6 You Shoot, You Lose

 6

You Shoot, You Lose

Those who were deprived of their freedom or life were not saints, they were not little angels. They tried to alter the established order.1

Hugo Banzer, president of Bolivia

When Mao famously said political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, he was wrong.2 Political power lies with those who don’t needto use guns. When regimes turn their guns on their own people, they risk becoming brittle. Tyrants may fall and regimes can collapse whenthe barrel of the gun ceases to be a metaphor and instead becomes a real-life strategy to retain control.

When the masses erupt and can no longer be controlled without guns, dictators must make an impossible decision. For many of them,it’s their last. These uprisings aren’t the principal risk to most tyrants, but that doesn’t mean they are no threat: around 17 per cent ofdictatorships fall as a result of popular uprisings.3 Given the obsession that all despots have with controlling their population, it’s aremarkably high number.

Democracies are extremely good at dealing with dissent. If you want to protest against the government, you can go ahead. Not only will itbe allowed, the police will protect demonstrators as they march. It’s a sign of strength that many heads of state need not devote a singlebrain cell to working out what to do about people chanting in the streets. Dictators, however, can’t ignore people in the streets. For them,it’s a real dilemma: if they allow protests without cracking down, others may be tempted to join. That can create a cascade, in which theprotests swell to a level that threatens the regime itself. If protestors can get away with marching even though they have been specificallytold not to, what else can they get away with in defiance of the government? It’s a dangerous moment.

In the social sciences, the process by which protests spread from one place to another is referred to as ‘diffusion’. This spread canhappen through a number of mechanisms, such as, for example, emulation. If protestors in one place see that protestors in anotherdon’t get beaten by security forces, they might imitate them. But also, they are going to ask themselves whether they can learn anythingfrom the others – thereby making their own resistance more effective. So when these protests break out, they aren’t just contagious –they become more effective as they spread from town to town because dissidents learn from each other; they inspire each other.

This learning effect happens all the time. During the Arab Spring, many dissidents consulted a book written by Gene Sharp called FromDictatorship to Democracy.4 Written in 1993, the book outlines 198 methods for popular resistance, ranging from strikes to moreunusual forms of protest such as mock funerals for regime officials. Gene Sharp describes methods of resistance falling into twocategories; they are either ‘acts of commission’ or ‘acts of omission’.5 Or, put more directly: doing what you’re not supposed todo or no longer doing what you’re supposed to do.6

Diffusion of protest isn’t exclusive to dictatorships, but the effects of diffusion are especially important in them because they contributeto solving a coordination problem faced by people who would like to protest but can’t. In every dictatorship, a sizeable percentage ofthe population hates the regime, but rising up is difficult because the disgruntled don’t know whether others would join them, and theycan’t plan protests because it’s illegal and dangerous to do so. Under those circumstances, it is very hard to launch a demonstration.But once people see others protesting in a town down the road, they no longer have to launch a protest, they can simply join in.

That prospect is especially menacing to dictators because it can happen so quickly. According to Erica Chenoweth from HarvardUniversity, one of the key advantages of non-violent civil resistance is its participation advantage.7 In comparison to a guerrillamovement, for example, non-violent resistance campaigns can mobilise vast numbers of supporters with ease because barriers toparticipation are much lower. You don’t need to be a hardened fighter to join a march – almost everyone can do it, whether they areschoolchildren, the elderly or somewhere in between. As a result, dictators who miscalculate can find themselves besieged by tens ofthousands of people in a flash once they have solved their coordination problem. Eventually, the number may become overwhelming,leading the regime to collapse. And indeed, there’s a ‘3.5% rule’. Coined by Chenoweth, it says that ‘no revolutions have failed once3.5% of the population has actively participated in an observable peak event like a battle, a mass demonstration, or some other form ofmass non-cooperation.’8 In 2003, for example, the Georgian people forced President Eduard Shevardnadze to resign. With a certainnumber of people in the streets, governments are simply overwhelmed and then they either have to make major concessions or they fall.That’s not only because there are so many people in active opposition, but also because the protestors will probably have supportamong an even larger share of the population.9 That said, only eighteen out of 389 resistance campaigns exceeded the 3.5% thresholdbetween 1945 and 2014.10 It’s comparatively rare – but when it does happen, it can be deadly to governments. (As Chenoweth pointsout, a 1962 revolt in Brunei and protests in Bahrain between 2011 and 2014 are notable exceptions. Both failed despite activeparticipation by more than 3.5 per cent of the population.)

