Much of the existing research into dictatorships is shaped by two pervasive assumptions. The first is the so-called “dictator's dilemma:” the idea that autocrats can never know the true extent of their support, because their subjects are too afraid to express their true opinions. Dictatorships, from this standpoint, succumb to coups and revolutions because they cannot identify their enemies. The second assumption is that regime elites are both more difficult to monitor and more dangerous for the dictator. Based on the perception that more dictatorships have been deposed by regime insiders than popular revolts, the prevailing view in the literature has been that policing the elite is the foremost concern for autocrats.
In Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China, Martin Dimitrov challenges both assumptions. Focusing on the cases of Bulgaria and China—two of the most dissimilar communist dictatorships—the book finds that some autocracies have quite successfully resolved the “dictator's dilemma,” but were still powerless to prevent their downfall. Most notably, Dimitrov traces the genesis of the extensive system of surveillance and social control set up by the Bulgarian regime, to find that its leader, Todor Zhivkov, was very well informed about citizen discontent and an ongoing plot by Politburo members to remove him from power. Yet despite these insights, he could not avert his own downfall.
The trove of archival evidence presented in the book shows that Zhivkov's fate was shared by other communist leaders, who presided over vast and extremely proficient surveillance apparatuses, including East Germany's Erich Honecker. Their main weakness, according to Dimitrov's analysis, was not that they could not build an all-knowing system of social surveillance. Instead, the eastern bloc dictatorships failed because the panopticons they built could not offset their inadequacies in governing advanced industrial societies. At the same time, the less sophisticated Chinese police state survived because it faced the simpler task of ruling over a predominantly rural society.
The second key insight of Dictatorship and Information is that these overbearing communist regimes have had a much harder time controlling their populations than the elites. Establishing control over the higher strata of society, as Dimitrov demonstrates, was a challenge that the Bulgarian and Chinese dictatorships overcame in their first decade in power. But these regimes never came close to achieving full dominion over their populations. Their most glaring and persistent failure, in this sense, was to establish a solid grip over their minorities, which were always first to rise in rebellions that threatened to spread to the rest of the population.
Crucially, Dictatorship and Information shows that in these contexts, elite divisions and coups were not sui generis processes, but were, in fact, motivated by mass unrest. As the book's archival evidence suggests, the plotters who brought down Zhivkov in Bulgaria only mustered the courage to do so after reading security services reports about growing popular discontent. Rather than safeguarding autocracy, surveillance expedited its demise. More fundamentally, the idea that dictatorships should fear regime insiders more than their populations is, as Dimitrov shows, misleading, when palace coups ride on the coattails of popular discontent.
The central idea of Dictatorship and Information, distilled from these observations, is that communist dictatorships have been sustained not by the reach of their security apparatus, but by the stability of their social contracts. Dimitrov finds that the evolution of communist dictatorships as disparate as Bulgaria's and China's has been surprisingly similar in this regard: they flourished as they substituted large-scale repression with voluntary compliance, enabled by a burgeoning welfare state that anticipated citizens’ demands. These regimes fell when they could not deliver on their end of the social contract. As Dimitrov points out, this raises the question of whether the increasingly stagnant rule of the Chinese Communist Party may yet face a reckoning, similar to what its east European counterparts had to contend with at the end of the Cold War.
Dimitrov draws these insights through his innovative use of archival archeology, which enables him to trace how different sorts of confidential information were generated and used by communist dictatorships to craft their policies. Students of authoritarianism would be well advised to consult Dictatorship and Information as an essential guide for both the inner logic of these regimes, and the methods required to examine it.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not reflect the views of the US government, the Department of Defense, or the US Navy.
