Communist states—both historical and contemporary—have been unique in the extent to which they collect vast amounts of information on their citizens, a phenomenon depicted in movies such as Lives of Others. The Soviet KGB, for example, had officials stationed in every significant enterprise, factory, and government institution and drew on millions of informers who infiltrated virtually every apartment block in the country. As Martin Dimitrov notes in his new book, Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China, the Bulgarian state similarly engaged in extensive monitoring of telephones and “systematic mail inspection” (p. 91). Today, China hosts one of the most extensive and sophisticated surveillance systems in the world.
But what do these governments do with all this information? How do the vast stores of information compiled by communist states shape governance and strategies for maintaining power? Decades after the release of communist archives in Eastern Europe, we now have an important part of the answer. Dimitrov has written a subtle and pathbreaking study exploring how communist autocracies collect and interpret intelligence on their populations, highlighting the trade-offs between repression and the degree to which autocrats are able to gain accurate and timely information on their populations.
A central challenge for autocracies, Dimitrov notes, is the “dictator’s dilemma”: autocrats often do not have an accurate understanding of their popular support, because citizens frequently lie to avoid reprisals. As Timur Kuran (“Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989,” World Politics 44 [1], 1991) famously argued, widespread preference falsification contributed to the sudden—and, for most people, surprising—collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. Similarly, Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia agreed to hold competitive elections in 1991 in part because he thought he had far more support in the population than he actually did. He ended up losing in a landslide, garnering only 25% of the vote.
But as Dimitrov notes, communist regimes “successfully develop strategies for evaluating the popular mood” (p. 62). In part they do this through redundancy—by having different agencies report on the same issue. Dimitrov also suggests that they succeed because they often elicit an extraordinarily high number of petitions and complaints. Complaints have the advantage that they are voluntarily provided and thus do “not suffer from preference falsification” (p. 55). In addition, Dimitrov makes the important point that the extent and nature of complaints are known only to regime insiders. In contrast to other forms of feedback in authoritarian systems, such as protest and voting, evidence of discontent is hidden from view and thus is unlikely to inspire opposition forces to take action. Petitions and complaints allow governments to identify opposition while it is still latent and before it grows into something unmanageable.
One of this book’s most important contributions is to demonstrate how authoritarian regimes may create effective mechanisms of accountability in the absence of competitive elections. The Bulgarian leadership received weekly and sometimes daily reports on the popular mood and instances of dissent. Such monitoring affected governance. According to Dimitrov, the state’s increased emphasis on consumption in the 1950s “reflected a new understanding that popular discontent was directly linked to frustrated consumption preferences” (p. 101). (These measures were also a response to protests.)
This relates to Dimitrov’s most interesting theoretical argument: that high levels of repression may harm regime stability by discouraging the voluntary provision of information. In response to repression, the public often clams up and refrains from complaining, thus depriving the regime of information that may be critical to its survival. For example, Dimitrov points to the Bulgarian regime’s brutal and antagonistic treatment of the Turkish minority. The government’s “regenerative process” in the early 1980s forcibly replaced Turkish Arabic names with Slavic Bulgarian names. Even inscriptions on gravestones were altered. Repression against the minority contributed to the regime’s extremely low penetration of this important population. There was just one informant for every 200 Turks and very few regime supporters among imams. As he argues, “These shortcomings in the informant network meant that State Security faced challenges in detecting and defusing latent discontent prior to its transformation into acts of overt resistance to the regime” (p. 214).
Dimitrov makes the somewhat counterintuitive argument that “low repression” (or at least lower “than commonly thought” [p. 441]) in Eastern Europe encouraged voluntarily provided information, which in turn allowed the regime to address latent opposition before it could grow into something more threatening. Such “anticipatory rule” allowed the Bulgarian communists to maintain stable control for decades until the 1989 wave of anticommunism swept it aside. At that point, there was little the government could do to save itself, even despite its accurate understanding of the public mood.
