Communist Coups: Authoritarianism And the Fate Of Three Revolutions

Abstract: How do leaders win power struggles in Leninist regimes? The political science literature emphasizes the importance of institutions in such polities: institutionalization allegedly provides a mechanism for distributing patronage, prevents the military and secret police from playing a special role, and strictly delineates the group that selects the leadership. This project instead argues that the defining feature of one-party states is the lack of institutionalization. Power struggles are therefore determined by prestige and sociological ties, politicized militaries and secret police, and the manipulation of multiple decision-making bodies. I test the relative explanatory value of these two competing sets of hypotheses by examining the power struggles fought by Nikita Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping, and Kim Ilsung. The historic failure to institutionalize leadership selection had a tragic legacy: its absence is crucial for understanding the origins of stagnation, the tragedy at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the Kim family multi-generational personality cult. 

About the Speaker: Joseph Torigian is a Ph.D. student at MIT interested in Chinese, Russian, and North Korean elite politics and qualitative methods. His current research uses archival material to investigate how war affects political authority in authoritarian regimes. Before coming to MIT, Joseph worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and studied China's policies towards Central Asia as a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. He has conducted dissertation research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. He received his BA in Political Science at the University of Michigan and speaks Chinese and Russian.