You might as well admit it; you’ve always wondered how you would do in a vicious struggle for power. Those thoughts might be prompted by an over-long project planning meeting for a new software produce, an angry meeting of a humanities department with an associate dean, or from binge-watching Game of Thrones one too many times. But for high-ranking officials in authoritarian regimes, such thoughts are simply part of careful and judicious Thinking Ahead.

In his new book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao, Joseph Torigian anaylyzes four power struggles in Leninist regimes, arguing that party institutions did not prevent power struggles from being shaped by “the politics of personal prestige, historical antagonisms, backhanded political maneuvering, and violence.” If he’s right, then we might even be able to learn something about the future from studying the past.

Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program.

For Further Investigation

Some of the same events discussed here  with Tony Saich, when in Episode 213 we discussed the one-hundred year long history of the Chinese Communist Party.

Another conversation in which historical knowledge is applied to political possibilities.