Speaker 1: Pushkin. This episode of Cautionary Tales was made an association
Speaker 1: with HBO and their new series The Regime. You can
Speaker 1: stream The Regime now on Max and you can find
Speaker 1: more episodes of this show Cautionary Tales wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. On the first of March twenty fourteen, the
Speaker 1: BBC journalist John Simpson hailed a taxi with his cameraman
Speaker 1: in Ukraine. The BBC had told them to go to Crimea,
Speaker 1: the southern peninsula sticking out into the Black Sea. Something
Speaker 1: it seemed was happening there. Nobody quite knew what. Simpson was.
Speaker 1: A veteran of foreign affairs. He had dodged Chinese bullets
Speaker 1: in Tienemann Square and American bombs in Baghdad. He'd smuggled
Speaker 1: himself into war torn Afghanistan wearing a burker. If anyone
Speaker 1: could make sense of events in Crimea, he could. As
Speaker 1: the taxi approached the thin strip of land that connects
Speaker 1: the Crimean Peninsula to the rest of Ukraine, the driver
Speaker 1: had to stop. The road was blocked. Men with guns
Speaker 1: and military uniforms beckoned the journalist and the cameraman from
Speaker 1: the car. The gunmen were hostile and threatening, Simpson wrote.
Speaker 1: They opened the taxis trunk and began to rifle aggressively
Speaker 1: through the traveler's bags. He took the cameraman's camera. But
Speaker 1: who were these people? Which army's uniforms were they in?
Speaker 1: The men at the checkpoint, he realized, were stopping everyone
Speaker 1: except local people from passing through. But what for? In
Speaker 1: his long career, Simpson had seen it all, but it
Speaker 1: had never seen anything like this. I found it hard
Speaker 1: to work out what was going on? He wrote, What
Speaker 1: was going on? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales. This episode of Cautionary Tales is something different.
Speaker 1: Three shorter stories with a theme in common. It's made
Speaker 1: possible by HBO and their news series The Regime, starring
Speaker 1: Kate Winslet as Elaina Vernon, the fictional dictator of a
Speaker 1: country in Central Europe. The character and the plot are
Speaker 1: inspired by real dictators and real events, and our friends
Speaker 1: at HBO came to us with a suggestion could Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales explore some of the true stories behind the drama.
Speaker 1: I talked to Will Tracy, writer of the Regime, about
Speaker 1: what sparked his ideas for the show. It's no coincidence
Speaker 1: that Elena Vernon and her husband Nicholas share their first
Speaker 1: names with the Chowsheskus who ruled Romania in the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties. Will told me he read up on
Speaker 1: the Emperor of Ethiopia Highly Selassie, the dictator of Syria
Speaker 1: Bashah al Assad, and the presumptive president for life of Russia,
Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin. And if you think you also see in
Speaker 1: Kate Winslet's character echoes of some war Western politicians who
Speaker 1: may be running for election, I'm not going to tell
Speaker 1: you you're wrong. The regime depicts a crisis in the
Speaker 1: dictator's rule, but here in the real world, it's democracy.
Speaker 1: It's in crisis. A few years ago, the book How
Speaker 1: Democracies Die became a best seller around the world. Over
Speaker 1: a third of under thirty fives think that a leader
Speaker 1: who doesn't have to bother with elections sounds like a
Speaker 1: good way to run a country. And so this week
Speaker 1: we present three mini tales on a theme of dictatorships,
Speaker 1: three true stories and the social science that helps explain them.
Speaker 1: Our first tale starts at that roadblock in Crimea in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. In the regime we see dictator Elena Vernham
Speaker 1: reveling in the impotent outrage of the United States when
Speaker 1: she takes control of the Faban Corridor, a disputed piece
Speaker 1: of land on her country's border. An illegal invasion, says
Speaker 1: the US. Nonsense, says Elena. No one is proposing an invasion,
Speaker 1: no one. This is an expression of peace and love
Speaker 1: towards our countrymen across the border. The real life equivalent
Speaker 1: of the Faban Corridor is Crimea, a peninsula in the
Speaker 1: Black Sea that's been conquered and reconquered by various empires
Speaker 1: over the centuries. After the breakdown of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: Crimea became part of Ukraine, but Russia kept the right
Speaker 1: to maintain some military bases there. Then, at the end
Speaker 1: of February twenty fourteen, something started to happen in Crimea.
