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M. Gessen: I’m M. Gessen, an Opinion columnist at The New York Times. I often write about autocracy and what it’s like to live under a totalitarian government.
I spent my childhood in Russia and later went back as an adult and reported from the country through the rise of Vladimir Putin. Now, in the United States, I often write about what’s happening during the Trump presidency.
I’ve been writing about autocrats and aspiring autocrats for most of my professional life. I often find myself thinking about a lecture I happened to listen to several years ago. It was a talk by a psychologist about a completely different subject: Domestic violence. As she talked about the way abusers control their victims, I kept noticing how much overlap there is between that experience and what happens to people under autocratic governments.
As I looked into the subject more, I realized that this was not a coincidence. For one thing, the study of trauma suffered by totalitarian subjects has informed the study of trauma in victims of domestic violence. I wanted to talk about it with a friend and a colleague of mine, Rachel Louise Snyder.
Rachel is a contributing writer at Times Opinion who often covers domestic violence, and she’s helped me think through this connection between violence against women and autocracy.
Thanks for being here, Rachel.
Rachel Louise Snyder: Thanks for having me.
Gessen: Before we get to the meat of the conversation, can you talk to me about how you got into your area of expertise?
Snyder: I can. It’s sort of a funny answer.
I had been a baby journalist of sorts and I lived overseas: I lived in London for a couple of years, I lived in Cambodia for a long time — six years — and I traveled to around 60 or 65 countries. I did stories on gender-based violence in all of those countries — stories of child marriage, trafficking, all this darkness, and domestic violence was in all of those stories. But I was so young and naïve that I would think: That’s not my story, so I’m not going to ask this young, 12-year-old married Roma girl about the violence in her house.
It wasn’t until I moved back to America in 2009 — I was standing in the driveway of a friend of mine, my dear friend the writer Andre Dubus III, whose sister Suzanne works for a domestic violence agency. She drove up, he introduced us, and I did that very American thing, asking “What do you do?” And she said, “Oh, I work for a domestic violence agency.”
I thought, oh, like you have a shelter? And she said, well, we do. But that’s not primarily what we do. What we actually do is: We have looked at the research to determine the highest risk indicators of domestic violence homicide in order to prevent it. So we basically predict domestic violence homicide.
I said, “You do what now?”
This is a crime that happens behind closed doors. This is a crime that I, as a journalist, with all of the privileges that came with it — I’m a white journalist, I’m traveling the world, I have an education — I was blind to it. In some ways, my career ever since that day has been an attempt to pull off my own blinders and say, “Wow, this is something we need to talk about, and that we need to study.” That’s what I’ve done ever since that day.
Gessen: Let’s try to unpack some things: I want to start by talking about control and mechanisms of control. I’m going to go through a list of things that stood out to me when I first started thinking about the overlap, and I want to get your reaction.
Growing up in the Soviet Union, I was used to seemingly every aspect of our lives being controlled. The state decided who could live in which city, which building, which apartment, where you would work after university, whether you could travel, even inside the country. How does that relate to what happens in domestic abuse?
Snyder: That’s one of the primary questions, really. Abusers will start slowly: They’ll talk about clothing, they’ll talk about makeup, they’ll say things like, “Hmm, I see the way men look at you when you wear that short skirt, and so I don’t think you should wear that.” It’s couched in protectionism, and they’ll chip away at attachments to meaningful things or people, and eventually you’ll see somebody control money and work and how much a victim interacts with friends or family.
You’ll see the threat of violence as sometimes more effective and certainly more ubiquitous than actual physical violence.
Gessen: The threat of violence, as we get more into talking about the Trump administration, that just the amount of violence that we are witnessing now — given that this is a very violent society and has been for a long time — but the spectacle of violence, ICE and political violence. Taken together, I think it has transported us into a different space, where the threat of violence feels much more sort of palpable to many more people.
Snyder: It is in the language that people in this administration are using. It is in Trump saying, well, Iran, you know, they better get smart soon, or they better do the right thing. There’s an implicit threat there of violence, but there’s also — to connect it to domestic violence — it’s also absolutely victim blaming and gaslighting.
Gessen: Right. It’s the “Look what you made me do.”
Snyder: Totally. “Look what you made me do” is essentially what all scholarship up until second-wave feminism looked at when it came to domestic violence. “Well, he wouldn’t hurt her if she didn’t bring it on herself. If she could just act a certain way, be obedient in a certain way.” We’ll save this for another day, but it’s also part of the trad-wife conversations that are happening today; but I’ll put a pin in that one.
Gessen: All right, pins in place. Let’s go to No. 2 on my list — a special relationship. The domestic abuser convinces his victim that no one can understand the special love bond between them. Don’t you think an autocratic leader does something similar? I’m turning the tables on you here.
Snyder: You are. I’m thinking, well, do autocratic leaders give intermittent rewards? I bet they do.
Gessen: They do, absolutely.
Snyder: You see what I did? I turned the tables right back on you there. [Chuckles.]
Gessen: Well done, Rachel. [Chuckles.]
Snyder: Thank you.
