“This is the thing about authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything”
“The problem for authoritarian regimes is not economic growth. The problem is how to pay the patronage for their elites, how to keep the elites loyal, especially the security services and the upper levels of the officer corps. If money just gushes out of the ground in the form of hydrocarbons or diamonds or other minerals, the oppressors can emancipate themselves from the oppressed. The oppressors can say, we don’t need you. We don’t need your taxes. We don’t need you to vote. We don’t rely on you for anything, because we have oil and gas, palladium and titanium. They can have zero economic growth and still live very high on the hog.”
“Did the Chinese regime [lift tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty and ensured that education levels are rising]? Or Chinese society? Let’s be careful not to allow the Chinese Communists to expropriate, as it were, the hard labor, the entrepreneurialism, the dynamism of millions and millions of people in that society.”
“What accounts for the popularity of an authoritarian regime like Putin’s? They have stories to tell. And, as you know, stories are always more powerful than secret police. Yes, they have secret police and regular police, too, and, yes, they’re serious people and they’re terrible in what they’re doing to those who are protesting the war, putting them in solitary confinement. This is a serious regime, not to be taken lightly. But they have stories. Stories about Russian greatness, about the revival of Russian greatness, about enemies at home and enemies abroad who are trying to hold Russia down. And they might be Jews, or George Soros, or the IMF, and NATO. They might be all sorts of enemies that you just pull right off the shelf, like a book.”
“We think of censorship as suppression of information, but censorship is also the active promotion of certain kinds of stories that will resonate with the people. The aspiration to be a great power, the aspiration to carry out a special mission in the world, the fear and suspicion that outsiders are trying to get them or bring them down: those are stories that work in Russia. They’re not for everybody. You know many Russians who don’t buy into that and know better. But the Putin version is powerful, and they promote it every chance they get.”
“We don’t know yet how the sanctions are going to work. The sanctions often inflict the greatest pain on the civilian population. Regimes can sometimes survive sanctions because they can just steal more internally. If you expropriate somebody’s bank account in London or Frankfurt or New York, well, there’s a source where that came from originally, and they can go back inside Russia and tap that source again, unfortunately. Putin doesn’t have money abroad that we can just sanction or expropriate. Putin’s money is the entire Russian economy. He doesn’t need to have a separate bank account, and he certainly wouldn’t keep it vulnerable in some Western country.”
A pretty good article - or a video, for whose who prefer - by Stephen Kotkin, in New Yorker, March 11, 2022.