Inside the Bizarre World of Dictators
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This episode of Cautionary Tales was made in association with HBO and their new series, The Regime. You can stream The Regime now on Max, and you can find more episodes of this show, Cautionary Tales, wherever you get your podcasts. On the 1st of March 2014, the BBC journalist John Simpson hailed a taxi with his cameraman in Ukraine.

The BBC had told them to go to Crimea, the southern peninsula sticking out into the Black Sea. Something, it seemed, was happening there. Nobody quite knew what. Simpson was a veteran of foreign affairs. He'd dodged Chinese bullets in Tiananmen Square and American bombs in Baghdad. He'd smuggled himself into war-torn Afghanistan wearing a burqa. If anyone could make sense of events in Crimea...

He could. As the taxi approached the thin strip of land that connects the Crimean Peninsula to the rest of Ukraine, the driver had to stop. The road was blocked. Men with guns and military uniforms beckoned the journalist and the cameraman from the car. The gunmen were hostile and threatening, Simpson wrote. They opened the taxi's trunk and began to rifle aggressively through the traveller's bags.

He took the cameraman's camera. But who were these people? Which army's uniforms were they in? The men at the checkpoint, he realised, were stopping everyone except local people from passing through. But what for? In his long career, Simpson had seen it all. But he'd never seen anything like this. I found it hard to work out what was going on, he wrote.

What was going on? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This episode of Cautionary Tales is something different. Three shorter stories with a theme in common.

It's made possible by HBO and their new series, The Regime, starring Kate Winslet as Elena Vernham, the fictional dictator of a country in Central Europe. The character and the plot are inspired by real dictators and real events. And our friends at HBO came to us with a suggestion. Could Cautionary Tales explore some of the true stories behind the drama?

I talked to Will Tracy, writer of The Regime, about what sparked his ideas for the show. It's no coincidence that Elena Vernham and her husband Nicholas share their first names with the Ceausescus who ruled Romania in the 1970s and 80s. Will told me he read up on the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, the dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and the presumptive President for Life of Russia,

Vladimir Putin. And if you think you also see in Kate Winslet's character echoes of some Western politicians who may be running for election, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. The regime depicts a crisis in the dictator's rule. But here in the real world, it's democracy that's in crisis.

A few years ago, the book How Democracies Die became a bestseller. Around the world, over a third of under-35s think that a leader who doesn't have to bother with elections sounds like a good way to run a country. And so this week, we present three mini-tales on the theme of dictatorships. Three true stories and the social science that helps explain them. Our first tale...

Starts at that roadblock in Crimea in 2014. In the regime, we see dictator Elena Vernham revelling in the impotent outrage of the United States when she takes control of the Fabon Corridor, a disputed piece of land on her country's border. An illegal invasion, says the US. Nonsense, says Elena. No-one is proposing an invasion, no-one.

This is an expression of peace and love towards our countrymen across the border. The real-life equivalent of the Faban Corridor is Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that's been conquered and reconquered by various empires over the centuries. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Crimea became part of Ukraine. But Russia kept the right to maintain some military bases there. Then...

At the end of February 2014, something started to happen in Crimea. Nobody quite knew what. Soldiers appeared in the streets. Or were they soldiers? They certainly looked like soldiers. They had guns and military-style green uniforms. But these weren't the uniforms of the Russian army or Ukraine's army. This mysterious militia soon became known as the Little Green Men.

But who were they? What was going on? The little green men took over the airport. They took over Crimea's parliament building and hoisted the Russian flag. So they were Russian troops, surely. They must be. No, no, no, said Russia's ambassador to the European Union. There are no Russian troops there. None whatsoever. The BBC told their cameraman and journalist John Simpson to take a taxi and investigate. They found a roadblock.

The little green men had taken control of the border. Then they surrounded Ukrainian military installations. Crimea's government announced there'd be a referendum on joining Russia. Vladimir Putin gave a press conference. Come on, said a journalist. These men in green uniforms are Russian soldiers, aren't they? They must be. Putin replied with a straight face. You can go to a store and buy any kind of uniform. Who are they then?

local defence forces. Putin shrugged. A couple of weeks later, Crimeans went to vote under the watchful eyes of the little green men. A credulity-stretching 97% supposedly voted yes. They wanted to be part of Russia. Putin announced the annexation two days later.

In 1966, at the height of the Cold War, the game theorist Thomas Schelling published a book called Arms and Influence. The Cold War fascinated game theorists. How did the two superpowers compete for advantage without pushing each other into a catastrophic nuclear response? One answer is what Schelling called salami slicing tactics.