At least from a domestic violence perspective, and trafficking is the same way — sex trafficking or even labor trafficking — what undergirds all of them is how complicated these relationships become, because victims will get these intermittent rewards; they’ll get gifts. They’ll sometimes get the gift of attention or time, and then, of course, they have a violent episode, and the cycle continues.
You’re destabilizing the relationship, but you’re also forcing that person into a state of dependency and often gratitude. The victim will think, “Oh my gosh, this person has fed me today.” Withholding food or withholding sleep is common. Actually, I want to ask you how that works — we’re going to get back to your list — but how does that work in an autocratic society?
Gessen: One thing — and this is a key similarity between gender-based violence, particularly human trafficking, and totalitarian societies — is that totalitarian leaders often set unrealistic goals for the people.
For example, in the Soviet Union there were these labor quotas, and they were completely insane. Especially in the early 20th century, they would set these quotas, and there would be maybe one factory worker somewhere in the country who was able to meet those quotas.
Then it would turn out that the whole factory was working to falsify this person being able to meet the quota — you don’t meet the unrealistic quota, most people can’t, and they don’t know whether they’re going to be penalized for not meeting it, or spared or rewarded for their factory performing better than the other factory. You’re always working with something where you can’t fulfill the expectation, you’re at the mercy of the regime or its representatives, who are the factory directors or whoever.
If they paid you, you were grateful; if they didn’t report you for not filling your quota, you were grateful, but you might also be penalized for not fulfilling your quota. That brings me to unpredictability and instability, which are key in a totalitarian society, because you’re always, in some way, outside the law — you’re always punishable.
Snyder: Right. That’s absolutely one of the key elements in domestic violence and sex trafficking: It’s that destabilization. I’ll be gender-specific in this, although I acknowledge that anybody can be a victim of domestic violence: You’re degrading women over time.
I’ve interviewed, at this point, probably thousands of domestic violence victims, and they often use that phrase, that cliché: Living on eggshells. When you live on eggshells, your own sense of your humanity collapses in on itself, by which I mean you don’t see yourself in relation to others anymore. You’re really isolated, and you check your own behavior. The abuser has taken up residence inside your own mind.
For example, you know that you have to have dinner on the table at 6 p.m. and have the kids’ toys cleaned up, but then the abuser comes home, and the goal posts are moved. It’s no longer dinner at 6 p.m.; it’s that you made chicken and you were supposed to make steak. There is this constant sense of “What am I supposed to do?” At the same time, as you know, you can read in somebody’s body language their mood — somebody that you know really well. It’s one of the things that makes domestic violence different from other crimes, like stranger-inflicted crimes.
Gessen: The next thing on my list is isolation, which you’ve already referenced, but when I was a kid, we lived behind the Iron Curtain. Getting books from abroad or listening to foreign radio was illegal, and we thought that there could be no alternative.
I grew up in a dissident family, and even we thought that there was no alternative to life as it was in the Soviet Union, but there were a lot of people who actually, truly believed that they lived in the best country on Earth.
Snyder: Wow. That’s so interesting. Isolation is really one of the first things you see in domestic violence victims’ situations. They get isolated from friends, from family.
I said earlier that the abuser takes up residence in their mind. It’s why you can see somebody walking around, running errands and still they are, as one advocate put it, “passive hostages,” because they are convinced that all the systems that might be in place to help them — if they’re even aware of those systems — are not going to be as powerful as that abuser. One way to think about it is to think of them as living in a kind of state of solitary confinement.
Gessen: Except a lot of the time it’s not solitary, and I’m mentioning that because you used the word hostage. That analysis was very helpful for me when I was writing about the Soviet period in Russian history.
There was a Russian sociologist named Yuri Levada who coined this term “collective hostage taking.” What he was describing was this mechanism of horizontal enforcement. Let’s say, if somebody was arrested for supposed anti-Soviet activity, everybody they socialized with — their whole family, their co-workers — might be punished. They wouldn’t necessarily be punished, but could be punished for not having been alert enough to this person becoming anti-Soviet.
The threat of bringing punishment — bringing violence onto the people you care about, either because you work with them or because you live with them and you love them — was enough to keep most people in line, which makes me think of women who worry about bringing violence onto their children or onto the other people they love.
Snyder: Absolutely. It’s interesting: I was listening to you, and I was thinking, “Well, this might be one of the ways that domestic violence is different, because victims are really isolated.” But you’re right — the threat of violence to family, we see that all the time: bystanders being killed.
If you think about famous mass shootings in this country, like the very first one, the Texas tower shooting in the 1960s, people forget that he started the night before by killing his mother and killing his wife. Or Sandy Hook: He started by killing his mother. There is a danger to others.
One of the interesting things about domestic violence — I’m interested in how this works in your research, if it does or if there’s a parallel — you see victims being blamed for the violence against their children: An abuser says, if you don’t get home right away, I am going to kill the kids. Kids are often used as leverage, and then if he actually does kill the kids, she is often slapped with a failure to protect — a homicide charge. Is there a parallel, or is it what you were talking about in terms of: The neighbors will get scooped up and blamed?