Speaker 1: Nobody quite knew what soldiers appeared in the streets, or
Speaker 1: were they soldiers. They certainly looked like soldiers. They had
Speaker 1: guns and military style green uniforms, but these weren't the
Speaker 1: uniforms of the Russian Army or Ukraine's army. This mysterious
Speaker 1: militia soon became known as the Little Green Men. But
Speaker 1: who were they what was going on. The Little Green
Speaker 1: Men took over the airport, They took over Crimea's parliament
Speaker 1: building and hoisted the Russian flag. So they were Russian troops.
Speaker 1: Surely they must be. No, no, no, said Russia's ambassador
Speaker 1: to the European Union. There are no Russian troops there,
Speaker 1: none whatsoever. The BBC told their cameraman and journalist John
Speaker 1: Simpson to take a taxi and investigate. They found a roadblock.
Speaker 1: The Little Green Men had taken control of the border.
Speaker 1: Then they surrounded Ukrainian military installations. Crimea's government announced there'd
Speaker 1: be a referendum on joining Russia. Vladimir Putin gave a
Speaker 1: press conference. Come on, said a journalist. These men in
Speaker 1: green uniforms are Russian soldiers, aren't they. They must be,
Speaker 1: Putin replied with a straight face. You can go to
Speaker 1: a store and buy any kind of uniform. Who are they?
Speaker 1: Then local defense forces? Putin shrugged. A couple of weeks later,
Speaker 1: Crimeans went to vote under the watchful eyes of the
Speaker 1: Little Green Men. A credulity stretching ninety seven percent supposedly
Speaker 1: voted yes they wanted to be part of Russia. Putin
Speaker 1: announced the annexation two days later. In nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: at the height of the Cold War, the game theorist
Speaker 1: Thomas Schelling published a book called Arms and Influence. The
Speaker 1: Cold War fascinated game theorists. How did the two superpowers
Speaker 1: compete for advantage without pushing each other into a catastrophic
Speaker 1: nuclear response. One answer is what Shelling called salami slicing tactics.
Speaker 1: If you try to steal a sausage all at once,
Speaker 1: the owner of the sausage is likely to object. But
Speaker 1: if you take just a little slice, you might get
Speaker 1: away with it. Then you wait a while and take
Speaker 1: another and another. Salami tactics, says Shelling, were surely invented
Speaker 1: by a child. Don't go in the water, a parent
Speaker 1: tells their son. He'll sit on the bank, says Shelling,
Speaker 1: and submerge his bare feet. He is not yet in
Speaker 1: the water. You look at him and think, hmm, I
Speaker 1: suppose that's okay. Then he stands up. No more of
Speaker 1: him in the water than before, says Shelling. Now he
Speaker 1: starts paddling around. What he says, I'm not going any deeper.
Speaker 1: Yes you did just then, I saw you. Ah, But
Speaker 1: I'm back in the shallows. Now it all evens out.
Speaker 1: You see pretty soon, says Shelling. We're calling to him
Speaker 1: not to swim out of sight wandering. Whatever happened to
Speaker 1: all our discipline? Salami tactics depend on ambiguity, says Shelling.
Speaker 1: We try to draw a line. Don't get in the water,
Speaker 1: but what does inn mean? Don't invade another country? But
Speaker 1: what about supporting local self defense forces. By the time
Speaker 1: it becomes clear that our line has been crossed, it's
Speaker 1: also become much more of a hassle to do anything
Speaker 1: about it. We might decide to let it slide. As
Speaker 1: any child can tell you, the key to successful salami
Speaker 1: tactics sensing just how far you can push your luck.
Speaker 1: In the decades since Thomas Schelling wrote about salami tactics,
Speaker 1: the phrase has been used widely, but not always precisely,
Speaker 1: says the political scientist Richard Mass. He suggests a more
Speaker 1: exact definition with crimea in twenty fourteen as a perfect illustration. First,
Speaker 1: salami slicing involves a phatocomplee. You change the facts on
Speaker 1: the ground before anyone wises up enough to stop you.