If you try to steal a sausage all at once, the owner of the sausage is likely to object. But if you take just a little slice, you might get away with it. Then you wait a while and take another. And another. Salami tactics, says Schelling, were surely invented by a child. Don't go in the water, a parent tells their son.

He'll sit on the bank, says Schelling, and submerge his bare feet. He is not yet in the water. You look at him and think, hmm, I suppose that's okay. Then he stands up. No more of him in the water than before, says Schelling. Now he starts paddling around. What, he says, I'm not going any deeper. Yes, you did, just then. I saw you.

Ah, but I'm back in the shallows now. It all evens out, you see. Pretty soon, says Schelling. We're calling to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline. Salami tactics depend on ambiguity, says Schelling. We try to draw a line, don't get in the water. But what does in mean?

Don't invade another country. But what about supporting local self-defence forces? By the time it becomes clear that our line has been crossed, it's also become much more of a hassle to do anything about it. We might decide to let it slide. As any child can tell you, the key to successful salami tactics is sensing just how far you can push your luck.

In the decades since Thomas Schelling wrote about salami tactics, the phrase has been used widely. But not always precisely, says the political scientist Richard Maas. He suggests a more exact definition, with Crimea in 2014 as a perfect illustration.

First, salami slicing involves a fait accompli. You change the facts on the ground before anyone wises up enough to stop you. Putin managed that perfectly. The little green men created just enough confusion that nobody was sure what was happening until it had happened. Next, that fait accompli has to be limited enough in scope that it won't provoke major retaliation.

Putin judged that perfectly too. The US and EU complained. The "referendum" was clearly a sham. They imposed some sanctions on Russia, but actually taking Crimea back from Russian control would have meant military action, and they weren't willing to go that far.

There's one last vital piece of the definition of salami tactics. There has to be potential for another fait accompli, to slice off another bit of sausage. On February 24th 2022, Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Putin had followed the same playbook as before, by creating confusion. He'd massed troops on the border but claimed it was just a training exercise.

Was he really going to mount a full-on invasion? Even in Russia, many found that hard to believe. The plan was to take Kyiv quickly and present the world with yet another fait accompli. But this time, Putin had sliced off more sausage than he could chew. The assault on Kyiv was repelled and the Russian offensive was pushed back to the east of Ukraine.

At the time of recording this podcast, we're two years into the war, and it's unclear how much territory Russia will eventually digest, or how tempted Putin might be to try for another slice in future. How can salami tactics be countered? There's no easy answer, says Richard Maas. The best we can do is be alert and try to stop each fae before it's accompli.

But it's not just in geopolitics that salami tactics matter. They trip us up in parenting, as Thomas Schelling knew. And if you read the bestseller, How Democracies Die, you'll be reminded of salami slicing too.

Often, say the authors, there is no single moment in which an elected regime obviously crosses the line into dictatorship. Instead, there are many little steps that gradually erode the norms and institutions of democracy, doze off, and we might wake up to find that democracy has died. We have to stay alert.

Cautionary Tales will be back with another true story about dictatorships after the break.

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A running joke in the regime is that dictator Elena Vernham has an unhealthy obsession with healthy air. She's convinced that she's breathing in dangerous mycotoxins because the air in her palace is too moist. So she fills the palace with dehumidifiers and insists on an aide following her round with a hygrometer.

A newly recruited lackey is advised. Never breathe in her direction. Stay calm. Don't vomit. It's comical, but it's based on reality. Autocrats seem to have a strange tendency towards germophobia. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, world leaders reacted in very different ways.

The UK's Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, proudly and unwisely said he'd been shaking hands with everyone on a visit to a hospital with Covid patients. Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, retreated to a palace outside Moscow and began to conduct government business by video call. So far, so unremarkable. But that was just the start.

According to media reports, Putin installed a special disinfection tunnel for visitors to his palace. It looks like one of those walk-through body scanners at airport security. Only this metal box bathed you in ultraviolet light and sprayed you with an aerosol mist of disinfectant solution.

That likely wouldn't have done much to halt the spread of Covid, so Putin took more precautions. Anyone who wanted to see him in person first had to quarantine. The head of the state-owned oil company was said to be spending two or three weeks a month in quarantine, just to have brief meetings with the president. Others made do with the video calls.

Putin is not alone. Other dictators have had similar obsessions about health and hygiene. Adolf Hitler washed his hands to kill bacteria as often as a surgeon does, according to a biography of his personal doctor. Kim Jong-un is reported to travel round North Korea with his own portable toilet. It would be unthinkable for the supreme leader to use a public restroom.

Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, reportedly required that anyone who was to meet him must first take a shower under the supervision of his guards. He was once filmed lecturing a village mayor about how it's not appropriate to be out in public, smelling stinky. Stories like this are common enough to seem like a trend. So what's going on?

Perhaps it's just part of a wider paranoia that inflicts dictators. In 1978, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena came to London for a state visit. Queen Elizabeth was not amused because other heads of state had warned her what to expect.

The President of France told his British counterpart that when the Ceausescu stayed in Paris, they ripped all the wiring out of the walls, presumably looking for listening devices. They also stole all the ashtrays. The Queen asked her government, do I really have to have this man in Buckingham Palace?

Yes, said the government. We're trying to agree a deal to make British airplanes in Romanian factories, and a state visit is part of the price. Nicolae and Elena admired the pomp and ceremony of the British monarchy. They wanted glamorous video footage of themselves in a horse-drawn, open-topped carriage...

to show off on Romanian state television. So the queen told her staff to keep an eye on the ashtrays and stop anyone pulling wires out of the walls. Nikolai was sure the palace must be bugged, so he got his entourage up at 6am to hold furtive meetings in the garden. That amused the palace staff, but the dictator's other quirks offended them.

When offered food, he'd insist that a minder taste it first. They might be trying to poison him. Then there was the germophobia. After he shook hands with anyone, royal or otherwise, Ceausescu would summon a lackey to pour rubbing alcohol over his hands to disinfect them.

By the end of the visit, says one royal biographer, Queen Elizabeth had become so desperate to avoid her unwanted guests that she did something she'd never done before and would never do again. Walking her corgis in the palace gardens, she spotted the Ceausescus in the distance, heading towards her. They hadn't seen her yet, so she jumped into a bush and hid.

Paranoia is one explanation for the apparent germophobic tendency of many autocrats. But I wonder if something more is going on. In 2014, researchers Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher published a book called The Parasite Stress Theory of Values and Sociality.

you're more likely to catch an infectious disease in some parts of the world than in others, they point out. Likewise, the risk varies from one time period to another. Thornhill and Fincher make the case that these differing disease risks explain a surprising amount of difference in cultures and values.

For example, when people feel at high risk from pathogens, the authors argue, that tends to manifest in more conservative and authoritarian politics, marked by suspicion of outsiders and demands for conformity and obedience. When people aren't so worried about infectious disease, they tend to be more welcoming of newcomers and open to diverse ways of doing things.

Later researchers looked at the 2016 US election. They found that places with greater prevalence of infectious disease voted more heavily for Donald Trump.

In 2020, as the COVID pandemic loomed on the horizon, researchers at the University of British Columbia saw a unique chance to conduct a real-time test of the idea that health warriors predict authoritarian attitudes. They quickly put together a survey asking people, how concerned are you by this new coronavirus? They also asked if people agreed or disagreed with a range of statements that reflect authoritarian values.

Such as: "What our country needs most is discipline, with everyone following our leaders in unity." On the day of the survey, at the start of March, life was still pretty normal. Lockdowns were a couple more weeks away. There'd been just a few dozen confirmed cases of Covid in the US. Boris Johnson was proudly shaking hands at a British hospital.

The researchers waited a few weeks and repeated the survey when cases were much more widespread. Sure enough, in this second survey, people were not only more worried about Covid, they were also more likely to endorse authoritarian attitudes.

I wonder if this research tells us something about germophobia among autocrats. If threats to our health make us more authoritarian, maybe it shouldn't surprise us if dictators are among the biggest hypochondriacs of all. We'll be back with our third story after the break.

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One of the most poignant moments in the regime is a conversation between the dictator Elena and the palace manager Agnes. Agnes's son suffers from epilepsy and needs modern medicine. But Elena has been insisting that all he really needs are traditional folk remedies. Nobody dares disagree with her.

When Agnes finally admits to Elena that the folk remedies aren't working and begs for real medicine, Elena agrees, but she also cruelly punishes Agnes for not telling the truth. Elena insists truth is so important. That's what this third and final part of our cautionary tale is about. Truth in a world that would prefer a lie.

Deep under the Don Basin, to the north of the Black Sea and the east of Ukraine, lie some of Russia's richest seams of coal, not a resource to be squandered. In 1901, a 26-year-old mining engineer named Peter Palchinski had been sent by the Tsar's government to study the area's coal mines.

A photograph of Palchinski shows him with heavy eyelids under arched eyebrows, a high forehead, starched collar and a wispy goatee beard. He looks slightly surprised and also like he's trying to neaten up for the camera but hasn't quite managed it.

