Martin Dimitrov’s thoughtful review of Revolution and Dictatorship draws attention to important theoretical and methodological issues we confronted while writing this book. The first issue relates to the importance of communist/totalitarian institutions to revolutionary origins. Dimitrov correctly notes that a large portion of our cases are communist, including some of the most durable such as the USSR, China, and Cuba. As Dimitrov’s book amply demonstrates and our statistical analysis confirms, communist institutions clearly foster durable authoritarianism. Extensive state penetration and control of society, as well as the ruling party’s penetration of the state, largely eliminate opportunities for organized opposition or internal challenges, thereby making such regimes difficult to overthrow. At the same time, communist institutions cannot explain the durability of revolutionary cases such as Mexico, Iran, or Eritrea. Furthermore, an institutional approach does not explain how robust communist institutions emerged in the first place. Where such institutions were not imposed by a larger foreign power as they were in Eastern Europe, the establishment of effective communist and Leninist institutions was made possible by conditions—war, state collapse, and counterrevolutionary conflict—that were produced by social revolution. Thus, China’s revolutionary civil war—which destroyed most preexisting power structures—enabled the Chinese Communist Party to create new authority structures that penetrated the countryside. Clearly, both revolutionary origins and communist institutions have contributed to regime durability.
The second and more complicated issue that Dimitrov raises relates to scope conditions, which we struggled with when writing the book. For reasons Dimitrov outlines, we would have been happy to include cases such as North Korea and Laos, which were clearly revolutionary. There is little doubt that the durability of these cases can at least partly be explained by the causal mechanisms outlined in our theory. The problem is that, as in Eastern Europe, revolutionary governments in Laos and North Korea were directly imposed by foreign powers unlike the other cases in our sample.
Foreign control has a direct impact on authoritarian durability that complicates comparison with more independent governments. This is most obvious when examining the resilience of communist autocracies in Eastern Europe. Although Dimitrov is right that few regimes are “truly independent,” the extent of foreign penetration into and control over the armed forces—not to mention the expectation of direct Soviet interference created by Soviet military interventions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968— fostered a deference to foreign authorities in Eastern Europe rarely found in other autocracies. For example, Bulgaria’s secret police was considered by Zhivkov to be a “branch of the KGB” and routinely received direct orders from Moscow (Christopher Nehring, “Active and Sharp Measures,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 23 [4], 2021). Dimitrov notes that palace coup plotters against Zhivkov operated with Soviet reassurance in 1989. Similarly, in East Germany, authorities could not crack down on protests without Moscow’s approval, and the ouster of party leader Erich Honecker in October 1989 was undertaken with Gorbachev’s approval (Mark Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” Journal of Modern History 83[4], 2011). (By way of contrast, the pro-American South Korean military undertook coups in 1961 and 1979 without informing the US government.) The degree of foreign control meant that the durability of these regimes depended as much on what was happening in Moscow as in their own capitals. Incorporating such cases would have significantly muddled our analysis. Given that Laos and North Korea, like East European communist regimes, were imposed from outside, there was no methodologically defensible way of including them without also including East European cases. Thus, to avoid selecting on the dependent variable, these and other cases (Cambodia after 1979 and the Democratic Republic of Congo after 1997) were coded as foreign controlled and excluded from the analysis because their coercive apparatus was directly controlled by a foreign power on regime formation.