Speaker 1: Putin managed that perfectly. The little Green men created just
Speaker 1: enough confusion, that nobody was sure what was happening until
Speaker 1: it had happened. Next, that phatocompley has to be limited
Speaker 1: enough in scope that it won't provoke major retaliation. Putin
Speaker 1: judged that perfectly too. The US and EU can planed
Speaker 1: the referendum was clearly a sham. They imposed some sanctions
Speaker 1: on Russia that actually taking Crimea back from Russian control
Speaker 1: would have meant military action, and they weren't willing to
Speaker 1: go that far. There's one last vital piece of the
Speaker 1: definition of salami tactics. There has to be potential for
Speaker 1: another fatal company to slice off another bit of sausage.
Speaker 1: On February twenty fourth, twenty twenty two, Russian tanks rolled
Speaker 1: into Ukraine. Putin had followed the same playbook as before
Speaker 1: by creating confusion. It massed troops on the border, but
Speaker 1: claimed it was just a training exercise. Was he really
Speaker 1: going to mount a full on invasion? Even in Russia?
Speaker 1: Many found that hard to believe. The plan was to
Speaker 1: take Kiev quickly and present the world with yet another
Speaker 1: fate a complee that this time Putin had sliced off
Speaker 1: more sausage than he could chew. The assault on Kiev
Speaker 1: was repelled and the Russian offensive was pushed back to
Speaker 1: the east of Ukraine. At the time of recording this podcast,
Speaker 1: we're two years into the war and it's unclear how
Speaker 1: much territory Russia will eventually digest, or how tempted Putin
Speaker 1: might be to try for another slice in future. How
Speaker 1: can salami tactics be countered? There's no easy answer, says
Speaker 1: Richard mass. The best we can do is be alert
Speaker 1: and try to stop each fay before it's a complee.
Speaker 1: But it's not just in geopolitics that salami tactics matter.
Speaker 1: They trip us up in parenting. Thomas Shelling knew, and
Speaker 1: if you read the best seller How Democracies Die, you'll
Speaker 1: be reminded of salami slicing too often, say the authors.
Speaker 1: There is no single moment in which an elected regime
Speaker 1: obviously crosses the line into dictatorship. Instead, there are many
Speaker 1: little steps that gradually erode the norms and institutions of democracy.
Speaker 1: Doze off, and we might wake up to find that
Speaker 1: democracy has died. We have to stay alert. Cautionary Tales
Speaker 1: will be back with another true story about dictatorships after
Speaker 1: the break. A running joke in the regime is that
Speaker 1: Dictator Elena Vernon has an unhealthy obsession with healthy air.
Speaker 1: She's convinced that she's breathing in dangerous mycotoxins because the
Speaker 1: air in her palace is too moist, so she fills
Speaker 1: the palace with dehumidifiers and insists on an aid. Following
Speaker 1: her round with a hygrometer, a newly recruited lackey is
Speaker 1: advised never breathe in her direction. Stay calm, don't vomit.
Speaker 1: It's comical, but it's based on reality. Autocrats seem to
Speaker 1: have a strange tendency towards germaphobia. When the COVID pandemic
Speaker 1: hit in twenty twenty, world leaders reacted in very different ways.