Despots understand how dangerous popular opposition can be, which is why they are so obsessed with the prospect of protest. Theseregimes depend on control and public perceptions of invincibility, and the mere existence of overt dissent signals vulnerability. Because ofthat, tyrants try to nip protests in the bud as soon as they break out. The usual tool to do this is repression. In political science, this isreferred to as the ‘law of coercive responsiveness’.11 When the marching starts, the beatings start. This is true even for non-violentopposition movements. When researchers examined more than one hundred non-violent opposition campaigns, they found that almost90 per cent of them were met with violent repression.12

From the dictator’s perspective, the problem with beating protestors who are already upset with the government is that it can lead to yetmore people in the streets. That’s particularly true for non-violent resistance. It’s one thing to shoot back at people who shoot at you,but to pro-actively go out and shoot at unarmed demonstrators is another.

In February 2022 Russia launched an illegal large-scale invasion of Ukraine. But Russia’s government and the Ukrainian people werealready in conflict. In late 2013, the Ukrainian government was about to sign an association agreement with the European Union thatwould have seen its economy become integrated more closely with the West. Then, on 21 November 2013, the government of Ukrainianpresident Viktor Yanukovych announced a stunning U-turn at the last minute. The agreement would be suspended and Ukraine wouldmove closer to Russia instead.

Protestors immediately started pouring towards the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s central square. When it became apparent thatUkraine’s rough winter weather wasn’t enough to break the protestors’ spirit, the government unleashed its security forces. The nightof 30 November, instead of sending demonstrators back to their heated homes and re-establishing control, police officers attackedpeaceful protestors with batons. According to witness reports, not even protestors who had fallen to the ground were safe: Ukrainiansecurity forces simply kept hitting them.13

The use of violence against unarmed students, including women, outraged people. The next day, Pavlo Tumanov, a thirty-eight-year-olddoctor, was on the Maidan with ‘stripes in the colours of the Ukrainian and EU flags tied to his hands’. ‘I came to support the studentswho were brutally beaten yesterday,’ he said.14 Pavlo wasn’t alone. Many who had been on the fence had got off it and sided againstthe government. The government now faced tens of thousands in the streets as repression had clearly backfired.

But the government hadn’t learned its lesson. As the Yanukovych government used repression, the protestors became more motivatedand radical. Some of them rioted, used firearms, threw Molotov cocktails. This seesaw of escalation, mobilisation and then escalationcontinued for months, and the authorities never regained control until the battle between protestors and the government ended in lateFebruary the following year.

On 20 February 2014, the Yanukovych government made its final stand as security forces fired live ammunition at demonstrators. Dozenswere killed, many of them by special police snipers.15 But despite the dead and the injured, the protestors did not back down. The nextday, as Ukrainians were mopping up blood and reinforcing barricades in the square, President Yanukovych signed a deal with theopposition in the presence of the foreign ministers of Germany and Poland.16

But it was too late for a piece of paper to save Viktor Yanukovych and he knew it. Just over twenty-four hours after police snipers had takenaim at the protestors, Yanukovych had no choice but to flee to Russia.

Activists mourned the dead, but they had killed the government. Faced with public protest, the aspiring dictator in Kyiv had continued tomake things worse by using physical force that simply made people angrier.

Since this seesaw of repression and radicalisation is a common problem, tyrants often try to prevent people from marching in the firstplace – because if nobody marches, they don’t have to retaliate with violence. And if they don’t have to do that, they don’t risk a loss ofcontrol.

Preventing people from resisting is a serious challenge in dictatorships because the system is so obviously set up in a way that hurts thevast majority of the population. There’s nearly always a large number of unhappy people.

And the obvious way of making people happy – giving them more influence – is not an attractive option because it runs counter to theinterests of the tyrant and wider elites. Instead, tyrants can focus on other forms of legitimacy.

