The Importance of Naming Authoritarian Tactics

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President Donald Trump vowing to send National Guard troops to more US cities. The head of the Federal Communications Commission has warned that some broadcasters risk losing their licenses over their news coverage of the Iran war Breaking news former FBI director James Comey. He has been indicted by a federal grand jury in North Carolina. This is over this controversial Instagram post for last year. Democrats are worried that the president might try to influence voter turnout in the midterms by doing things like sending in the National Guard or IC agents to poll sites When you think of it we shouldn't even an election That's what he told Reuters Sometimes it's hard to find the words to describe exactly what's going on since so many of Trump's moves are unprecedented in our democracy. The frequent frantic declamations of authoritarianism, unbridled corruption, and would be king don't quite capture it It's happening so fast we haven't had time to coin the words with the specificity required to describe how the wheels are turning That's why Maria Kuznitova and Dan Storev decided to write a glossary of sorts. It's called How too Survive Authoritarianism, a Russian phrasebook for Eday Life in America. And it'll be out in the fall Maria and Dan worked as activists and human rights defenders in Russia for about a decade before Putin's crackdowns made it too dangerous to stay. They now live abroad in exile. Maria, Dan, welcome to the show Hi, it's so nice to be here. Thank you. Thankk you, gllad to be here You wrote that you wanted to share the wisdom of what's called A saapian speech. When I was in Russia, I think the word closest to that was mjdlinia in between the lines. It's a hidden lexicon or a coded vocabulary that obscures meaning for the powerful while allowing you to communicate freely with peers or others in the know Yeah, its something like that the whole concept of it really goes back to the Tarist Russia I want to start with three concepts that you talk about Rutna Upravlenia, which means manual control Andchello beatnaer, which means knee bent petition Pinoo Prolenia, the manual control, It's a newer term. it comes from Putin era Russia, whereas Cheellebitnya goes back to the times of Ivid the Terrible. And Chelebitnya literally means you' bowing so hard that you strike your head on the floor In Russia, you see it all the time where people who need something as basic as having their road paved in their city they essentially have to record these Theory messages to Vladimir Putin asking him to intervene and do something about this. I want to add to that that a huge and important part of Chile bititna is accumulation And humumilation in this process is on purpose. L Trump buying shoes that don't fit for people to wear, or have them all say he's a gift from God in cabinet meetings? Exactly I think there is no better example here the showdown and the Oo back with Zelensky when Zelensky was attacked by JD Vanson and then by Donald Trump. How can you dress like that? Yes, how can you dress like that? Do you own a suit? You never once said, than you. Exactly What they expect isn't necessarily a thank you in a conventional sense of the word What they expect is to have a Cileitna bestowed on them There's another one of these terms that I think show the dangers of authoritarianism, at least, as a mode of government and you can apply them directly to America again. The phrases And you can say it in Russian, effective manager K They denoted these technocrats within the Soviet systems who would run cities, they would run collective farms, they would run T logs in some cases. It is a successful yet ruthless technocrat, and it became especially popular in post Soviet Russia Th it became really popular. Wisdom Putin elite Vladimir Putin and the rest of them being extremely impressed with the Chinese model, with the Singaporean model, with the UAE model, where you have prettyretty much zero political life, you have pretty much zero democratic freedoms and liberties But at the same time, you have economic growth, the trains run on time, and the streets are immaculately clean. And this is exactly what we see the contemporary wride in America People like Curtis Yarwin, for example, allegedly JD. Vance's favorite philosopher like Peter Theel, this is exactly what they advocate. They advocate for something they call a corporate monarchy And the argument that these people give is that we need to delegate all our power to the single executive This concentration We'll make sure that the trains run on time, the streets are clean You can walk alone at night and so on and so forth. just Give up your freedom of speech But why the hell then would they be throwing their support behind clear incompetent, where the economy is in free fall, the streets are not clean There is civil unrest and the whole thing. I don't know how to answer that question, but maybe it can lead us to the idea we haven't talked about yet, which is manual control. That word R P. What we see right now in America, what we see now in Russia is quite different from what we saw in dictatorships of the twentieth century Now the regimes are very personalistic and basically you find a person who is charismatic enough to lead