Speaker 1: The UK's Prime Minister, Boris Johnson proudly and unwisely said
Speaker 1: he'd been shaking hands with everyone on a visit to
Speaker 1: a hospital with COVID patients. Vladimir Putin meanwhile retreated to
Speaker 1: a palace outside Moscow and began to conduct government business
Speaker 1: by video call. So far, so unremarkable, But that was
Speaker 1: just the start. According to media reports, Putin installed a
Speaker 1: special disinfection tunnel for visitors to his palace. It looks
Speaker 1: like one of those walk through body scanners at airport's security,
Speaker 1: only this metal box bathed you in ultraviolet light and
Speaker 1: sprayed you with an aerosol mist of disinfectant solution that
Speaker 1: likely wouldn't have done much to halt the spread of COVID,
Speaker 1: so Putin took more precautions. Anyone who wanted to see
Speaker 1: him in person first had to quarantine. The head of
Speaker 1: the state owned oil company was said to be spending
Speaker 1: two or three weeks a month in quarantine just to
Speaker 1: have brief meetings with the president. Others made do with
Speaker 1: the video calls. Putin is not alone. Other dictators have
Speaker 1: had similar obsessions about health and hygiene. Adolf Hitler washed
Speaker 1: his hands to kill bacteria as often as a surgeon does,
Speaker 1: according to a biography of his personal doctor. Kim Jong
Speaker 1: Un is reported to travel round North Korea with his
Speaker 1: own portable toilet. It would be unthinkable for the Supreme
Speaker 1: leader to use a public restroom. Iraq's leader Saddam Hussein
Speaker 1: reportedly required that anyone who was to meet him must
Speaker 1: first take a shower under the supervision of his guards.
Speaker 1: He was once filmed lecturing a village mayor about how
Speaker 1: it's not appropriate to be out in public smelling stinky.
Speaker 1: Stories like this are common enough to seem like a trend,
Speaker 1: so what's going on. Perhaps it's just part of a
Speaker 1: wider paranoia that inflicts dictators. In nineteen seventy eight, the
Speaker 1: Romanian dictator Nikolai Chousescu and his wife Elena came to
Speaker 1: London for a state visit. Queen Elizabeth was not amused
Speaker 1: because other heads of state had warned her what to expect.
Speaker 1: The President of France told his British counterpart that when
Speaker 1: the Chouchescu stayed in Paris, they ripped all the wiring
Speaker 1: out of the walls, presumably looking for listening devices. They
Speaker 1: also stole all the ashtrays. The Queen asked her government,
Speaker 1: do I really have to have this man in Buckingham Palace? Yes,
Speaker 1: said the government. We're trying to agree a deal to
Speaker 1: make British airplanes in Romanian factories, and a state visit
Speaker 1: is part of the price. Nicolay and Elena admired the
Speaker 1: pomp and ceremony of the British monarchy. They wanted glamorous
Speaker 1: video footage of themselves in a horse drawn open topped
Speaker 1: carriage to show off on Romanian state television, so the
Speaker 1: queen told her staff to keep an eye on the
Speaker 1: ashtrays and stop anyone pulling wires out of the walls.
Speaker 1: Nikolai was sure the palace must be bugged, so he
Speaker 1: got his entourage up at six am to hold furtive
Speaker 1: meetings in the garden that amused the palace staff, but
Speaker 1: the dictator's other quirks offended them. When offered food, he'd
Speaker 1: insist that a minder taste it first, they might be
Speaker 1: trying to poison him. Then there was the germophobia. After
Speaker 1: he shook hands with anyone royal or otherwise, Chasescu would
Speaker 1: summon a lackey to pour rubbing alcohol over his hands
Speaker 1: to disinfect them. By the end of the visit, says
Speaker 1: one royal biographer, Queen Elizabeth had become so desperate to
Speaker 1: avoid her unwonted guests that she did something she had
Speaker 1: never done before and would never do again. Walking her
Speaker 1: corgiars in the palace gardens, she spotted the Chowschescus in
Speaker 1: the distance heading towards her. They hadn't seen her yet,
Speaker 1: so she jumped into a bush and hid. Paranoia is
Speaker 1: one explanation for the apparent germaphobic tendency of many autocrats,
Speaker 1: but I wonder if something more is going on. In
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, researchers Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher published a
Speaker 1: book called The Parasite Stress Theory of Values and Sociality.
Speaker 1: You're more likely to catch an infectious disease in some
Speaker 1: parts of the world than in others, they point out, Likewise,
Speaker 1: the risk varies from one time period to another. Thornhill
Speaker 1: and Fincher make the case that these differing disease risks
Speaker 1: explain a surprising amount of difference in cultures and values.
