The Economist April 2nd 2022 75
CultureTwenty-firstcenturyauthoritarianismThe menace of mendacity
R
ussia did not invade Ukraine. Ukrai-
nians are shelling their own cities. A
Jewish president is actually a Nazi. Dicta-
tors have always told lies, so the Kremlin’s
recent whoppers have precedent. Dictators
have often used terror, too, so what Vladi-
mir Putin is doing to civilians in Ukraine is
nothing new, either. But the balance
between lying and killing has changed, ar-
gues a fascinating new book. For most
modern autocrats, lying matters more.
In “Spin Dictators”, Sergei Guriev, a Rus-
sian economist living in exile, and Daniel
Treisman, a political scientist, describe
how this shift has occurred. For much of
the 20th century, despots were ostenta-
tiously violent. Hitler, Stalin and Mao slew
millions. Lesser monsters such as Mobutu
Sese Seko, a Congolese tyrant, hanged
cabinet ministers in public. The aim was to
terrify people into submission.
The authors contrast such “fear dicta-
tors” with “spin dictators”, who kill fewer
people, and deny it when they do. The lat-
ter are now more common. Among auto-
crats who took power in the 1960s, roughly
a quarter killed more than 100 dissidents ayear;amongthosewhotookpowerinthe
2000s, less than a tenth did.
Spin dictators pretend to be democrats.
They hold multiparty elections and seldom
claim to have won more than 90% of the
vote, as was the norm for non-democracies
in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. They rig less
and gerrymander more. In 2018 Viktor
Orban, Hungary’s spinner-in-chief, turned
less than half the vote for his party into a
two-thirds supermajority in parliament.He will be hard to dislodge at the election
on April 3rd (see Europe).
Fear dictators’ propaganda was crude
and relentless. Busts of Stalin were placed
on 38 mountain peaks in Central Asia. So
many Mao badges were produced that Chi-
na’s aircraft industry ran short of alumini-
um. It was often absurd, too. Mussolini
and Kim Jong Il could supposedly conjure
up rain and teleport from place to place, re-
spectively. This absurdity was itself a
weapon, demonstrating the regime’s “ca-
pacity to force people to repeat nonsense”.
Spin dictators like to project an image
of competence. Nursultan Nazarbayev
used to address Kazakhs from behind a
stack of papers, reading out lists of bread-
and-butter policies and chiding his minis-
ters for not serving the public better. Spin
dictators seldom have a coherent ideology,
but use humour to paint themselves as no-
ble and their opponents as vile. They even
weaponise light entertainment. In Peru
under Alberto Fujimori, a Jerry Springer-
style show featured screaming guests, alle-
gations of infidelity and calm words from
the host praising the president.
Censorship under fear dictators was to-
tal. When an impure snippet found its way
into an agricultural paper in the Soviet Un-
ion, “censors raced to track down every co-
py sold, including 50 already pasted into
ersatz wallpaper and 12 used as toilet pa-
per.” Spin dictators, by contrast, let a few
highbrow, low-circulation dissident pa-
pers survive, to show they respect freedom
of speech. Meanwhile, independent broad-Two scholars examine the modern autocrat’s arsenal of deceit→Alsointhissection
76 Thejoyofinauthenticcuisine
77 PhilWang’sseriousjokes
78 Royaltyanddisease
78 Gruesomegenealogy
79 Back Story: Singing for victorySpin Dictators. By Sergei Guriev and Daniel
Treisman. Princeton University Press;
360 pages; $29.95 and £25