All governments can be measured according to two forms of legitimacy, which are sometimes split into ‘input’ vs ‘output’. The‘input’ refers to democratic procedure, so authoritarian regimes always fail that test. But output legitimacy refers to whether or not theregime delivers prosperity or some other positive outcome that people are looking for. That’s an area in which some autocrats candeliver. Every authoritarian regime has a version of this. In their telling, the leaders of the junta in Myanmar put an end to anarchy. Theabsolute monarchies of the Gulf turned barren deserts into marvels of modern engineering. President Kagame, the dictator of Rwanda,has lifted millions out of poverty. But to go beyond transactional acquiescence and achieve real support, governments need a story to tell;they need to give people an emotional reason to support something that is bigger than themselves. These appeals to a higher ideal comein all shapes and sizes. Il Duce subordinates the individual to the health of the Italian people. God chooses kings and queens to rule theirsubjects. Ayatollahs defend Allah’s will on earth. Communist dictatorships oppress workers to set them free.

One thing that helps to persuade people to tolerate or even support the dictator’s rule is to give them the illusion that the dictatorship issupported by others. Ever wonder why non-democratic states spend millions of dollars on elections despite it being clear that they don’tmean anything? This is why: ‘winning’ elections is a way to demonstrate to a country’s own people and to foreign states that theregime has popular support.

The classic way to persuade the population of obvious falsehoods is to blast them with propaganda every minute they’re awake. Whenthey read the newspaper, they read what the regime wants them to read. When they turn on the television, they watch what the regimewants them to watch. When they listen to the radio . . . you get the idea. No form of propaganda is more intense than dictatorial cults ofpersonality.

But even these attempts at legitimation, effective as they can be when amplified by a powerful propaganda apparatus, will never persuadeeveryone. So instead of fighting all remaining opponents, sophisticated authoritarians give at least some of them a stake in the continuedsurvival of the regime.

A sustainable way of giving people a stake in the survival of the regime is ‘co-optation’. If you walk some three hundred metres northfrom Moscow’s Kremlin, you’ll find yourself standing in front of a large, symmetrical building that houses Russia’s lower house ofparliament. In a liberal democracy, this building would be full of opposition parties. Firebrand politicians would use their time at thelectern to hold the government’s feet to the fire. Reporters would do television interviews in the lobby, going after the governmentbecause this or that latest policy had failed.

In Putin’s Russia, all of this still happens but none of it is real. It’s a charade, an illusion. Voters get to vote for opposition candidates atthe ballot box but all of them are effectively controlled by the government. Journalists are allowed to criticise the regime but only withinthe parameters set by the shadowy figures who oversee this ‘managed democracy’ which is actually a dictatorship. If this theatredidn’t exist, the journalist and the firebrand might actually oppose the regime. Now that it does, both have a strong interest in itspreservation because the preservation of the current order also preserves their high positions and plush salaries. If co-optation is donewell, it turns potential enemies into supporters without any bloodshed.

There are also structural factors that tyrants can change in order to make mobilisation more difficult even if a large segment of thepopulation is deeply unhappy. The most effective way of doing this to a leader’s advantage is to use the full force of the state in a way thatmakes it impossible for large groups of people to collaborate even if they do come across triggers that inspire them to take action. Thatmeans closing the window to any sort of political opposition as far as is humanly possible: no free media, no free expression, no forms ofpolitical organisation outside the control of the dictatorship; as many people as possible spying on each other to detect even the smallestinfractions; harsh punishments, if need be across generations, for anyone who dares to defy the supreme leadership. That’s how NorthKorea works and that’s why Kim Jong-un doesn’t have to worry about protests ever breaking out in Pyongyang.17 There are plenty ofreasons why North Koreans might be upset, but even if they are, they can’t do much about it. They might be hungry, they have no spaceto meet like-minded individuals and even if they managed to bring some people onto the streets, it would be highly unlikely for proteststo spread because people elsewhere in the country would simply never know a thing about it. Because how would they? Watchingtelevision means watching the government’s propaganda, and organisation through social media is impossible. While a few NorthKoreans have access to foreign media, sharing something as innocent as a South Korean television show can reportedly lead to NorthKoreans being executed.18

Not all authoritarian rulers can sleep as easily as Kim Jong-un. One thing that many of them are obsessed with is the prospect of a ‘ColourRevolution’. The term Colour Revolution initially referred to the popular uprisings in Eurasia following the end of the Soviet Union. Therewas the Georgian Rose Revolution in 2003, the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Kyrgyz Tulip Revolution in 2005. From theperspective of Moscow and like-minded capitals, these protest movements were not organic signs of dissent with unpopulargovernments, they were instigated, financed and organised by the United States and other hostile democracies. Faced with the threat ofthis supposed destabilisation from abroad, the Kremlin moved to bring Russian civil society under its control.