Speaker 1: For example, when people feel at high risk from pathogens,
Speaker 1: the authors argue that tends to manifest in more conservative
Speaker 1: and authoritarian politics, marked by suspicion of outsiders and demands
Speaker 1: for conformity and obedience. When people aren't so worried about
Speaker 1: infectious disease, they tend to be more welcoming of newcomers
Speaker 1: and open to diverse ways of doing things. Later, researchers
Speaker 1: looked at the twenty sixteen US election. They found that
Speaker 1: places with greater prevalence of infectious disease voted more heavily
Speaker 1: for Donald Trump. In twenty twenty, as the COVID pandemic
Speaker 1: loomed on the horizon, researchers at the University of British
Speaker 1: Columbia saw a unique chance to conduct a real time
Speaker 1: test of the idea that health warriors predict authoritarian attitudes.
Speaker 1: They quickly put together a survey asking people how concerned
Speaker 1: are you by this new US coronavirus. They also asked
Speaker 1: if people agreed or disagreed with a range of statements
Speaker 1: that reflect authoritarian values, such as what our country needs
Speaker 1: most is discipline, with everyone following our leaders in unity.
Speaker 1: On the day of the survey, at the start of March,
Speaker 1: life was still pretty normal. Lockdowns were a couple more
Speaker 1: weeks away. There'd been just a few dozen confirmed cases
Speaker 1: of COVID in the US. Boris Johnson was proudly shaking
Speaker 1: hands at a British hospital. The researchers waited a few
Speaker 1: weeks and repeated the survey when cases were much more widespread.
Speaker 1: Sure enough, in this second survey, people were not only
Speaker 1: more worried about COVID, they were also more likely to
Speaker 1: endorse authoritarian attitudes. I wonder if this research tells us
Speaker 1: something about germaphobia among autocrats. If threats to our health
Speaker 1: make us more authority, maybe it shouldn't surprise us if
Speaker 1: dictators are among the biggest hypochondriacs of all. We'll be
Speaker 1: back with our third story after the break. One of
Speaker 1: the most poignant moments in the regime is a conversation
Speaker 1: between the dictator Elena and the palace manager Agnes. Agnes's
Speaker 1: some that suffers from epilepsy and needs modern medicine, but
Speaker 1: Elena has been insisting that all he really needs are
Speaker 1: traditional folk remedies. Nobody dares disagree with her. When Agnes
Speaker 1: finally admits to Elena that the folk remedies aren't working
Speaker 1: and begs for real medicine, Elena agreed, but she also
Speaker 1: cruelly punishes Agnes for not telling the truth. Elena insists
Speaker 1: truth is so important, That's what this third and final
Speaker 1: part of our cautionary tale is about. Truth in a
Speaker 1: world that would prefer a lie. Deep under the Don Basin,
Speaker 1: to the north of the Black Sea and the east
Speaker 1: of Ukraine lie some of Russia's richest seams of coal,
Speaker 1: not a resource to be squandered. In nineteen oh one,
Speaker 1: a twenty six year old mining engineer named Peter Palchinsky
Speaker 1: had been sent by the Tsar's government to study the
Speaker 1: area's coal mines. A photograph of Palchinsky shows him with
Speaker 1: heavy eyelids under arched eyebrows, a high forehead, starched collar,
Speaker 1: and a wispy goatee beard. He looks slightly surprised and
Speaker 1: also like his trying to neden up for the camera,
Speaker 1: but hasn't quite managed it. Palchinsky came from a poor family,
Speaker 1: the oldest of twelve siblings and step siblings. Yet despite
Speaker 1: lacking money and connections, he married well to Nina, who
Speaker 1: was bright, well educated, and politically active, and he rose
Speaker 1: to positions of high responsibility thanks to his sharp intelligence
Speaker 1: and relentless energy. Palchinsky was worried by what he saw
Speaker 1: in the Don Basins mining communities. The miners were being
Speaker 1: housed forty or even sixty to a room, stacked in
Speaker 1: shared wooden bunks, like cheap goods in a warehouse. Palchinsky
Speaker 1: knew what it was to be poor, and this was
Speaker 1: no way to treat hard working men a greater asset
Speaker 1: than any seam of coal. Palchinsky put together a dossier
Speaker 1: on these working conditions. And sent it to his superiors.