the movement and then you deal with all of the problems that arise with that. Manual control basically means that all of the bureaucrats afraid to make any decisions and every time they have to make one, every decision is just of upstairs till it richher the most powerful person in the country or at least the minister The problem with such system is that it stops reacting to routine tasks. E task becomes political, and also problems are not resolved on time We saw so many things like that with Vladimir Putin when local authorities For for example, just didn't even want to react to emergencies because they didn't know if the federal government would approve of that In America, there is a great example of that. Basically Christian Norm wanted to approve all the expandings in DHS, which resulted in FEMA not getting money on time You're saying that by concentrating all of this power at the top We are creating a situation where people are frightened to act on their own initiative to address problems. A lot of things about authoritarian regimes are in tension with each other and it's kind of contradicts and tendences. and on one hand, we have effective managers who are ruthless and who just try to run Gulag efficiently On the other hand, authoritarianism is often quite chaotic because it doesn't prevent problems on time. And it's actually in that way a fragile system that hurts a lot of people. It also makes a lot of things that should not be political. It makes them political. again Fixing the vat, having F of working on time on the ground, stuff like that There are a couple of Russian phrases that both relate to leaders staying in power longer than legally allowed And the words are in English, Hassling Zeroing Castling is Rikirovka in Russian the chess move, right where you shield your king with your roook Putin at one point when he needed to leave the presidency so that he wouldn't be breaking the law What he did is he created out of thin air replacement for himself. That replacement's name was Dmitri Medvvedv. who indeed became a Russian president, then ended up continuing the exact same policies that war going on under Vladimir Putin. And in fact, it was under Midvediv that Russia invaded Georgia in two thousand eight. What can happen in the US potentially and I donon't see people talking about that enough is I don't see any problem with Donald Trump returning into power as vice president whileile J Van to someone else becomes the president That I guess that that is possible Donald Trump is not a young or healthy man, I think time may runun out We have seen though, precisely something you've pointed out that a lot of people in the twenty first century or a lot of nations, China, Venezuela They just changed the Constitution to allow them to stay forever And this is what zeroine is. zeroine or abnolmia. It's just basically canceling your term limits What happened in Putin's case is that he Mashha, maybe you could explain it better than I can. Yeah, right. So the things that Putin run into and a lot of leaders do is that it's really hard to change Cstitution. It's not only the American case where constitution is very rigid But even in countries where processes are easier to make amendments, often the presidential the presidential amendments are hard to change What Putin did basically was officially we still have term limits in Russian cononstitution Putin just propose that Because we are changing constitution substantially in twenty twenty and we had this S a referendum that ran for seven days all over Russia to do that We kind of reset the terms. So basically the exception of not having two presidential terms only applies to Putin and it will apply again to everyone after. Right. The clock stopped for Putin Basically You wrote about polytechnilogi or political technologists. These are people who exist to maintain the illusion that an undemocratic system is working democratically. Some call that illiberal democracy. Can you tell me about some of the more creative ways Putin's political technologists managed to pull this off These people treat politics. as a machine, right? It's something that you can engage with technologically, cynically and without actually believing in anything They don't really have any values, but they know how the thing works and they know how to mess with it. That's absolutely right The term that we use in the book is electural activities. They are not really elections. They are electural activities. They are a performance. And everything within this performance isn't about the real policies of the candidates as much as it is about the various trickery that political technologists use. For instance, in Russia, we have something called Dead Souls. Now the Dead Souls, of course, it's the title of the amazing novel by Russian imperial writer Nikolai Googol It's a hilarious book. Yes Anyway We actually have many cases in Russia where during the elections or electoral activities, you have people voting again, quote unquote voting And these people They might have died years and years ago, or they may never have existed in the first place. And coincidentally, they always tend to vote for Voladimir Putin or they vote for his favorite party, the United Russia. But this sort of trickery, it wasn't invented in Russia. It's not new. In the U.S presidential