topple her husband and get him thrown into jail were a small number of the Imperial Guard. Even back in 1762, the Russian Empire had an estimated population of more than 17 million.16 And yet, losing the support of his wife and a few key military figures made all the difference between sitting on a throne and dying in a grimy dungeon.
It may seem as though the story of Peter and Catherine is a far cry from the dynamics of contemporary politics. The United States didn’t exist then, industrialisation hadn’t occurred and there was a grand total of zero liberal democracies in the world – but that doesn’t mean the general mechanism of how a tyrant functions has ceased to apply. In highly authoritarian countries, the winning coalition can still consist of just a few hundred people. In these countries, the support of a core elite determines everything: if the tyrant can maintain the support of the winning coalition, he stays in power and stays alive. If he loses the winning coalition, he loses power – and perhaps more than that. And for everyone else who lives under these brutal regimes, having a better life means climbing from powerless peasant to someone who actually counts as part of the selectorate.
If they didn’t already know this after decades of totalitarian rule, the North Korean regime taught this lesson to its people during the 1990s.17
North Korea is mountainous, its winters harsh, its agriculture precarious. Starting in the late 1950s, when much of North Korea lay in ruins as a result of the war with South Korea and its allies, farmers were forced to collectivise. This meant that instead of mostly farming for themselves, people now mostly farmed for the state. As a result, millions of people became totally dependent on the government since they could no longer buy food or grow it in meaningful quantities for themselves. Instead, the government decided who got what. This system only ‘worked’ to the extent that it did because both the Soviet Union and China provided significant support to North Korea during the Cold War. As the Soviet Union collapsed, China also reduced its support – partly because its own harvest didn’t go as planned. It was a massive external shock. The Kim family could have reacted by expanding foreign trade or liberalising the collective system at home; they did neither. When floods hit in 1995, North Koreans were already experiencing famine. The system hadn’t worked before the water came rushing in, but now it was totally destroyed.
For many ordinary North Koreans, the situation became so desperate that they began to eat trees. Ji Hyun-ah, who was seventeen at the time, describes what it was like.18 To start with you had to find the right tree. It had to be pine, and finding it could involve going up mountains or down valleys. Once found, Ji had to chop the tree down, which wasn’t an easy task for someone already weakened by hunger.
With the trees chopped, the children (or their parents) had to peel back the outer bark with a knife or a scythe. Beneath the outer bark lay what they called songgi, a thin inner layer that separates the outer bark from the wood of the tree. Once enough of the songgi had been collected (which was hard work), it then had to be boiled in lye, stretched out and soaked for a night. When all that was done, it had to be beaten with a club and combined with a little bit of corn flour to make a sort of cake. As Ji put it: ‘It was barely edible, and having to do with that kind of food was terrible.’19 For some Korean children, the situation was even more dire, because not even pinetree-bark cake was available regularly. For them, getting to eat the trees was like Christmas.20 And yet, Ji recalls, ‘it never occurred to us to blame North Korea’s dictatorial government for our hardships.’21
But slowly, as the catastrophe unfolded and more North Koreans became malnourished before dying, the risk of that happening increased. To Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un and son of North Korea’s first leader, Kim Il-sung), this wasn’t just a humanitarian problem, it rapidly became a question of whether the regime would survive. Instead of distributing the little food that was left according to need, it was distributed, at least partly, based on a subject’s loyalty to the regime and the extent to which a person was needed to keep the Kims in power. In Pyongyang, where people really mattered to the dictatorship, the rations were comparatively large. Outside the capital, in less important areas of the countryside, countless people starved to death. That wasn’t a coincidence. At times during the famine, the rations per person in Pyongyang were almost twice as high as those in some other provinces.22 As political scientists Daniel Byman and Jennifer Lind have concluded: ‘Kim Jong-il shielded his selectorate and concentrated the famine’s devastation on the people deemed the least loyal.’23 And for them, the effect was truly devastating. By some credible estimates, around 3 to 5 per cent of North Korea’s pre-famine population died.24
Palace elites, whether they are high-ranking party officials, generals or oligarchs, can help or hinder the tyrant’s aspirations. In the best-case scenario for the tyrant, a large segment of the elites believes that the continued rule of the dictator is in their own interest. When that is the case, they may not just acquiesce in his rule but act as a crutch during moments of turmoil. But the more likely scenario, and the one that all tyrants must fear, is one in which a significant portion of the real selectorate wants to see the dictator overthrown – either because they want power themselves or because they believe their interests will be better served under different leadership.
