Many years ago, in Tehran, I spent a few hours in a bookshop run by an Armenian whose adult life had coincided almost exactly with the existence of the Islamic Republic. As I browsed, he fell into conversation with a German-language student who had come in looking for what appeared to be an obscure Persian grammar. The student was hopeful for change in Iran. A young population with growing social media use, together with state-wide oppression and economic mismanagement, would, he argued, see the end of the mullahs soon enough. The bookshop manager listened politely for a long time and then, clearly deciding his potential customer could be trusted, replied that none of that mattered. Somewhat forlornly, he said of the mullahs: ‘They may not know how to run this country properly, but they know how to survive.’
Despite the disasters the mullahs have inflicted on Iran, they now approach half a century of domination
I thought of this bookseller when reading Revolution & Dictatorship, an interesting and rigorous analysis of why so many autocratic states born of social revolutions – from the USSR to China to Iran and so on – prove immovable in the face of problems that would end normal regimes.
To explain why, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way posit a theory of what they call ‘revolutionary durability’. In November 1941, they point out, ‘Soviet power hung by the barest of threads’, overwhelmed by the invading Nazis – and this following years of starvation and purges. One might have reasonably expected another popular revolution, or a coup against Stalin. Indeed, according to this book, days after the German invasion the Soviet leader was found in his dacha slumped in a chair, apparently expecting to be arrested by the senior members of the Politburo who had come to visit him unannounced. In fact Stalin’s rule ended only with his death more than a decade later (how he was allowed to die naturally has always been a mystery and source of fury to me) and the USSR would last another 50 years.
For the authors, the survival of the Soviet regime illustrates a broader point – that ‘autocracies born of violent social revolution are extraordinarily durable’ – and they’re not wrong. Chinese communists are still in power, despite the chaos unleashed during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward; and despite the many disasters the mullahs have inflicted on Iran, they now approach half a century of dominance.
Authoritarian regimes that have emerged out of violent social revolutions have survived on average three times as long as their non-revolutionary counterparts. Moreover, 71 per cent of revolutionary regimes have lasted for 30 years or longer than non-revolutionary ones. Levitsky and Way are academics, so never far from the relevant data.
This matters, because the states they analyse have had an ‘outsized impact on modern world politics’. It turns out that destroying old elites and traditional ways of doing things is a pretty effective way of rapidly transforming a society. The Bolsheviks began a process which turned Russia from an agrarian society into one capable of defeating the Wehrmacht and then achieving nuclear parity with the United States. The Chinese Revolution turned a weak, decentralised state into a military and economic superpower. Both regimes needed to trample on their own populations to make the necessary transformation. So it’s no surprise that this sort of hyper-progress is not generally available to nations governed by the rule of law.
These types of states also tend to get involved in wars – almost twice as often as non-revolutionary ones, we are told. And, of course, they have a tendency to show up the limits of western power. Has anything more painfully exposed American hubris than revolutionary Cuba, Vietnam, Iran and Afghanistan? The authors offer no stats for this: it’s just obvious.
What people consistently fail to understand is that revolutions are not events but processes; and it is in the beginning of these processes that the authors see the sources of their durability. The attempts of revolutionary movements to remake their countries almost always run into initial – and intense – resistance, both internal and external. The Iranian revolutionaries had firstly to take on and then purge the country’s armed forces, while their desire to export their radical ideology to the Middle East alienated much of the region.
This kind of pushback, described in the book as ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, poses an existential threat to nascent regimes. But if they survive it they are likely to prosper. This is because they produce what the authors identify as
three key pillars of regime strength: (1) a cohesive ruling elite; (2) a highly developed and local coercive apparatus; and (3) the destruction of organisations and alternative centres of power in society.
Once these pillars are in place, the assorted thugs who run such states are usually set, at least for a while. The problem with autocracies is that in the end – and it can be a long time coming – they rot from within. When you subvert national institutions, and authority comes only through the leader and their (usually diminished) successors, the DNA of your politics carries its own demise within it.
Institutions, not people, ensure the continuity of political systems. That is why, despite the West’s supposed decadence, democratic nations such as America and Britain are still here, while the imperial dreams of Napoleon and Hitler are phantasmagoria.
In Russia, Putin is trying to bring back Stalinism, but he has overreached in Ukraine. In Iran, people risk their lives daily on the streets to overthrow the mullahs, and in the end they will succeed. To be clear: the authors provide no stats on their chances. Once more, it’s just obvious.
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