What do authoritarians like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin have in common with their 20th-century predecessors?
Within days of the invasion of Ukraine, though, “violent repression and comprehensive censorship”—the hallmarks of the fear dictator, per Guriev and Treisman—made a quick comeback, with people being arrested just for holding blank pieces of paper as a protest, while the Russian government fought a war on civilians in finest Stalinist style.
This is not entirely new—nothing ever is—but the crossbreeding of clownishness and politics has never been so intense. The Russian dissident literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin taught us to cherish “carnival” culture as a liberating force in social life. It’s in the authority-mocking brio embodied by the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, or, for that matter, by the self-deprecating clowning of Alexei Navalny, unashamed to play video games and to make lip-synched TikTok videos.
Finally, today’s autocrats tend to have a changing rather than a fixed series of villains. Anti-Semitism was always central to Hitler’s world view. Stalin, too, was a man of cemented antipathies. As the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s work has shown, Stalin was a genuine Marxist intellectual who believed in class warfare and the evils of the bourgeoisie as much as any student at the Sorbonne.
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