Palchinski came from a poor family, the oldest of 12 siblings and step-siblings. Yet, despite lacking money and connections, he married well, to Nina, who was bright, well-educated and politically active. And he rose to positions of high responsibility thanks to his sharp intelligence and relentless energy.

Palchinski was worried by what he saw in the Don Basin's mining communities. The miners were being housed 40 or even 60 to a room, stacked in shared wooden bunks like cheap goods in a warehouse. Palchinski knew what it was to be poor, and this was no way to treat hard-working men, a greater asset than any seam of coal. Palchinski put together a dossier on these working conditions and sent it to his superiors.

They decided it would be best if young Peter Palchinski was sent somewhere less politically sensitive for his next assignment, namely Siberia. Palchinski eventually managed to slip away to Western Europe, where he soaked up the latest industrial knowledge.

He wrote back to the very superiors who'd effectively exiled him, suggesting ways in which the Russian economy might be reformed along Western lines. He also wrote love letters to his wife, Nina, in which he cheerfully confessed to an affair. This was a man who just had to blurt out the truth, no matter what the consequences might be.

Palchinski eventually returned to Russia, narrowly escaped being bayoneted during the revolution of 1917 and secured a position providing engineering advice to the communist government of the new Soviet Union. But his compulsive honesty continued. At a time when everyone was joining professional associations controlled by the Communist Party, he refused.

on the grounds that engineering advice should not be distorted by politics. Even drafted a letter to the Soviet prime minister, offering the helpful observation that technology and science were more important than communism. His alarmed friends persuaded him not to send it. What Palchinski did send to the authorities was a series of bracingly frank critiques of their prestige industrial projects.

Stalin wanted to build a vast hydroelectric dam, the Lenin Dam, across the Dnieper River in what is now Ukraine. Palchinsky dismantled the idea, point by point. The Dnieper moved slowly through a floodplain. So the Lenin Dam would flood huge areas of valuable farmland and many thousands of homes. It would generate little electricity and none at all in the dry season.

As an alternative, Palchinski proposed a series of smaller dams, supplemented with coal-fired power stations, which would be much cheaper, more efficient and more reliable. But this technical critique was missing the point. Stalin wanted to build the world's largest hydroelectric dam, and he did. The project was an economic and engineering failure,

which devastated the local ecosystem and required 10,000 farmers to be forcibly relocated. The next project on Palchinsky's radar was Magnitogorsk, the city of Magnet Mountain. This remote mountain, far to the east of Moscow, was packed with iron ore.

And next to it, the Soviet authorities planned to build vast steel mills, capable of outmatching the entire steel output of the United Kingdom, along with a garden city to house workers. Palchinsky delivered another frank analysis.

Without a detailed study of the area's geology, was there really as much iron in Magnet Mountain as people thought? And where would the coal come from to fire these mighty steel mills? His old studies of worker conditions in the coal mines of the Don Basin also led him to worry about the fate of Magnitogorsk's workers. Palchinski's warnings were again ignored and again ignored.

were all too accurate. Workers and their families were shipped to the site in cattle wagons, in conditions rarely seen outside Nazi Germany's concentration camps. One witness who travelled there as a child later recalled, "For a day and a half, the door was not even opened. Mothers had children die in their arms. From only the wagon in which we travelled, four little corpses were removed."

Over 3,000 people died in the first winter of construction work. And the iron ran out eventually, just as Palchinski had feared it would. Magnitogorsk turned into a crumbling hub of shortages and alcoholism, described by one historian as blighted by almost unfathomable pollution.

and a health catastrophe impossible to exaggerate. Palchinski had told the truth and been right again. That was a dangerous habit. In the early 1990s, a young researcher named Amy Edmondson was studying the performance of medical teams at two Massachusetts hospitals. She had a simple and intuitive theory. Good teams make fewer mistakes.

Yet the numbers told a very different story. The teams who displayed the best teamwork were also the ones making the most mistakes. What on earth was happening? Edmondson figured it out eventually. The best teams didn't make more errors. They admitted more errors.

Dysfunctional teams admitted to very few, for the simple reason that nobody in those teams felt safe to own up to making a mistake. The time-worn euphemism for a screw-up is a learning experience. But Edmondson's insight suggests that the cliché has teeth. How can a mistake be a learning experience if nobody will admit that the mistake ever happened?

Peter Balchinsky had been sent to Siberia for his frank advice to the Tsar, and his friends had begged him not to repeat the trick with Joseph Stalin. They knew that they lived in a society where telling the truth could get you killed. In 1937, for example, the Soviet Union carried out its first population census in 11 years. It was, says one historian, exceptionally thorough and complete...