Speaker 1: They decided it would be best if young Peter Palchinski
Speaker 1: were sent somewhere less politically sensitive for his next assignment,
Speaker 1: namely Siberia. Palchinski eventually managed to slip away to Western Europe,
Speaker 1: where he soaked up the latest industrial knowledge. He wrote
Speaker 1: back to the very superiors who defectively exiled him, suggesting
Speaker 1: ways in which the Russian economy might be reformed along
Speaker 1: Western lines. He also wrote love letters to his wife Nina,
Speaker 1: in which he cheerfully confessed to an affair. This was
Speaker 1: a man who just had to blurt out the truth,
Speaker 1: no matter what the consequences might be. Palchinski eventually returned
Speaker 1: to Russia, narrowly escaped being bayoneted during the Revolution of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventeen, and secured a position providing engineering advice to
Speaker 1: the Communist government of the new Soviet Union. But his
Speaker 1: compulsive honesty continued. At a time when everyone was joining
Speaker 1: professional associations controlled by the Communist Party, he refused on
Speaker 1: the grounds that engineering advice should not be distorted by politics.
Speaker 1: Even drafted a letter to the Soviet Prime Minister offering
Speaker 1: the helpful observation that technology and science were more important
Speaker 1: than communism. His alarmed friends persuaded him not to send it.
Speaker 1: What Palchinsky did send to the authorities was a series
Speaker 1: of bracingly frank critiques of their prestige industrial projects. Stalin
Speaker 1: wanted to build a vast hydroelectric dam, the Lenin Dam,
Speaker 1: across the Dnipa River in what is now Ukraine. Palchinsky
Speaker 1: dismantled the idea point by point. The Danipa moved slowly
Speaker 1: through a floodplain, so the Lenin Dam would flood huge
Speaker 1: areas of valuable farmland and many thousands of homes. It
Speaker 1: would generate little electricity and none at all in the
Speaker 1: dry season. As an alternative, Palchinsky proposed a series of
Speaker 1: smaller dams supplemented with coal fired power stations, which would
Speaker 1: be much cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable. But this
Speaker 1: technical critique was missing the point. Stalin wanted to build
Speaker 1: the world's largest hydroelectric dam, and he did. The project
Speaker 1: was an economic and engineering failure, which devastated the local
Speaker 1: ecosystem and required ten thousand farmers to be forcibly relocated.
Speaker 1: The next project on Palchinsky's radar was Magneta Gorsk, the
Speaker 1: city of Magnet Mountain. This remote mountain to the east
Speaker 1: of Moscow was packed with iron ore, and next to it,
Speaker 1: the Soviet authorities planned to build vast steel mills capable
Speaker 1: of out matching the entire steel output of the United Kingdom,
Speaker 1: along with their garden city to house workers. Palchinsky delivered
Speaker 1: another frank analysis without a detailed study of the area's geology.
Speaker 1: Was there really as much iron in Magnet Mountain as
Speaker 1: people thought? And where would the coal come from to
Speaker 1: fire these mighty steel mills. His old studies of worker
Speaker 1: conditions in the coal mines of the Don Basin also
Speaker 1: led him to worry about the fate of Magnetogorsk's workers.
Speaker 1: Palchinsky's warnings were again ignored, and again were all too accurate.
Speaker 1: Workers and their families were shipped to the site in
Speaker 1: wagons in conditions rarely seen outside Nazi Germany's concentration camps.
Speaker 1: One witness who traveled there as a child later recalled
Speaker 1: for a day and a half the door was not
Speaker 1: even opened. Mothers had children die in their arms from
Speaker 1: only the wagon in which we traveled. Four little corpses
Speaker 1: were removed. Over three thousand people died in the first
Speaker 1: winter of construction work and the iron ran out. Eventually,
Speaker 1: just as Palchinsky had feared it would, Magnetogorsk turned into
Speaker 1: a crumbling hub of shortages and alcoholism, described by one
Speaker 1: historian as blighted by almost unfathomable pollution and a health
Speaker 1: catastrophe impossible to exaggerate. Palchinsky had to the truth and
Speaker 1: been right again. That was a dangerous habit. In the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties, a young researcher named Amy Edmondson was
Speaker 1: studying the performance of medical teams at two Massachusetts hospitals.