To the despot, managing the real selectorate and the country at large is so difficult because these regimes are notoriously opaque, not just to outsiders, but also to the dictator himself. This is known as the ‘dictator’s dilemma’.25 To stay in power, the dictator creates a climate of perpetual fear. That fear silences critics, who don’t dare to speak their minds. But because most keep silent, the dictator never knows what people – even his advisers – actually think. Is this person genuinely loyal or are they only pretending? Does he or she really support the government’s ideology, or is it all theatre designed to buy time until they can stab the tyrant in the back? The tyrant cannot possibly know. He may be the most powerful person in the country, but he can never trust his subordinates to tell him the truth. Every decision a dictator makes, then, is made with information that has been filtered through a fog of fear.
These dynamics feel alien to most of us because we are able to speak our minds without worrying that it’ll lead to our untimely deaths, or our families being tortured. An office worker telling their boss an unpleasant truth might lower their chances of promotion. They could even get fired. But who wouldn’t lie to a dictator if the truth meant jail or death? In dictatorships, the truth can be deadly.
Most tyrants aren’t stupid, so they understand that they don’t receive the full picture. Under those circumstances, it’s rational for tyrants to assume the worst about the people surrounding them.
But not all tyrants have the same difficulty in dealing with the enemy within because the coalition upon which leaders depend varies hugely. Political scientists Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have written:
If a small bloc of backers is needed and it can be drawn from a large pool of potential supporters (as in the small coalition needed in places like Zimbabwe, North Korea, or Afghanistan), then the incumbent doesn’t need to spend a huge proportion of the regime’s revenue to buy the coalition’s loyalty.26
Under those conditions, the price of elite ‘loyalty’ to the incumbent is low because there is plenty of supply. If the minister of the interior demands a larger cut of the money the regime steals from its people, the minister won’t get a raise – instead, he will be replaced by one of the many other people who are ‘qualified’ and willing to do his job. But what de Mesquita and Smith described for Zimbabwe, North Korea and Afghanistan isn’t true for all tyrannical regimes. Some incumbents need to work much harder to keep the money-making machine running because the pool from which they can recruit is significantly smaller.
Let’s imagine the new head of a military junta. A year ago, he was a colonel worrying about his military role, but now he has seized power and needs to worry about his new role as dictator. He’s done his first television broadcast to project authority and calm the nerves of the international community, and now has to get on with his new job. To a large extent, that will mean keeping fellow colonels happy because they are needed for him to stay in office. If the colonels feel as though they could improve their lot with someone else in charge, they will see to it that someone else will take charge. And once that person is in charge, their predecessor will be in immediate danger.
The problem with this situation, from the coup leader’s perspective, is that it is difficult to replace people. There are plenty of soldiers, but not a lot of colonels – and he needs to surround himself with high-ranking military officers because privates don’t have the experience or stature to help him lead the new government.
In democracies, voters are replaceable; you lose one, you can win back another. But in authoritarian regimes, the supply of elites that make up the real selectorate is finite. In monarchies, for example, there are only so many princes. Alienate one, and there may not be another to take his place. The same is true for many dictatorships. There are only so many generals and so many spy chiefs, and tyrants can’t always replace the ones who turn against them. The result of this more limited replacement pool in military regimes or monarchies is that rulers need to work harder to keep the elites on their side. Their price, if you will, goes up. And as annoying as that might be from the tyrant’s perspective, not paying is not really an option.
To pay this price, despots need money – lots of it, and that is quite apart from their own private funds, of course. In an ideal situation, tyrants want access to a source of wealth that doesn’t depend on skilled labour. If it does, the tyrant depends on the goodwill of large numbers of people and that is a situation they generally want to avoid because it makes them vulnerable. In addition, having the money-machine depend on skilled labour means that money needs to be spent on educating people, which is a waste of money if the same money could also be spent on the things that really matter – such as buying off opponents or building golden statues of yourself that rotate with the sun.
