In my decades as a cultural anthropologist studying authoritarianism in Russia and the United States, I’ve learned that one of power’s most useful tricks is making responsibility vanish. Autocrats convince people that the harms they create are someone else’s fault — or no one’s fault at all.
I first thought about this sort of doublespeak in an ordinary situation. In the 2000s, as I completed my doctoral research in northern Russia, an older friend tried to teach me a lesson about dressing warmly. She stopped in the middle of the woods during a walk, looked with disapproval at my light jacket, and threw her hands up in mock confusion, surveying the snow-encrusted pines. She said, “I seem to have lost my way!” I stared, knowing she could find her way home easily. My friend continued, “I hope we don’t freeze to death!” (Having grown up during Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship in the 1940s and 1950s, when authorities sometimes took relatives away for criticizing the regime, she had learned to talk about human missteps as if they simply happened, with no one behind them.) Shivering in the woods, I found myself acting like we were really lost, even though she was the agent of chaos.