election of eighteen seventy six Democrats were the pro slavery party back then The Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden his ballots actually decorated in some instances They were decorated with illustration of Abe Lincoln right besidide Tilden's name And so the illiterate Republican voters would mix those two up and they would end up voting for a pro slavery Democrat. rather than a Republican And you give a very contemporary example in Russia that echoes that having to do with Boris Vishneevsky running in a city council election in St. Petersburg So what happened with Vishnevsky is one day he looked at the list of candidates running against him. and lo and behold, he saw two more Vishnevskys who were running on behalf of pro Putin A these? And those two Vishneevskys, one of them legally changed his name And both of them grew out their beards so they would resemble Vneevsky some more So Vladimir Putin's political technologists basically created these two double gangers so that they could split the vote. and get poor old Vishchnevsky out of the race. That's what you call election activities. That's right There's a Russian phrase We've heard it here quite a lot. Svoyim So. Chushchim Zakon, which means everything for our own For others, the law You know, another phrase Bill B Cellabc . Yeah, giveive me the man and I'll find the crime. And all of these involve In English is called undesirables, also a Russian term These three terms have really uncomfortable echoes here at the moment. But one I really want you to focus on is this term inter colonization. I think it's a really cool term Masha Basically authoritarians start to use law just for their own purposes while still pretending that Hving some law implemented is a thing of democracy They also start to use law selectively and that's what phrases like Find me a man and I will find your a crime refers to. And we actually have such a prominent example right now in the United States. It's what going on with James Commy And the fact that they're trying now to prosecute him based on an Instagram post that had one hundred likes That gives me vibes of Late Putin's regime actually. You just decide who you don't like, you decide who you want to prosecute and then you find anything on them That's why, for example, us as Russian activists We always know that we either have to be saints or we have to be nuns You have to be absolutely clear on everything so they cannot find anything on you, you have to follow absolutely all tax regulations to a letter. Ideally, you don't have any secrets that you are afraid of coming out into the world because then they have leverage over you It's also what I think people in America don't understand right now is that sometimes this kind of political prosecution The goal is not to put a person into jail. The goal is to threaten you with the process and it doesn't matter how this process ends basically deters a lot of people in power from even attempting to say something against the wantanabe dictator So let's turn to infopomoika, basically an information dumpster. and it's a phrase that depicts how tyranny can corrupt our perception of reality. Basically what Putin's regime decided to do is to create as many versions of reality as possible, to confuse people and to encourage people to disengage In Russian, we use the phrase we will never know the whole truth which means that there are so many contradictory versions out there that it's impossible find what really happened Russian propaganda does is creating a lot of content of low quality. That's what we call infoampster outwhere. hundredundreds of channels on all social media, it's on television, it's in newspapers, it's maybe even in the comments and Russians use a lot of troll farms to even you engage in that way with people you create so many things that Journalists have no time to fuck chack them all People get confused and when people get confused and overwhelmed, they just disengage The idea here because like I think like people misunderstand that modern dictators like they want you to believe what they do or they want to put you in prison. No, they actually much better off If you just don't do anything, you stay at home or you emigrate That's where the concept of inner immigration comes in. So that's another Russian phrase we should highlight. Inner immigration. Inner immigration is when a person who understands the political reality who understand that democracy is under assault. Anyway chooses to Dis engage and only spent time doing the personal things and basically shut themselves from politics add to inner immigration and to how important apathy is for modern dictatorships. Another Russian saying is Mayakataskoich is Nayo and it basically means My house is at the edge of the village And so I don't care what happens with the rest of township. It rhymes in Russian and it doesn't really rhym in English That's sort of the idea. You disengage as much as possible This relates to another Russian phrase, budget people Oh yes, B Jne You have these large swaths of population are dependent on their livelihood on the state And in Russia, it's quite a huge segment of the population It's doctors, it's teachers It's Bus drivers, you name it, okay? because only recently Russia was Soviet Union. and in Soviet Union, you basically