Authoritarian regimes invest heavily in propaganda. These lies serve not only to persuade citizens to support the acting regime, but also to shape how citizens interpret external political information, including what they believe is true, trustworthy, or even possible. In this paper, Konstantin Sonin examines why a regime would lie in ways that citizens can recognize as false, and how might those lies still reinforce political control.
Sonin argues that these lies serve a strategic purpose: to prompt citizens to generalize. Rather than focusing only on the failures of their own regime, citizens exposed to transparent falsehoods may become disillusioned with political elites more broadly.
The Kitchen Debate
Sonin brings this argument to life with a personal story about his father’s visit to the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. The exhibit famously featured a “typical” American kitchen stocked with modern appliances—dishwashers, electric juicers, and refrigerators—standard features for middle-class American households at the time. For most Soviet visitors, however, these items were unfamiliar or entirely unattainable. The Soviet government set up a parallel display of its own appliances, meant to suggest rough parity. But as Sonin notes, many attendees, accustomed to state lies, assumed that both sides were exaggerating. “Naturally,” he writes, “my father and many others assumed that the U.S. kitchen was as fake as the Soviet display.”
Rather than showcasing capitalism’s superiority, the exhibition had a leveling effect: it reinforced the belief that everyone was lying. Khrushchev himself reportedly dismissed the American kitchen as implausible. The episode, famously captured in the Nixon–Khrushchev “kitchen debate” photo, viscerally illustrates the paper’s core insight: when citizens are steeped in domestic propaganda, they often become skeptical of all political messaging.
Sonin’s model yields several key insights about authoritarian propaganda:
- When citizens observe their leader lie about something obviously false, they become more likely to believe that other politicians lie too, including those in other countries. This comparative skepticism reduces the appeal of democratic alternatives and dampens the motivation to replace the incumbent regime.
- The strategy is particularly effective when the regime can mediate or restrict access to foreign information, such as through state-run media or controlled exhibitions.
- The model also applies to democratic settings. A candidate might tell an obvious lie not to persuade directly, but to undermine the credibility of an opponent.
Authoritarian propaganda is not just about spreading lies, it is about shaping the cognitive environment in which citizens make sense of the world. Authoritarian regimes deploy messaging not to persuade in the traditional sense, but to reshape comparison, suppress alternatives, and limit hope. This research offers a powerful framework for understanding how propaganda works—even when no one believes it.