April 23
Stalin Fought A War Using Soldiers Whose Families He Was Starving: A two part investigation into regime durability.
What keeps dictators in power, what brings them down, and what decades of research tells us about the fight we are in.
Stalin survived an engineered famine that killed millions of his own people. Saddam Hussein survived two catastrophic wars, a decade of sanctions, and a no-fly zone over a third of his country; he stayed in power until the United States military personally removed him. Putin has survived twenty-five years of economic shocks, a failed invasion, mass emigration of his own educated class, and a mercenary uprising that marched on Moscow. Netanyahu survives coalition collapses every eighteen months and hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in the streets demanding his removal. Orbán survived sixteen years of European Union pressure, frozen funding, and one failed opposition movement after another, until a week ago, when one finally did not fail. Trump is one year into his second term.
These six men are not the same. They are not interchangeable. They came to power through different routes, they hold power through different mechanisms, and they will leave power, if they leave power, for different reasons. But they are all trying to answer the same question, and so are the people who study them. What decides regime durability.
Remember that phrase. Regime durability. That is what we are investigating here, and it is going to be the anchor for everything that follows because understanding regime durability is of existential importance for humanity.
There is academic research on this. Decades of it. Political scientists have built frameworks specifically designed to answer the question of why some authoritarian leaders survive conditions that would end a normal politician a dozen times over, while others finally break. The great news is that you don’t need a PhD in political science to understand this research. All it takes is walking things through in plain language, and that’s the goal here. Why? Because we can’t keep this knowledge cordoned off in academia. We increase the likelihood of democratic outcomes by educating ourselves, and our community, on the underlying principles of power, influence, and political change making.
My hope with this piece, and with the series it opens, is not just to educate but to equip others to educate. I want to put the research backed, real world use case tested, and ultimately replicatable toolkit in your hands. Because understanding regime durability is how we evaluate what is happening right now, and it’s how we figure out where our energy and resources are most effectively applied. By the time we are done, you will be able to look at any news cycle, any Trump administration move, any state attorney general filing, any protest, any cabinet appointment, and understand what it really means. You will have the vocabulary to explain it. Maybe you will convince your neighbors. Maybe you will convince your mayor. Maybe you will convince your attorney general. Maybe you will convince your family. Maybe you will give people hope. Maybe we will inspire them. Maybe one person who reads this is going to change everything. Or maybe we all will.
Here is what we are going to prove across the next two pieces. Things getting worse does not inherently shake his base. Dictators do not need good approval ratings to stay in power. And the goal Trump and the GOP have, the actual goal, is to be a install single party GOP rule.
People generally have an implicit assumption in the US that if conditions get bad enough, the population turns on the leader who caused the conditions. That is the story we tell ourselves about democracy, and it is the story we are counting on to save us. The grocery bills will get high enough, the state violence will get brutal enough, the corruption will get obvious enough, and the base will finally crack.
To start, let’s explore an extreme case. It’s important to begin there because that’s how we discern the outer edges of circumstances. Think of it like starting a puzzle by putting together the outer edges to orient the rest of the picture.
In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization and grain requisitions produced mass starvation across the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian famine, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor, killed somewhere between 3.9 and 5 million people in 1932 and 1933. At the peak in June 1933, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 a day. Soviet police files record at least 2,505 people sentenced for cannibalism in Ukraine across those two years, and historians agree the actual number ran far higher than what the courts processed. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry has since digitized 1,022 surviving case files, with roughly a thousand more destroyed by Soviet authorities in 1956. The Soviet government printed posters across Ukrainian cities with a single instruction for starving parents. To eat your children is a barbarian act.
And Stalin’s hold on the population survived it.
Peasants who had watched their neighbors die, who had buried their own children, who had lived through an engineered famine, wept when Stalin died in 1953. Ukrainians served in the Red Army throughout the famine and after it. When Germany invaded in 1941, millions of Soviet citizens, including Ukrainians who had lived through the Holodomor less than a decade earlier, fought and died for Stalin’s government. Ukrainian Communist Party membership held and in some regions grew during and after 1933. None of this proves universal devotion, and all of it was coerced. But all of it is inconsistent with a population that had been able to turn material harm and suffering into internally driven regime change.
