Political technology is the reason why so few post-Soviet states are democracies. Georgia has become a mini-Russia, with the ruling Georgian Dream party using many of the same techniques that the Kremlin used to consolidate power in the 2000s. And to rule over and ignore a society that is overwhelmingly pro-European. Moldova was a case study of state capture by a single oligarch using political technology. The new government of Maia Sandu has been struggling to overcome his legacy since 2019.

Much of the existing literature has addressed authoritarian learning from external examples but has failed to analyse internal examples. The chapter begins by analysing learning from China, Singapore, and Kazakhstan among the case studies, finding that China is a source of learning. Another example is the restrictive NGO laws that took off after the Russian foreign agents law across the post-Soviet region, which highlights copying at the very least, if not direct learning. The chapter then turns to the domestic, analysing Belarusian learning from the Soviet Union. The main point of interest in the chapter is that the Moldovan and Ukrainian regimes appear to learn from the internal, both in terms of failure and success. This is particularly the case regarding the examples of Plahotniuc and Poroshenko learning from previous regimes both belonged to. The chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of success and failure in authoritarian learning.

The internal aspect of learning is something that the existing literature has not investigated in detail. A range of examples are investigated in this chapter, with the first section addressing Belarusian and Russian learning from the Soviet Union. Then the chapter analyses how Putin learnt from his image failure after the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine in the early 2000s. The Kursk sinking led to a significant change in image with Putin becoming a macho-man. The 2009 Moldovan Twitter Revolution led to learning after the protest on the part of the nominally pro-European government and the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan provided learning opportunities for Ukrainian governments. The chapter then addresses sub-optimal legislation in Belarus and Russia and potential learning from the failure. Learning from failure has not been investigated too much in the existing literature and this chapter addresses the issue.