On 4 December 2008, the Moscow employees of Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organisation, were in fora shock. That morning, seven masked men stormed the office. Armed with batons, they prevented all staff members from leaving whilethey cut the phone lines. Over the course of the next seven hours, the organisation’s lawyer was denied access while the men searchedthe office. In addition to computer hard drives, they seized an archive of Soviet repression stretching back two decades.19

The raid caused international uproar, but it was only the opening barrage of a long campaign waged by Putin’s regime. In 2012, itescalated as Putin signed the foreign agents law. The law was a frontal assault on the viability of running a non-governmental organisationin the country. It introduced ‘a requirement that organizations engaging in political activity and receiving foreign funding must registeras foreign agents, even if the foreign funding they receive does not actually pay for political activities’.20 The Americannon-governmental organisation Freedom House summarised the situation as follows: ‘Once an “apolitical” organization engages in acritique of government policy, its activities could be deemed political as well.’21 Since that can mean just about anything, nobody wasimmune and the ensuing regulations were strict. Among other things, ‘foreign agents’ had to let everyone they dealt with know thatthey were ‘foreign agents’.

Combined with the regime making clear to domestic donors that they should no longer fund such organisations, laws such as this made itmore difficult for the organisations to operate. What’s more, whipping up the population against human rights organisations (or traitorsfunded by the country’s enemies, in this version of events) served another purpose. If enough people are angry enough, some of themwon’t stop at posting mean comments on social media; they will throw fake blood at the doors of the organisations or harass theiremployees. It made life hell for anyone involved with them, whilst the regime retained plausible deniability because the intimidation wascarried out by another party.

The coup de grâce came in 2021. Standing beneath Russia’s coat of arms, the two-headed golden eagle, the robe-clad Supreme Courtjudge Alla Nazarova ordered Memorial to close. Its violations of the foreign agent laws had been ‘repeated’ and ‘gross’, she said.22And just like that, the Kremlin had used the legal system to restrict the work of a critical non-governmental organisation before killing italtogether. But importantly, it had done it with a thin veneer of legality that made it easier to avoid popular opposition.

Another thing that can help to reduce the probability of mass protests with a comparatively low risk of public backlash is surveillance. If theregime knows exactly who wants to topple them – what they think, who they meet, what they plan – they can take them out of the gamebefore they offer any serious opposition.

During the Cold War, conducting that work was a massive challenge. Agents had to camp outside somebody’s house, tail them, tap theirtelephone, open their letters and even then they didn’t necessarily have a full picture of everyone the suspect was talking to. That’s why,for example, the secret services of the Warsaw Pact states were so massive. In the Soviet Union, there was roughly one full-time secretpolice officer for every 600 citizens. The Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police, had an estimated officer for every 180 citizens.23It was, by most accounts, the largest surveillance organisation in recorded history. Since then, obtaining information about people hasbecome easier. When I talked to a human rights researcher about the way technology enables authoritarian rule, I was told that workingout who someone is talking to can be as easy as scraping publicly available social media data. The work that was once done by dozens ofagents can now be done by a single engineer – and that engineer can do it for dozens of people at once.

As odd as it may sound, reducing the number of people on the streets can also be achieved by focusing on streets rather than people.Think of the big protest movements that have rocked authoritarian regimes. What do they have in common? For people to challenge theirregimes they need a place to come together: Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square in Istanbul, Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv. Even indemocracies, people tend to congregate in symbolic places to show their strength: Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate,Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Contrast that with Burma. As the journalist Matt Ford has pointed out, the country’s military junta was rocked by demonstrations in2007, but protests never took hold in the country’s capital city.24

Why? At least in part because the generals had earlier moved the capital from Yangon – an organically evolved coastal city – toNaypyidaw, a planned city, described as ‘dictatorship by cartography’.25 Protests in Naypyidaw were unlikely for several reasons. Fora start, barely anyone who wasn’t connected to the government lived in Naypyidaw. But even if there had been more potential dissidentsin the city, it’s not clear where they could have gone to protest. As Ford wrote in The Atlantic: ‘Broad boulevards demarcate thespecially designated neighbourhoods where officials live, with no public square or central space for residents, unruly or otherwise, tocongregate. A moat even surrounds the presidential palace.’26

And while the structure of the capital is a handicap for protestors, it allows the generals’ security forces to move around without beingimpeded by annoying residents. Perhaps you remember the video that went viral of a fitness instructor dancing, inadvertently made infront of a military convoy during the 2021 coup d’état in Burma? That was Naypyidaw.

