From Germany’s Adolf Hitler to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), the world’s 20th-century dictators took to heart Niccolo Machiavelli’s famous dictum that “it is better to be feared than loved.”
Yet, most modern dictators seem more concerned about maintaining their people’s loyalty not by giving them what they want, but by manipulating them into thinking that they already have it. Nobody executes this approach more masterfully than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Although Putin’s approval ratings have declined considerably over the past few years, they remain high, with polls indicating that 61 percent of Russians evaluate his performance positively.
If a presidential election were held today, 44 percent would vote for Putin. No other candidate would receive double-digit percentage support.
Putin certainly does not owe his popularity to his economic leadership. Since recapturing the presidency in 2012, he has consistently failed to deliver on promises of reform, higher productivity and investment, and improvements in Russians’ standard of living. His government also does not seem to have any plan to kick-start stagnant GDP growth.
The IMF expects Russia’s annual GDP growth to average less than 2 percent over the next five years. Next year, Russia’s share of global GDP (in purchasing parity terms) is expected to drop below 3 percent for the first time in modern times.
In nominal terms, this ratio will be even lower: an estimated 1.8 percent. Most importantly, the real incomes of Russian households are 10 percent lower than they were in 2014 — and show no signs of rising.
So what explains Putin’s enduring popularity? The answer — for Putin and other modern autocrats — lies in the ability to control the information that people receive, which enables a leader to convince most of the population that, despite the regime’s imperfections, it is the country’s best option.
In the digital age, this is no easy feat. A growing number of educated citizens — or “informed elites” — recognize the system’s deficiencies. It is thus imperative for autocrats to prevent these elites from communicating the truth to the public.
TARGETED REPRESSION
Repression plays an important role here. However, far from the widely publicized mass repression of the past — aimed at scaring off all potential opposition — today’s repression is targeted and, critically, deniable.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was officially barred from running in the 2018 presidential election not for political reasons, but because of his fraud conviction, which was subsequently overturned by the European Court of Human Rights.
This approach enabled Putin to maintain the pretense that he secured power in a free and fair election.
Modern informational autocrats also make extensive use of censorship. Russia ranks in the bottom 20 percent of the press-freedom rankings compiled by Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders. Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net Index shows that the Internet is less free in Russia than in Belarus, Kazakhstan or Turkey, reflecting the importance of online censorship in an informational autocracy with high Internet penetration.
According to the Google Transparency Report, Russia leads the world in official requests to remove online content. In the first half of last year, Russia placed more than 10,000 requests to remove content. The second-place country, Turkey, had just 1,000 requests. (China is not included in the ranking.)
With the Russian constitution explicitly outlawing censorship, one of the most important jobs of the Kremlin’s censors is to conceal information about their own activities from the public. They are largely successful. In informational autocracies such as Russia, the general public is significantly more optimistic about media freedom than educated elites.
A third key tool for silencing the informed elites is co-optation. Rather than resist Putin’s regime, and face repression or censorship, Russian elites who choose to support it are rewarded handsomely. Indeed, for this corrupt system to work, Putin must ensure that it provides larger rewards than a competitive one would.
NEW CHALLENGES
However, as effective as these tools have been, the challenge of controlling information is only intensifying. In particular, YouTube has become a powerful platform for independent and opposition bloggers, as well as political satire.
Given the platform’s popularity as a source of entertainment for ordinary Russians, the Kremlin cannot simply block it without exposing the extent of its censorship activities.
China has managed largely to avoid this challenge, by building its own, controlled version of the Internet, including social media and entertainment platforms. It launched this strategy as soon as Internet penetration began, so Chinese users have never experienced a free YouTube.
With Russians already integrated into the global Internet, it is too late to adopt such an approach.
Compounding the challenge, the cohort of informed elites in Russia is growing. As the top Russian propagandist Dmitry Kiselev has said: “Higher learning in the humanities [and social sciences] breeds social unrest.”
Not surprisingly, he said that “too many” Russians are studying these subjects.
The majority of Russia’s population would not become well-informed overnight, but as the regime is forced to dedicate more resources to silencing the informed, the majority would suffer economically.
Eventually, the reality of their empty refrigerators would overwhelm the eternally optimistic messages coming from their televisions and computers, and the foundations of Putin’s informational autocracy would begin to crumble.
Sergei Guriev is an economics professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and former chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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