MAIN IDEA:

This book seeks to explain the phenomenon of the long-term survival of authoritarian regimes created by revolutions. The idea is that the initial challenge of counter-revolutionary forces forges a strong and mutually dependent group of leaders capable of controlling the machinery of violence and maintaining the regime despite all odds. The authors contrast this with less durable regimes and clearly present their logic, with massive factual support from the history of Russian, Chinese, and Mexican regimes. Here is the graphic representation, with the three pillars of the authors’ argument presented at the top:

MY TAKE ON IT:

This is a pretty good model, but authors underappreciate the role of ideology, information manipulation, and people’s attitudes toward the regime. The revolutionaries have to convince a sufficient number of the population that it is in their best interests to support the new regime. The process has to be graduated when revolutionaries mislead people about their real objectives to obtain the support of some and the neutrality of others so they can eliminate an active opposition.

A good example is the history of the Russian Revolution. After a lifetime of theorizing about public property on a means of production and the need for the revolutionary war to establish worldwide dictatorship, Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power under the slogan: “Land to peasants, factories to workers, and peace to people.” For people at the time, it meant private property on land transferred to peasants who worked on it, cooperative ownership of factories, and rejection of wars as a means to society’s ends.

After initially acting according to this slogan, communists were able to eliminate the opposition from pillars of the old regime, then remove any trace of independence for workers’ unions, and eventually force peasants into slavery of collective farms. The key was maintaining an agenda-setting initiative so those a bit further on the elimination list would not feel threatened until their time came.

Another important part that is missing is an underestimate of the parasitic character of these regimes, which are usually unable to maintain effective economic and technological development without external support from developed countries with effective capitalist economies. Both the Soviet military power of the past and the Chinese economic power of the present came from the flow of money, technology, and informational support from Western intellectuals ideologically aligned with communism and big business seeking super profits by shifting production and technology to authoritarian countries where workforce could be violently suppressed as needed, outside of regulatory control of Western societies. 

My final disagreement is with the very definition of durability. These regimes did not necessarily survive that long: 70 years of the Soviet Union or 75 years of Chinese communist power is not that long, and inevitable succession problems combined with the disillusionment of the next generations normally cut down these monstrosities long before Western intellectuals understood their levels of internal instability.