Some opposition movements sustain themselves without the need for individual leaders. Others slowly evolve beyond them as theybecome more powerful. But either is difficult to achieve under tyranny because tyrants make it so difficult to come together and organiseanything. Under those circumstances, prominent individuals can become the opposition’s best hope of achieving real change. That’s aweakness that can be exploited by tyrants because they can change the entire board simply by taking an individual piece off it.

Such targeted repression can take many forms: intimidation, harassment, detention, imprisonment, forced exile or even physical attacks;in the most extreme form, murder. Since targeting well-known activists inevitably leads to higher costs for the tyrant, the danger isparticularly acute for dissidents and opposition figures who present a threat to the regime if they don’t have a large public profile toprotect them against the worst.

The advantage of targeted repression, from the tyrant’s point of view, is twofold. First, there’s a risk of backlash but in many cases this islower than the risk of backlash from targeting a larger group of people. Second, it’s a direct way to make an example out of someone todeter others, so aiming at one may silence many.

Targeted repression like this has always happened, but it’s changed over the last couple of decades. In the past, fleeing abroad offeredsignificant (albeit not perfect) protection. Opponents could still be found and killed in a faraway place, but that was costly and difficult.

In the twenty-first century, tyrants can follow their enemies abroad with relative ease. Transnational repression has moved from being anexception to being the norm, and the assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018 was only the tip of the iceberg.Not only is it easier to travel long distances to visit friends or faraway places, it is also easier for autocratic hit squads to track and murderdissidents.

But often, tyrants don’t even need to send their own thugs to follow dissidents abroad, because fellow authoritarian leaders will do thejob for them. A recent report on transnational repression found that ‘most acts of transnational repression are undertaken throughco-optation of or cooperation with authorities in the host country.’27 Sometimes, that can take the form of an explicit deal wherein oneregime takes care of foreign dissidents within its borders in exchange for another doing the same.28 Other times, dictators don’t evenhave to ask.

But let’s say, despite all this, people still protest. If neither beatings nor snipers are the solution, what is? What exactly can tyrants do toprevent their fall? The answer is depressing: they need to go big. If tyrants are going to use severe repression, including bullets, they needto be ready to go all the way. Otherwise, they risk ending up in an escalating cycle, where the repression doesn’t do its intended job,protests grow and they have the worst of all worlds.

Some tyrants have, unfortunately, been willing to commit to the ‘go big’ approach. The most effective way to avoid a backlash whenusing force is to be so brutal that the barriers to participation increase disproportionately to its mobilisation effect. Put bluntly, peopledon’t join protests if they think they will die. And as the risk of death increases, the participation advantage of popular protest evaporatesinto thin air.

That’s a strategy more than one tyrannical regime has pursued. On 3 June 1989, a Chinese woman named Jia was looking down at aburning bus on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in central Beijing.29 Having climbed onto the base of a lamp-post to get a better look at thecarnage, her heart beat fast. Without being organised or ordered by any leader, the residents of China’s capital had brought outwhatever they could find into the street in an attempt to halt the advance of the People’s Liberation Army. Earlier that evening, Jia hadeven seen some men roll a milk cart into the street. They thought if they smashed the bottles, the glass might puncture the tyres of theapproaching military vehicles.

But faced with the overwhelming might of the Chinese military, they didn’t stand a chance. As the soldiers advanced, they firedindiscriminately at peaceful protestors. Jia jumped down from the lamp-post and ran. Before long, a man waved her into an alley wheredozens of people were hiding from the troops. Hiding there, Jia could see tank after tank rumble by. In that moment, she asked herselfwhat would happen to the students. ‘Are the soldiers going to shoot them as they did us?’30

They did. The army had poured into the city from all four directions. Armoured vehicles cleared barricades and the violence went on forhours with extreme brutality. Students, other protestors and innocent bystanders were beaten and shot. Some were even crushed by Type59 main battle tanks.31

Lu Jinghua, a twenty-eight-year-old, was in the square when the tanks rolled in. ‘I heard bullets whizz past and people getting shot. Onebody fell by me, then another. I ran and ran to get out of the way. People were crying for help, calling out for ambulances,’ she said.‘Then another person would die,’ she added.32

The scene the following morning was harrowing. The Avenue of Eternal Peace ‘echoed with screams’.33 The corpses of deadprotestors were carried away by friends. Some of the wounded were thrown onto bicycles or rickshaws. As people ran next to them tomake sure that they would find their way through the crowds, some cried.