How is that possible? How does a population watch the state starve them, bury their own dead, and still march behind for the man who did it?
The historians who spent their careers on these questions have some answers. Sheila Fitzpatrick at the University of Sydney and the University of Chicago built much of her scholarship on exactly this problem. In Everyday Stalinism and Stalin’s Peasants, she worked through private diaries, letters, and Soviet archives that opened after 1991, and she found a pattern that showed up again and again. Ordinary Soviet citizens redirected blame toward the enemies the state named. They blamed kulak saboteurs. They blamed foreign capitalist encirclement. They blamed Jews, Germans, Americans, Poles, whoever the loudspeaker named that week. A significant share of them blamed local officials for corruption while preserving their faith in Stalin himself. Historians have a name for this last pattern, because it shows up across Russian and Soviet history. They call it the good tsar, bad boyars phenomenon. The leader is good. The leader’s subordinates are the ones ruining everything.
People ask “how can Trump still have a 35% approval rating?” If they want the answer then they just have to go to a construction site or a jiu jitsu gym and they will find people who still have adoration for their dear leader using identical “good tsar, bad boyar” thinking.
Orlando Figes did something similar in The Whisperers, where he interviewed hundreds of families across the former Soviet Union and worked through their private archives. He found the same pattern Fitzpatrick found. The suffering was real; the explanation was manufactured. And as a result, the devotion survived the contradiction, because the story the state told about why people were suffering was more psychologically available to most people than the truth that the state was the one making them suffer.
If you want to understand why your favorite politicians often choose outdated half measures, just read that last paragraph again. It’s less disruptive psychologically to accept even ludicrous lies when it’s convenient or dangerous to step outside approved lanes.
This is the mechanism. When a population’s material conditions collapse under a leader’s direct policy choices, the leader does not automatically lose control. The leader keeps them by naming an external enemy and repeating the name until the lie becomes the less burdensome than truth. The pain gets rerouted. The farmer who buried his family under Soviet policy spent his grief on America, on Germany, on the Jews, on whoever the loudspeaker told him to blame.
We are watching a version of this machinery running right now in the country we live in.
The grocery bill goes up and the blame lands on immigrants. The factory closes and the blame lands on China. A child dies from a preventable illness and the blame lands on trans people, on DEI hiring, on whatever slop was dropped in the fox and friends feed trough that morning. A mother is killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis and the blame lands on her rather than on the federal officer who pulled the trigger. The eight men who own the feed never appear in the story. They are the ones who designed the rerouting, and they are the ones who benefit from it. Every grievance that lands on an immigrant or a trans person or a Chinese factory is a grievance that did not land on them.
This is why the powers that be want to ensure that suffering alone cannot save us. Under the GOP plan, the suffering, chaos, war, and even starvation actually help autocrats retain power, because a starving and poorly educated public whose youth are dying in foreign wars is less capable of effective resistance.
So how do regimes end? What actually makes them fall?
That is what part two is for. In the next piece, we walk through four prominent academic frameworks that political scientists have built to answer exactly that question. Selectorate theory, which explains what Trump is actually trying to do when he purges the civil service and captures the Justice Department. Competitive authoritarianism, developed by Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way at Harvard and Toronto, which explains how regimes like this actually fall when they fall, and which just watched its own prediction come true in Hungary last week. Erica Chenoweth’s work at the Harvard Kennedy School on civil resistance, which has measured exactly what it takes to break an authoritarian regime from below and tells us how close we already are. And the framework I have been building around The Taxonomy of State Postures in Response to Federal Authoritarian Capture, which is built specifically for the American constitutional system and offers a nonviolent pathway for states use existing mechanisms to respond effectively when federal institutions have been captured. Together, these four lenses give us all the puzzle pieces. Part two is where start filling in the puzzle and seeing the picture it reveals.
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