If It Looks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck...

HOW TO SURVIVE AUTHORITARIANISM:
A RUSSIAN’S PHRASEBOOK FOR EVERYDAY LIFE IN AMERICA

By Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev
Liveright; 232 pp.; $19.99

BUY THE BOOK

This bright red giftbook-sized volume might give one the impression that How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian’s Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America will be light reading, even humorous, but there just isn’t anything funny about indications that the United States is trying to mimic the worst aspects of Russian (and Soviet) governance. A second subtitle might be: “All Unhappy Authoritarian Societies Are Alike.”

The authors are Russian natives living in America who announce in their introduction that this is a “guide we hope you won’t need,” but obviously we Americans have needed it for at least the last ten years. Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev make their points punchier and more briefly than the great M. Gessen, who has been reminding us for decades that if a would-be tyrant says tyrannical things, he means them.

Each of the nearly 100 entries (laid out in five sections: Power, Corruption, Propaganda, War, Resistance) comes with a Russian phrase in Cyrillic and transliterated (e.g. Лес рубять – щепки летят: Les rubyat – shchepki letyat) and the English equivalent or approximation (“When the forest is felled, chips fly”) as well as sometimes the roots and history of the word or phrase. Learning the “joke” or ironical meanings of the phrases and idioms is interesting, while also goading me into an anger and exasperation that we have allowed our democracy to be shredded by crooks and ignoramuses.

How to Survive Authoritarianism reminds me of Voltaire’s anti-authoritarian Philosophical Dictionary (1764), with nothing to offend you unless you’re a Putinite or Trumper. It’s little consolation that  tyrants’ cronies often come to a bad end, victims of their master’s paranoia or peevishness:

“The hidden paradox of authoritarianism is that while it appears to be stable from the outside, inside it is fragile and chaotic. A crisis may brew under the surface for a long time and then erupt seemingly out of nowhere.”

Kuznetsova and Storyev point out the difficulty of finding truth amid slagheaps of lies: “In 2025, the Kremlin’s Pravda Network published as many as twenty thousand articles of pro-Russian propaganda on the internet a day. Those articles were not meant to sway anyone reading them. … They are published to pollute the large language models (LLMs) that scrape the internet for new data.  … Western chatbots are unwittingly, invisibly molded into instruments of authoritarian propaganda.” Truth stands tall but lonely – lies always have lots of company. Cheaters, criminals and political henchmen despise truth and knowledge because they’re not pliable.

Resistance to authoritarianism isn’t futile, but it’s demanding and occasionally, before or after the fact, punishable by law: “Был бы человек, а статья найдется: Give me the man, and I’ll find the crime.”  The authors urge us to stick together, despite disagreements – to be a team: “A unifying strategy that maximizes damage to an authoritarian regime is difficult to implement. But it is important to keep the bigger goal in mind. Only dictators benefit from the internal struggles and disorder within opposition movements.”

There’s no check-the-box and total up the numbers to figure out what the United States’ score is on the authoritarianism scale, but, for the moment, the brutes are winning. The authors discuss the expression В России нужно жить долго (One must live long in Russia); while it used to mean that

“you just had to wait long enough” for justice, “other Russians prefer to use the phrase ironically: Live long enough, and you will bear witness to all manner of unbelievable, often horrific, upheavals. Among the anti-Kremlin opposition of the 2010s, however, it was used to remind people that fighting tyranny is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Kuznetsova and Storyev evoke Alexei Navalny’s fateful but heroic slogan: “Beautiful Russia of Tomorrow,” which “drew its power from hope. Great resistance slogans should inspire people to think of the future with optimism instead of dwelling on the glories or humiliations of the past.” How to Survive Authoritarianism is like a birder’s guidebook for American residents. Before you even try to name the bird, watch it, observe what it does. And then, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, confidently conclude: it’s a duck!

– Bob Blaisdell