How to Survive Authoritarianism: Dan Storyev on a Russian Phrasebook for America

“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 it