“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan Storyev
How to survive authoritarianism in the United States? Maybe we can learn from the Russians. At least according to the Russian-American Dan Storyev, co-author (with Maria Kuznetsova) of How to Survive Authoritarianism, a phrasebook which provides a hundred Russian words for the nasty political things Americans can see but can’t yet name.
Storyev’s premise is that America hasn’t got the vocabulary to describe its current predicament. The country has never lived under a dictatorship, he explains, so the language simply isn’t there. Russian history, on the other hand, is defined mostly by dictatorship. Storyev experienced Putin’s post-Soviet authoritarianism, his parents Brezhnev’s stagnation, their parents Stalinist totalitarianism, their ancestors one brutal czar or another. So the Russian language shaped itself accordingly, words becoming a way to both describe and resist the authoritarian reality of their lives.
Storyev provides us with phrases like “power vertical,” a chilling Kremlin euphemism for a country where a single desk decides everything (ie: the aspiration of the current White House). Then there’s the Russian word “byudzhetniki,” meaning the budget people, whose salaries come from the state and who are therefore expected to loyally show up at the rally and at the ballot box (ie: everyone who benefits from Trump’s $5,000 handout). And the “siloviki,” the men of force (ie: ICE agents). Best of all, “mnogohodovochka,” the multistep stratagem — Moscow’s way of explaining a catastrophe as a plan too clever for ordinary mortals to follow. Which is an unpronounceable way to understand everything from Elon Musk’s ridiculous DOGE debacle to Trump’s absurd war in Iran.
Further Reading:
• How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian’s Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America by Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev (Liveright, 2026) — a hundred Russian idioms, from apparatchik to samizdat.
• “Here’s What’s Happening in America, in Six (Mostly) Russian Terms” — the authors’ 2025 New York Times guest essay, and the seed of the book.
• “Protests Are Not Emotional Support Groups” — their Persuasion argument about why the No Kings demonstrations failed, raised in this conversation.
• OVD-Info — the Russian human rights watchdog whose English newsletter Storyev writes.
• Earlier on Keen On: Gal Beckerman on how to be a dissident, Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith and Jacob Weisberg on cowardice in the MAGA age — all raised here.
Five Takeaways
• A Phrasebook, Not a Prophecy. Storyev is careful about the claim he is making. The United States is not an authoritarian country, and he says so repeatedly. What exists is a looming threat, and a faction within the ruling class that would plainly like the country to become one. The trouble, in his account, is linguistic. Americans have never lived under a dictatorship, so they have no words for its early symptoms, while Russian is saturated with them. AK’s immediate objection was a good one: millions of Americans have lived under an authoritarianism of their own, whether under Jim Crow or during the McCarthy years, and surely they know the signs. Storyev conceded the point readily, observing that those communities developed a private vocabulary for the agents of the state which never reached the mainstream. His own formulation of the difference is the one that sticks. Russia has spent three centuries learning these models of government. America is speed running them.
• Aesopian Language. The device at the heart of the book is an old one, invented by satirists under the czars and perfected in the Soviet Union: a way of attacking the state that everybody understands and no prosecutor can use. Storyev’s favourite example is mnogohodovochka, the multistep stratagem, which Russians now deploy sarcastically to describe the Kremlin’s habit of presenting every disaster as a master plan too subtle for ordinary minds to follow. The American equivalent arrived when the White House press secretary explained that journalists would understand the president’s thinking if only they had read more of The Art of the Deal. Among the young, Storyev argues, the same instinct now appears as irony poisoning: everything becomes a joke about itself, partly because jokes are harder to punish. AK brought in Lea Ypi on growing up in Hoxha’s Albania, where families spoke in opposites, and the artistic lineage that runs from Havel to Shostakovich to Tarkovsky. Resistance begins, Storyev says, in private language: first in your own head, then among friends, then with strangers. That is how movements start.
• Breaking the Law. The one moment in the hour when Storyev abandoned his hedges. American liberals, he argues, are still debating whether what the administration does is legal, and have not yet absorbed the central fact about autocrats, which is that they write the laws themselves. At some point, therefore, resistance will mean breaking them. AK pushed back hard, and on two grounds: Trump was elected and can be unelected, and once lawbreaking is licensed so, eventually, is violence. Storyev clarified rather than retreated. He is not calling for a civil war; he is calling for an end to normalization. His article with Kuznetsova argued that the No Kings protests achieved nothing because protests are not emotional support groups. He points to Steve Bannon’s own formulation — we win or we go to prison — as evidence that at least one side has stopped thinking in electoral terms, and to the unitary executive theory as the blueprint for what Russians call the power vertical. He offers no solution and says so plainly. What he offers is a vocabulary.
• The Words Themselves. Power vertical entered Russian in the late nineties, sold as a promise of order after the gangster decade, and came to mean that in the largest country on earth every decision is taken at one desk. The byudzhetniki, literally the budget people, are the teachers, doctors and students whose salaries come from the state and who are therefore expected at the rally and at the ballot box; Storyev’s American instances are the promised $5,000 payment should the Republicans hold the midterms, and Musk’s money in the Wisconsin judicial election. The siloviki are the men of force, whose ancestors are Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, riding into towns on black horses with severed dogs’ heads at the saddle; his parallel is the recruitment of ICE, which AK was unw...
