Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union

An essential exploration of how authoritarian regimes operate at the local level

“Gorlizki and Khlevniuk have produced an impressive study. . . . A must for scholars of Stalinism and Soviet politics more generally.”—Gerald Easter, Russian Review

How do local leaders govern in a large dictatorship? What resources do they draw on? Building on recent innovations in the theory of dictatorship, Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk examine these questions by looking at one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. They show how Soviet regional leaders, lacking Stalin’s direct access to the means of repression, resorted to alternative strategies—especially through political exclusion and control of information—to build the local networks they needed to rule. The authors suggest that making sense of these networks is key to understanding how the dictatorship as a whole operated. Analytical scrutiny provides important clues to how the institutions of dictatorship changed over time, how conflicts within it were resolved, and how certain central policies, such as on the management of ethnic diversity, were implemented.