This chapter lays out a novel theory of elite cohesion, coercive capacity, and authoritarian social order. Enabling and controlling coercive agents is a fundamental challenge confronting all dictators. Actors like secret police chiefs pose a grave threat to incumbent authoritarian elites because they hold the means of violence and could use them to overthrow their masters. Elites’ task of monitoring and controlling their coercive agents is a collective action problem. All members of an authoritarian ruling coalition are better off if they cooperate to control coercive agents. However, individual authoritarian elites have incentives to defect from cooperation. When authoritarian elites cannot cooperate to prevent insubordination by coercive agents, they reduce coercive capacity. Institutions promote authoritarian elite cohesion. They provide structures of shared expectations or focal points that allow authoritarian elites to pool their resources, cooperate, and control coercive agents. In Cold War communist Central and Eastern Europe, Stalinism was the institutional structure that promoted elite cohesion and led to the construction of large, capable coercive institutions across the region.

In this chapter, I analyze data on over 300 individual members of the communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. I explore how an abrupt post-Stalinist transition in the wake of the Soviet dictator’s death affected elite cohesion and the relationship between ruling coalitions and their coercive subordinates. Specifically, I test whether breakdowns in elite cohesion led to more punishment of coercive agency chiefs, and their more frequent removal from office. My test of this argument exploits both variation in elite cohesion across Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes, and variation in Soviet authority over different types of coercive agents. I analyze original data on members of communist ruling coalitions to estimate survival models of their tenures. I find that the tenures of Defense Ministers and secret police chiefs were similar under Stalinist coalitions, but secret police chiefs had significantly shorter tenures than Defense Ministers under post-Stalinist coalitions.

This chapter introduces the research design and comparative case studies in Part II of the book. In this part of the book, I present historical case studies of Poland and East Germany. This is the qualitative component of the integrated, multimethod difference-in-difference research design with which I test the theoretical propositions laid out in Chapter 2. The first case experienced a post-Stalinist transition, while the second did not. By carefully tracing developments in elite cohesion and coercive capacity across the two otherwise very similar cases, I demonstrate that post-Stalinist transitions caused reductions in coercive capacity. I do so by showing that trends in capacity were similar across the Polish and East German regimes before 1953; that post-Stalinist transitions occurred randomly and were not themselves a function of coercive capacity; and by tracing the causal mechanisms that linked transitions to declines in capacity.

In this chapter, I explain why the Stasi became the largest and most capable secret police force in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The shock of Stalin’s death did not cause a leadership transition and wholesale repudiation of Stalinism in the GDR. Instead, the ruling coalition persisted and purged their rivals after 1953. Walter Ulbricht and his fellow elites survived and persisted in their strong commitment to a harsh, Stalinist regime of repression. This persistence had profound consequences for the security apparatus, repression, and social order. The Stasi continued its growth in capacity to become an all-present repressive force. The story of elite cohesion and coercive capacity in East Germany is one of continuity and growth – unlike that of disruption, collapse, and stagnation in Poland. And as the commitment to surveillance and repression continued unabated in the GDR, the fortunes of regime opponents waned. With a few notable exceptions, dissidents and opponents were isolated and neutralized in East Germany.

In this part of the book, I move from a comparative historical analysis of Poland and East Germany in Part II to an analysis of quantitative data drawn from all the socialist dictatorships of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The purpose of the following two chapters is to test whether the argument developed in Chapter 2 can travel beyond the Polish and East German cases examined above to explain variation in the turnover of coercive elites and the size of coercive institutions across the region from 1945 to 1989.

In this conclusion, I draw broader lessons for the study of authoritarian regimes from the analyses of this book. I call for greater attention to coercive institutions by scholars of authoritarian politics, and for authoritarian regimes to be theorized as groups rather than unitary actors. I briefly discuss the applicability of my theoretical argument to the Chinese case. Under Mao Zedong, breakdown of elite cohesion during the Cultural Revolution was associated with a decline in the capacity of the Ministry of Public Security. This mirrors reductions in coercive capacity after post-Stalinist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe.

This introduction lays out the problem of enabling and controlling coercive agents under authoritarian regimes. It describes puzzling variation in the size and activities of coercive institutions across six regimes in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The theoretical approach of the book is briefly discussed, emphasizing elite cohesion over political threats. The research design, plan, and empirical findings of the book are discussed.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how the shock of Stalin’s death in 1953 caused a collapse in the cohesion of the Polish communist ruling coalition. This breakdown caused a persistent decline in the regime’s coercive capacity. The transition to a post-Stalinist ruling coalition in Warsaw removed the institutional basis for cooperation among PZPR elites. The highest echelons of the communist regime could no longer agree on an appropriate repressive policy or effectively monitor and control their coercive agents. The reformed and reduced post-Stalinist secret police simply did not employ enough agents and secret informants to effectively monitor and repress opponents. Opposition to the communist government among industrial workers and university students crystallized in the 1960s, persisted for decades, and became organized in durable social movements. By the late 1970s, the Polish regime faced a large, well-organized opposition movement in the trade union, Solidarity. The imposition of martial law and reconstruction of the security apparatus after the militarization of the regime in 1980 were too little, too late for the PZPR regime.

In this chapter, I test the effects of post-Stalinist transitions on two important measures of agency capacity: officers employed and individuals registered as secret informants by coercive agencies. I present an original cross-national dataset on officer and informant numbers for every coercive agency in communist Central and Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989. I show that countries that experienced post-Stalinist transitions had similarly sized coercive agencies to other states before 1953, but these agencies shrank thereafter while others continued to grow. I then estimate a series of difference-in-difference models to test the effect of post-Stalinist transitions on agency size. I find that agencies under post-Stalinist regimes had significantly smaller coercive agencies after Stalin’s death. This confirms the theoretical logic laid out in Chapter 2 in a broader setting than the comparative historical analyses of Poland and East Germany in Chapters 4 and 5. Although the number of cases and coverage of data here are limited, my results suggest that the logic of elite cohesion and coercive capacity laid out in Chapter 2 is applicable to a wide range of authoritarian regimes.