Speaker 1: She had a simple and intuitive theory. Good teams make
Speaker 1: fewer mistakes, Yet the numbers told a very different story.
Speaker 1: The teams who displayed the best teamwork were also the
Speaker 1: ones making the most mistakes. What on earth was happening?
Speaker 1: Edmondson figured it out. Eventually, the best teams didn't make
Speaker 1: more errors, they admitted more errors. Dysfunctional teams admitted to
Speaker 1: very few, for the simple reason that nobody in those
Speaker 1: teams felt safe to own up to making a mistake.
Speaker 1: The time worn euphemism for a screw up is a
Speaker 1: learning experience, but Edmundson's insight suggests that the cliche has teeth.
Speaker 1: How can a mistake be a learning experience if nobody
Speaker 1: will admit that the mistake ever happened. Peter Balchinsky had
Speaker 1: been sent to Siberia for his frank advice to the czar,
Speaker 1: and his friends had begged him not to repeat the
Speaker 1: trick with Joseph Stalin. They knew that they lived in
Speaker 1: a society where telling the truth could get you killed.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty seven, for example, the Soviet Union carried
Speaker 1: out its first population census in eleven years. It was,
Speaker 1: says one historian, exceptionally thorough and complete. That was awkward,
Speaker 1: since the census count was eight million, shy of official projections,
Speaker 1: the consequence of the catastrophe famine caused by Stalin's policies,
Speaker 1: which had struck regions such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen thirties. The statisticians responsible for the census
Speaker 1: were promptly arrested and executed, and the census itself was suppressed.
Speaker 1: Future statisticians would not make the same mistake. A replacement
Speaker 1: census swiftly reinstated the missing eight million, and no further
Speaker 1: census was conducted for twenty years. Some time after Stalin's death.
Speaker 1: Amy Edmondson argues that you don't need to go to
Speaker 1: a dictatorship to find people who don't feel it's wise
Speaker 1: to point out problems with their organizations. Nobody in a
Speaker 1: modern business expects to be executed for telling the truth,
Speaker 1: but they might well expect to be bullied, passed over
Speaker 1: for promotion, or fired. It all depends on the corporate culture.
Speaker 1: Edmondson popularized the idea of psychological safety, when people feel
Speaker 1: they can speak openly to each other about problems, learning
Speaker 1: from mistakes, and fixing them. But psychological safety doesn't happen
Speaker 1: by accident. Edmondson gives the example of the aluminium company Alcoa.
Speaker 1: When Paul O'Neill became the boss in nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: he set the apparently unachievable target of zero workplace injuries.
Speaker 1: That was smart, not only as a safer workplace the
Speaker 1: right thing to aim for, but that target encouraged workers
Speaker 1: to focus on detail, quality and proper processes. Except how
Speaker 1: to make sure that teams on the factory floor actually
Speaker 1: focused on safety, rather than getting the message that they
Speaker 1: should simply loss over minor accidents and near misses. O'Neill's
Speaker 1: approach was simple and direct. He wrote to every worker,
Speaker 1: giving them his personal phone number and asking them to
Speaker 1: call him if there were any safety violations. That's what
Speaker 1: it takes to create psychological safety. Without psychological safety, people
Speaker 1: learn to avoid speaking uncomfortable truths. But when the truth
Speaker 1: becomes impossible to utter, society disappears into a maze of illusions.
Speaker 1: It's only a matter of time before everything falls apart.
Speaker 1: It's easy to forget how successful the Soviet system was
Speaker 1: for a time. Yes, it was brutal and repressive. Yes,
Speaker 1: millions died in famines caused by senseless policies, hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands died in prison, but the economy industrialized and grew quickly.