The first Chinese report spoke of 241 dead including twenty-three soldiers. According to multiple outside observers in the city at the time,the true number of dead is likely to have been much higher – perhaps even somewhere around 2,600 to 2,700.34 But it wasn’t just thedead. The soldiers had shot so many protestors that some doctors had run out of blood with which to treat the wounded.35

But even that wasn’t sufficient, because protests quickly spread to 181 cities across the country.36 It was a crucial moment for theChinese Communist Party. China’s regime had gone all out on repression. Would they be willing to see it through to the gruesome end?

The answer came soon, as brutal crackdowns took place across the country. In the provincial capital Chengdu alone, ‘at least 100seriously wounded people’ were carried out of one square, according to American officials.37 And that is just a single square in a singlecity. With protests being put down around the country, it’s impossible to tell how many people were killed by their own government.

The depressing truth is that it worked. On 9 June, some three weeks after the government had declared martial law, the chairman of theCentral Military Commission, Deng Xiaoping, gave a speech to military commanders in Beijing. In that speech, he thanked the People’sLiberation Army for quelling the rebellion that aimed to ‘overthrow the Communist Party and topple the socialist system’.38 In thatmoment, millions of people certainly opposed the regime. But the regime survived and continues to survive. Ruthless repression canwork, but it requires a total commitment to horrific brutality.

After the protests had been crushed, the regime sent a further chilling message to anyone who might consider challenging it. Soldiers whoshot innocent civilians were given praise and promotions. Two went on to become minister of defence and one later joined the powerfulPolitburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. There was no mistaking the signal being sent. Challenge us, and we will killyou. Then, we’ll find the person who fired the lethal shot and we will pin a medal on their chest and call them a hero. The choice is yours.Sensing an existential threat to its survival, the Chinese regime hadn’t taken half measures as the Ukrainian government did decadeslater. Soldiers were needed, not policemen. Even guns weren’t enough, it had to be tanks.

But if shock and awe, using maximum force, is the best way to stay in power when faced with popular discontent, why doesn’t everydictator order tanks onto the street? The short answer is that they can’t.

The long answer I found much closer to home. In 2023, I drove east to Leipzig to meet sixty-four-year-old Siegbert Schefke. When I gotthere, he told me that everyone has five or six days in a lifetime where you remember everything: every detail from the moment you get upin the morning to the moment you go to bed at night. For Schefke, 9 October 1989 was one of those days.

Schefke was for years a dissident, and the GDR regime did what it could to make his life miserable. Codenamed ‘Satan’ by the fearsomeStasi, he was constantly under observation. Interrogations, some extremely long, were frequent. Then, a day after attending a vigil for apolitical prisoner, the state-owned company at which he worked told him that he was going to lose his job. But instead of getting him toback down, it only radicalised him. He became a full-time revolutionary.39

By autumn of 1989, the Socialist Unity Party, which had ruled East Germany since 1949, had already been dealing with populardissatisfaction for months. Now a major protest was planned in Leipzig and the authorities were on high alert. Before the big day, theregime desperately tried to prevent people from attending. Among other things, they threatened that a Tiananmen Square scenariocould be repeated if the population defied the regime’s orders. On the day of the planned protest, Schefke woke up in Berlin. Hisimmediate problem were the Stasi agents who followed his every move. He managed to climb onto the roof of his building unseen,before he boarded a tram and then changed to a borrowed car. It worked. After arriving in Leipzig, Siegbert and his friend Aram lookedfor a place from which they could film the demonstration. It wasn’t easy because the city was crawling with security forces.

In their desperation, they eventually asked a local pastor whether they could set up their equipment on top of his church’s bell tower.Their request was followed by ten seconds of silence. ‘Of course that’s possible,’ the pastor finally said.40 A moment of relief, and upthey went. The floor of the tower was covered in bird droppings, but the view was perfect.