had no private employment, right? Everyone was employed by the state And so that means that these people are very susceptible to pressure especially when you need to pull off some sort of electoral activity You need to provide some warm bodies for a demonstration in front of the American emmbassy, for example, which is something that happens surprisingly often You don't actually need to do this organically. All you got to do, you got to send a top down letter to a factory or a school and say, okay, tomorrow, at one PM, I need a hundred people at this location with posters and flags. And whoever doesn't show up will get their pay dock,' get fired, will'll get expelled from a university They love doing this with students, by the way The main purpose of Creating this bjetnicky people is to justify and legitimize authoritarian rule There is a good example of how Bijetnki starts to form in the United States It's run for the last year parade that Donald Trump organized, he made thousands of military personnel to come to DC And they had to sleep on the floor in some barracks and then to perform for the Wannabe dictator on his birthday parade with no people watching. We saw that, you know, there were like no audience basically and the troops were just mortioned through empty streets. That's an excellent example. Can we have a quick discussion of Sovotka and how that relates to both The Russian and American scene right now. it's literally a little get together Literally to so much case a little party, a little get together, people hanging out means in the parlance of Russian dissidents is that these Russian disnant communities, they are prone to forming bubbles And within these bubbles, people work together They go the protest together They state within these bubbles. I wouldn't understand that, Dan, because I live in Brooklyn Exactly. So if you've ever been involved with like student activism, you will probably know what I'm talking about or just activism in general And that's the problem within both Russian opposition circles, which ended up fighting between each other significantly more than they fought Vladimir Putin. and in the United States because in the United States For example when you look at the Democratic Py today, what is the Democratic Party doing Is it? one hundred percent focused on defeating Donald Trump Not really. Is it one hundred percent focused on providing an alternative and positive vision America that every American can get behind. Not really. What is at the top of the headlines for like the past few weeks is whether or not the Democrats should share a platform with Which streamer has on Piker? Right? So you have this constant infighting that is incredibly detrimental to 's the overarching cause. Right. You've said that one of the key principles of this book is that language matters What was your intention in assembling this phrase book of Russian words Okay, so I moved to the United States a couple of years ago and when Trump came back to power, I started to see a lot of similarities with what I knew from Russia The problem was that I saw A lot of my friends and I went to Harvard at the time notot being able to understand what was going on and not being able to see that some of the things that were happening were actually authoritarian And again, not even being able to name what was going on because that's the first step toward trying to work and resolves the problem So I posted something on the Instagram to the fact of, oh, hey, do you know how these phrases can be translated or how we can explain them because I feel like people around me don't understand what's going on. I also started to have my American friends directly ask me for advice and how to live in such circumstances I was talking to one of my friends who was at the Democratic partarty And he was asking me for advice and he asked me So do we need to call ourselves dissidents now And I felt like it's such a profound mind shift. and very early on, even before Trump officially took office, but after hum won elections People started to understand that the dynamics has changed they lacked a language that they could apply to the consequences and the techniques of the people who oppose democracy That's the thing. You know how in several indigenous Northern languages like Siberian Upk, for example, You have dozens of definitions for what snow is, the kind of snow, you know, the snow with ice, falling snow, l theent snow lineing down, etcetera It's just because these people live around And within I guess the snow, simimilarly to how Russia had existed for so long for literal centuries, under the boat of authoritarian regimes. And that means that Russians have developed this special language which allows us to talk about authoritarian developments which allows us to categorize them. And which also allows us to talkal about them in the open without actually being thrown in jail. That's a very important component of this And so I remember watching in twenty twenty five, the detention of Remesa Osturk who was a PhD student at Tufts University. And she was detained effectively for her pro Palestinian stance see was kidnapped. by mask Fame clothed agents out in the open just snatched up and dragged away When you grow up in Russia, these kind of images, they immediately resonate with you just instantly