Speaker 1: Many Western economists speculated that the Soviet economy would eventually
Speaker 1: overtake that of the United States. That never happened, because
Speaker 1: the more the Soviet economy grew, the more important it
Speaker 1: was to get feedback about which projects were working and
Speaker 1: which were not. With the truth choked off, the Soviet
Speaker 1: system became incapable of distinguishing success from failure. One I
Speaker 1: see Leningrad Night. In April nineteen twenty eight, there was
Speaker 1: a knock on the door of Peter Polchinsky's apartment. He
Speaker 1: was arrested by the Secret police and was never seen
Speaker 1: by his wife again. Many years left, the historian Lauren
Speaker 1: Graham managed to unearth a secret police dossier on Palchinsky,
Speaker 1: documenting crimes such as publishing detailed statistics and trying to
Speaker 1: set minimal goals, in other words, trying to figure out
Speaker 1: and then tell the truth about what was possible and
Speaker 1: what was not. Palchinsky was not alone. Three thousand of
Speaker 1: the country's ten thousand engineers were arrested in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties and either imprisoned or
Speaker 1: sent to Siberia. Alongside them was Palchinsky's wife, Nina, who
Speaker 1: died there. Peter Palchinsky met a different fate. Truthful to
Speaker 1: the end, he refused to confess to crimes he had
Speaker 1: not committed, and so he was executed. The truth killed him,
Speaker 1: of course it did, and the lack of truth killed
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union. In July nineteen eighty nine, the first
Speaker 1: major strike in Soviet history began. A quarter of a
Speaker 1: million coal miners walked away from their jobs, protesting against
Speaker 1: grotesquely unsafe conditions and simple deprivations, no meat, no fruit,
Speaker 1: no soap, and no hot water. After risking their lives
Speaker 1: each day in the suffocating depths, miners couldn't even wash.
Speaker 1: The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was
Speaker 1: forced to appear on national television offering substantial concessions. The
Speaker 1: strike is far less famous than the fall of the
Speaker 1: Berlin Wall, but it was a decisive moment in the
Speaker 1: downfall of the Soviet system. The miners who walked out
Speaker 1: and humiliated Gorbachev worked, of all places in the Don Basin.
Speaker 1: It was eighty eight years since Peter Polchinsky had documented
Speaker 1: the problem of working conditions in the Don coal mines.
Speaker 1: From the beginning of the Soviet Union to its end,
Speaker 1: the country's leaders had managed to block out the truths
Speaker 1: they really needed to hear. A year on from Russia's
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two invasion of Ukraine, an anonymous Russian official
Speaker 1: told The Financial Times, it's all gone horribly wrong. The
Speaker 1: idea was never for hundreds of thousands of people to die.
Speaker 1: Putin had badly misjudged the strength of the Russian army
Speaker 1: and the strength of the Ukrainian's will to fight. But
Speaker 1: why had this salami slice failed when the annexation of
Speaker 1: Crimea in twenty fourteen had been so successful. One source
Speaker 1: gave The Financial Times a familiar explanation, nobody can tell
Speaker 1: Putin the truth. But another explanation is more surprising. Isolated
Speaker 1: behind his disinfection tunnel during the COVID pandemic, Putin had
Speaker 1: too much time to brood on the perceived injustices of
Speaker 1: the past. When historians come to debate the causes of
Speaker 1: the war in Ukraine, germaphobia may be among them. The
Speaker 1: three themes explored in this episode of Cautionary Tales, germaphobia,
Speaker 1: truth telling, and salami tactics were inspired by HBO's new
Speaker 1: series The Regime, starring Kate Winslet as the fiction dictator
Speaker 1: Elena Vernon. You can stream episodes of The Regime now
Speaker 1: on Max. Next Time on Cautionary Tales, the second of
Speaker 1: our two episodes inspired by The Regime looks at how
Speaker 1: dictatorships end. Join us for the true story of what
Speaker 1: brought down Nikolai and Elina Chashescu. The definitive source on
Speaker 1: the life and death of Peter Palchinski is Lauren Graham's
Speaker 1: The Ghost of the Executed Engineer. For a full list
Speaker 1: of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Cautionary Tales with me Tim Harford,
Speaker 1: which you can find wherever you get your podcasts. Cautionary
Speaker 1: Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Alice Finds with support from Marilyn Rust.
Speaker 1: The sound design and original music is the work of
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
Speaker 1: voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemmy
Speaker 1: Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been
Speaker 1: possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
Speaker 1: Dital Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
Speaker 1: at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
Speaker 1: tell your friends and if you want to hear the
Speaker 1: show ad free sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
Speaker 1: show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot fm.
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