We don’t know how many members of the regime’s security forces were in Leipzig that day since troves of documents were ‘lost’when the German Democratic Republic collapsed, but what the historian Mary Elise Sarotte could find paints a terrifying picture of theforces Leipzigers had to fear: ‘Fifteen hundred army soldiers appear to have been present. An unclear number of Stasi agents andemployees had been activated. More than three thousand police officers would be on duty.’41

North of the city centre, ten armoured personnel carriers were waiting to engage with their motors running.42 All of them were equippedwith live ammunition powerful enough to shoot down planes three kilometres away. The regime was ready.

As tens of thousands of peaceful Germans marched in defiance of the Socialist Unity Party, the regime had a decision to make: would theygive an order to shoot?

On the morning before the showdown, three high-ranking local party leaders joined forces with a celebrated conductor, a theologyprofessor and a cabaret artist to appeal for non-violence on both sides. That appeal was read not only in the churches where theprotestors gathered before their march but also to security forces and on the local radio. ‘We urge you to exercise prudence so peacefuldialogue becomes possible,’ it said.43 That intervention was so important because it signalled that the regime was split. There was nouniform desire among elites to crush the opposition.

There were signs of rupture within the security forces as well. Morale in the party’s local militias was so low that a good many of itsreservists simply didn’t show up.44 Among those who did, many openly questioned the orders they were given. Berlin had indicatedthat protests would not be allowed to go ahead. But what if there were women and children in the crowd? Who would take responsibilityafter innocent people were gunned down, their blood running in the streets? As protestors talked with security forces throughout the day,soldiers and policemen sympathised with the people they were preparing to kill.45

These dynamics explain why tyrants usually try to maximise their chance of ‘success’ by bringing in troops from the outside when theycrack down on civilians. The closer the oppressor is to the intended victims, the more uncertain things become because even the mostloyal supporters of a regime cannot be expected to kill their neighbours, friends or family. And how could soldiers be so sure that thisisn’t what was about to happen? They were facing a crowd of tens of thousands – there was no telling who exactly would be standing infront of their barrels.

Regime planners were aware of the problem, not least because even the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had struggled withinsubordination when quelling protests on Tiananmen Square. Local units, which had most contacts among the population of the city,were deliberately deployed as the last line of defence rather than being on the front lines where they could cause trouble.46

Under those circumstances, one of the regime’s key concerns had to be whether an order to shoot unarmed protestors would even becarried out if it were given. Dictators may want to order a brutal crackdown, but someone has to fire the guns. If the people carrying theguns sympathise with the people they are supposed to shoot, a bad situation could spiral out of control and become catastrophic. Andindeed, this is how popular resistance can succeed: either the regime looks weak or it risks crumbling under the weight of its ownrepression.

The clock was now ticking. Protestors were approaching the Eastern Knot, a sharp bend in the street near Leipzig’s main train station atwhich security forces would have to fire to stand any chance of dealing with this many people. In her book The Collapse, Sarotte detailswhat happened next. As it became clear that the march couldn’t be stopped without massive use of lethal force, Helmut Hackenberg, thelocal Party leader in charge of implementing the order to quell the protest, called Berlin to get hold of Egon Krenz to ask him what to do.Krenz was a prominent member of the Politburo. More importantly, he was seen as a frontrunner to replace Erich Honecker, the leader ofthe ruling Socialist Unity Party. When Hackenberg eventually managed to reach Krenz on the phone and told him that it would be best notto intervene because there were simply too many protestors, Krenz was so shocked that he didn’t reply. When he finally did, Krenz saidhe would call back shortly as he had first to talk to somebody else.47

And then no further call came. While Hackenberg waited to hear back, the local police chief began to summon more units from outsideLeipzig so that they might stand a chance against the sheer mass of bodies.48 With the protestors coming ever closer to the curve in theroad, Krenz had still not called back. Hackenberg was on his own, weighing his options. None of them was good and there was simply nomore time. Now or never, shoot or show weakness.

At around half-past six, he ordered the units to fall back and take defensive positions. According to many of those there that night, theorder came not a moment too soon. One young policeman later said that he had already had an order to start charging demonstrators.When he got the order to pull back, he was within thirty metres of the protestors.49

With the regime unable to agree to mass murder, protestors in Leipzig had won the day. From the perspective of regime survival, an orderto shoot that night would probably have been ruinous, but the decision not to shoot was equally catastrophic.