In the Chinese context, Dimitrov argues that stability has been maintained by surveillance, repression, and what he calls a “market social contract.” Despite the weakness of overt opposition threats, Dimitrov argues that the trade-off between repression and long-term regime stability is evident in China. On the one hand, Chinese state has successfully quelled open opposition challenges. Although the Chinese state initially had more limited surveillance capacity than did communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the Chinese Communist Party in the twenty-first century has used extensive repression and a uniquely sophisticated and pervasive surveillance system to suppress dissent in Xinjiang, Tibet, and elsewhere. “Technological advances and cheap data have given the Chinese state access to surveillance tools” that make East Germany’s efforts “seem decidedly premodern” (p. 365).
But Dimitrov is skeptical that coercion and sophisticated surveillance technologies are sufficient to maintain long-term stability, arguing that “triumphalist thinking about the surveillance capacity of the Chinese state should be tempered” (p. 365). In particular, high levels of incarceration among Uyghurs indicate the failure of the regime to penetrate the minority population and suggest “that the state is not omniscient or omnipotent.” Its overt reliance on repression and the resulting “failure to accurately assess and counteract latent discontent may have serious negative consequences for regime stability” (p. 365).
Overall, Dimitrov provides a uniquely in-depth picture of communist strategies of identifying and coping with dissent. The book includes extraordinarily detailed and fascinating chapters exploring how the nature of information gathering shifted in both subtle and less subtle ways over the course of the postwar period in Bulgaria and China. He also gives us a highly sophisticated analysis of the dilemmas and trade-offs faced by autocrats in their efforts to penetrate society and gain popular support. Dimitrov’s extensive use of previously untapped archives makes this book essential reading for anyone interested in authoritarian governance.
At the same time, a fuller understanding of regime durability requires us to move beyond Dimitrov’s theoretical lens. His study of regime resilience focuses almost exclusively on popular discontent, which is just one—albeit important—source of authoritarian instability. According to Milan Svolik’s data (The Politics of Authoritarian Rule, 2012), just 11% of autocrats fell to popular uprisings between 1946 and 2008. Data from Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz suggest a somewhat modest increase after the end of the Cold War to 21% (Barbara Geddes et al., “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set,” Perspectives on Politics 12 [2], 2014).
Another, more serious threat to authoritarian stability comes from within the regime. According to Svolik (2012), nearly 70% of authoritarian exits were a result of civilian and military coups. Because autocrats have a massive coercive advantage over protesters, they almost never fall from power unless there are defections from within the regime. Preventing coups or other types of elite defection requires monitoring the elite. Dimitrov is certainly aware of such dangers but suggests that “monitoring elites does not present a serious logistic challenge” (p. 15). Thus, the focus of his book is on monitoring the masses.
Yet Dimitrov’s perspective reflects his focus on communist states, which are unusually good at elite penetration. Thus, communism—whether it emerged out of revolution or foreign imposition—resulted in a high level of infiltration of the military by the party and party-controlled security officials and informants. Under Stalin, top military officials were surrounded day and night by regime agents who infiltrated chauffeurs, bodyguards, cooks, maids, adjutants, secretarial staff, mistresses, and the NKVD special departments. Such penetration facilitated a degree of elite monitoring not seen in most other autocracies. Partly as a result, communist states had fewer coups and coup attempts than other autocracies. By contrast noncommunist and nonrevolutionary autocracies such as Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–66) were unable to infiltrate the military and therefore had a much more difficult time distinguishing friend from foe in the armed forces. As a result, Nkrumah fell to a military coup less than a decade after taking power. More broadly, military coups accounted for about half of all authoritarian breakdowns during the Cold War. The elite may be less numerous than the general public, but it is also frequently better at dissimulation and much more equipped to defend its interests.
None of this, however, takes away from Dimitrov’s extraordinary achievement. His study is truly groundbreaking. It offers a novel and nuanced exploration of the range of issues faced by autocrats seeking to understand their populations and preempt opposition before it transforms into serious overt challenges.