That was awkward, since the census count was 8 million shy of official projections. The consequence of the catastrophic famine caused by Stalin's policies, which had struck regions such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the early 1930s. The statisticians responsible for the census were promptly arrested and executed. And the census itself was suppressed.

Future statisticians would not make the same mistake. A replacement census swiftly reinstated the missing 8 million and no further census was conducted for 20 years, sometime after Stalin's death. Amy Edmondson argues that you don't need to go to a dictatorship to find people who don't feel it's wise to point out problems with their organisations.

Nobody in a modern business expects to be executed for telling the truth, but they might well expect to be bullied, passed over for promotion or fired. It all depends on the corporate culture. Edmondson popularised the idea of psychological safety, when people feel they can speak openly to each other about problems, learning from mistakes and fixing them. But psychological safety doesn't happen by accident.

Edmondson gives the example of the aluminium company Alcoa. When Paul O'Neill became the boss in 1987, he set the apparently unachievable target of zero workplace injuries. That was smart. Not only is a safer workplace the right thing to aim for, but that target encouraged workers to focus on detail, quality and proper processes. Except...

How to make sure that teams on the factory floor actually focused on safety, rather than getting the message that they should simply gloss over minor accidents and near misses? O'Neill's approach was simple and direct. He wrote to every worker, giving them his personal phone number and asking them to call him if there were any safety violations.

That's what it takes to create psychological safety. Without psychological safety, people learn to avoid speaking uncomfortable truths. But when the truth becomes impossible to utter, society disappears into a maze of illusions. It's only a matter of time before everything falls apart. It's easy to forget how successful the Soviet system was for a time.

Yes, it was brutal and repressive. Yes, millions died in famines caused by senseless policies. Hundreds of thousands died in prison. But the economy industrialized and grew quickly. Many Western economists speculated that the Soviet economy would eventually overtake that of the United States. That never happened.

Because the more the Soviet economy grew, the more important it was to get feedback about which projects were working and which were not. With the truth choked off, the Soviet system became incapable of distinguishing success from failure. One icy Leningrad night in April 1928, there was a knock on the door of Peter Palchinski's apartment.

He was arrested by the secret police and was never seen by his wife again. Many years later, the historian Lauren Graham managed to unearth a secret police dossier on Palchinski, documenting crimes such as publishing detailed statistics and trying to set minimal goals, in other words,

trying to figure out and then tell the truth about what was possible and what was not. Palchinski was not alone. 3,000 of the country's 10,000 engineers were arrested in the late 1920s and early 1930s and either imprisoned or sent to Siberia. Alongside them was Palchinski's wife, Nina, who died there. Peter Palchinski met a different fate.

Truthful to the end, he refused to confess to crimes he had not committed. And so he was executed. The truth killed him. Of course it did. And the lack of truth killed the Soviet Union. In July 1989, the first major strike in Soviet history began.

A quarter of a million coal miners walked away from their jobs, protesting against grotesquely unsafe conditions and simple deprivations. No meat, no fruit, no soap and no hot water. After risking their lives each day in the suffocating depths, miners couldn't even wash.

The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was forced to appear on national television, offering substantial concessions. The strike is far less famous than the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it was a decisive moment in the downfall of the Soviet system. The miners who'd walked out and humiliated Gorbachev worked, of all places, in the Don Basin.

It was 88 years since Peter Palchinski had documented the problem of working conditions in the Don coal mines. From the beginning of the Soviet Union to its end, the country's leaders had managed to block out the truths they really needed to hear. A year on from Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, an anonymous Russian official told the Financial Times...

It's all gone horribly wrong. The idea was never for hundreds of thousands of people to die. Putin had badly misjudged the strength of the Russian army and the strength of the Ukrainians' will to fight. But why had this salami slice failed when the annexation of Crimea in 2014 had been so successful? One source gave the Financial Times a familiar explanation.

Nobody can tell Putin the truth. But another explanation is more surprising. Isolated behind his disinfection tunnel during the Covid pandemic, Putin had too much time to brood on the perceived injustices of the past. When historians come to debate the causes of the war in Ukraine, germophobia may be among them.

The three themes explored in this episode of Cautionary Tales, germophobia, truth-telling and salami tactics, were inspired by HBO's new series The Regime, starring Kate Winslet as the fictional dictator Elena Vernham. You can stream episodes of The Regime now on Max.

Next time on Cautionary Tales, the second of our two episodes inspired by the regime looks at how dictatorships end. Join us for the true story of what brought down Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu. The definitive source on the life and death of Peter Palchinski is Lauren Graham's The Ghost of the Executed Engineer.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. You've been listening to Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Vital Mollard, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry.

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