High up on the bell tower, Siegbert Schefke had captured the protest in all its glory. A day later, he was nervously watching television in hisliving room. He waited and waited and there it was! After being smuggled through Berlin, their images were shown on West Germantelevision and since the signal was easily strong enough to reach most of East Germany, millions there could see it in their living rooms aswell.

The following week, Leipzigers marched again and protests quickly grew in other cities as well. With Honecker forced out almostimmediately, the new Politburo, now under the direction of the man who hadn’t called back until it was too late, tried to concede its wayout of the misery, but the wheels of history were already spinning too fast. In November, the whole world watched as East Germanscelebrated the end of the communist dictatorship on top of the Berlin Wall.

The international dimension has a role to play as well – as can be seen in particular in the linkage and leverage idea posited in a much-citedarticle by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way.50 Liberal democracies in North America and Europe are the most powerfulpolitical actors interested in the promotion of international democracy, and most important among those is the United States. Eventhough the government of the United States may claim to promote universal values around the world, its interest and ability to do sodiffers hugely from country to country. When Chinese leaders used tanks to clamp down on protests in 1989, China had neitherparticularly strong connections to the United States (linkage) nor did the White House have much influence over Beijing (leverage). To theChinese leadership, that meant they couldn’t expect much punishment for killing those protestors. Or at least that punishment, whateverit might be, wouldn’t make much difference. As a result, they knew they could ‘go big’ and get away with it – at least when it came tointernational reactions.

Some regimes, at the point of having to decide whether to crack down on protestors, face a very different situation. They are highlyconnected to, and highly dependent on, countries which could imperil the survival of their regime if they do what the Chinese governmentdid. The more the public is outraged, the likelier democratic voters are to push their governments into punishing dictators over whomthey have influence. And that chance is now higher.

But obviously, the international environment doesn’t have to be a constraint when dealing with the masses – it can be an advantage. Ifdictators can find a friendly foreign dictator to help protect them against their own population, they solve two problems at once. For one,this increases coherence of the regime elites who keep the dictator in power because they now know that victory is much more likely.Secondly, foreign troops are less likely to refuse an order to fire on protestors than the dictator’s own soldiers because they are moreremoved from their targets. Taken together, this can make a significant difference.

But knowing all this, how are tyrants supposed to react if they cannot ‘go big’ and they don’t have a foreign dictator to protect them?As a start, they should say a prayer because the time for ‘good’ options has long gone. Then they have the final card to play: they canattempt to split the opposition by making concessions that are either unimportant to them or fake. If that works, it will reduce the numberof people who need to die – thereby also reducing international costs and the probability that the dictatorship will come apart. As odd as itsounds, offering concessions is often the best way to break protestors before they break the despot.

With the enemy near the gates, this manouevre can go something like this: the despot fires hated government officials, dismissesunpopular ministers and then promises deep constitutional reforms. And just like that, without giving up anything that really matters, theregime may turn people against one another. Some will reluctantly believe the government, others will keep protesting. Those thatprotest, now a much more manageable number, can be met with beatings, torture or live ammunition. By the time it dawns on the formerthat they have been deceived, that the concessions aren’t going to lead to meaningful change, the regime, it is hoped, has regainedenough strength to put their protests down as well.51

If a dictator reaches the point where they need to decide whether to shoot their own people, they’ve almost certainly made multiplemistakes already. Cunning dictators intervene long before they have to make lose–lose decisions because they realise that killing theirown people in the street risks breaking even the most cohesive of regimes. Even if such atrocities don’t kill the regime there and then,they are so outrageous that they can serve as a point of mobilisation for opponents forever. It’s for that reason that the ChineseCommunist Party is so scared of dissidents who as much as mention the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre – let alone what actuallyhappened under their command that day. It is an event that cannot be shaken, it will remain forever a mark of shame for the Party.

Popular uprisings are a constant threat for almost all tyrants. When the streets do erupt, despots can’t simply ignore them. They need totake action but they usually cannot give an order to shoot because guns are useless if the regime doesn’t have enough people to firethem. Most tyrants don’t, and that’s why they tend to lose their power at the very moment they try to use them. Clever tyrants canreduce the risk of this happening but it never goes away completely. And even if they manage to avoid a scenario in which their palace isoverrun by the people who have long suffered from their rule, they aren’t out of the woods. Because there are some things even the mostpowerful rulers cannot prepare for. Nobody can outrun a bullet.

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