Gessen: Yeah, I think there is a parallel — not in terms of criminal punishment, but in terms of societal understanding. Which, in this country, I think the criminal punishment expresses, that the mother didn’t take good enough care if the kids were killed.
The social understanding in a totalitarian country is very often similar: If this person got himself or herself jailed and brought punishment onto their coworkers, then they were being irresponsible. I certainly heard it as a kid about dissidents: How could this mother get herself arrested? Doesn’t she care about her children?
Snyder: Oh my gosh, really? Wow.
Gessen: For somebody who we, in this country, now think of as a hero for standing up against the regime — but that’s not the social milieu.
I want to stay with this subject of collective hostage taking for a second, because we in this country have witnessed a milder form of it. When we see university presidents or even heads of law firms saying, “I’m just trying to protect people’s jobs” or “I’m trying to protect my students and our funding.” I take those statements with a huge, giant grain of salt. That’s probably an expression of something these people are feeling. They are feeling this huge burden of responsibility for other people and an enormous threat to being able to stay responsible for these people’s livelihoods.
Snyder: Do you take it with a grain of salt because there’s obviously some self-serving reasons for people to fall into line?
Gessen: That’s a great question. I think because focusing on that value of protecting people’s jobs, say, in a university setting, requires ignoring all of these other values that a university administrator is supposed to uphold — like academic freedom. That’s why I take that statement of motivation with a grain of salt.
Getting back to my list — probably the most important thing that ties these kinds of control together is the psychological effect. I’ve heard it described as low-level dread, which is distinct from a state of high anxiety.
In high anxiety, you are really unable to function, but somebody who lives in a state of low-level dread can go to work, can do the grocery shopping, can prepare lunch for their kids, and at the same time, as you said, the abuser has taken up residence in their brain — or the totalitarian leader, or the regime, has taken up residence in their brain. There isn’t room there, in this state of low-level dread, for acting creatively, for forming meaningful social connections, and most importantly, for planning for the future.
Snyder: Yes, absolutely. That resonates with my experiences with domestic violence victims. When they are in that state of dread, as you put it, they can’t make meaningful decisions around, for example, breaking free.
In fact, there’s an organization called D.C. SAFE that told me years ago, when I was researching for my book, that they realized in a moment of crisis — say, there’s a violent moment and the police are called and they’re getting a woman and her children to shelter. If they could just provide a go bag for that family that had 24 hours of supplies in it — that had a grocery card for food, that had some diapers, maybe some baby formula, just really basic things — they found that victims of domestic violence were able to make much better long-term decisions just by having those things in that moment of crisis being taken care of in that moment.
Gessen: What’s happening there? Is it that their basic needs are met for a minute and they can think of something else?
Snyder: Yes, and I’ve thought of this in every trial I’ve ever covered when it comes to domestic violence: Probably the most common question that I get asked as someone who covers domestic violence is: Why didn’t they just leave?
It’s really difficult to explain to a judge or a police officer why you can’t just leave. The bureaucratic hurdles, the financial hurdles, the manipulation — but I don’t think we ever actually ask that of citizens of autocracy. I wonder if you see a parallel there.
Gessen: I think there’s a parallel in the actual difficulty of leaving, and maybe talking through it will be a little illuminating.
Imagine what it’s like to leave a country: The bureaucratic hurdles, the logistics of it, the expense of it. Again, we’ve talked about the inability to plan for the future. If you’re isolated in a totalitarian country, how do you even imagine what it’ll be like to live somewhere else, to have your circumstances change?
It’s not actually dissimilar from the situation of somebody who has been isolated at home, who has been entirely focused on surviving in the situation — it’s almost like having to learn a new language, and certainly it is like immigration; like learning to live anew.
I think people do understand that about the subjects of totalitarian countries — they understand how hard it is, and I think they also have more compassion just for how hard it is to leave your home. People hope to the last to be able to just stay at home in a place that maybe they once loved and are hoping to love again.
Snyder: Yeah, and certainly among people they love, but it’s interesting — what do people in a totalitarian country imagine about living somewhere else, especially if they’re told it’s the best country in the world?
Gessen: Exactly. Well, when my family was making plans to immigrate, a friend of my parents asked as a kind of joke — but maybe not exactly a joke — he said: “What evidence do we have of the existence of the West?”
Snyder: Really? Like the very truth of the United States as a place, or Western Europe, or —
Gessen: There was no material evidence. We certainly didn’t know anybody personally who had been to the United States.
Snyder: But didn’t you have Levi’s? I thought Levi’s were a big thing on the black market.
Gessen: Levi’s were a big thing, but how do we know that it comes from this magical place that is supposed to exist? Maybe they make it in Albania.
Snyder: Oh, right.
Gessen: We had material evidence of the existence of the Eastern Bloc, but not places farther away.
Snyder: Wow, so you can’t even imagine. There is a parallel there that I see with domestic violence victims: “How do I raise my kids? What am I going to do? What does it look like over there?”
Gessen: So let’s try to bring this home. We’ve established the similarities, and now let me point out something pretty obvious, which is that autocratic ambition, on the one hand, and gender-based violence, on the other hand, have really come together in the Trump administration.
There’s the president himself, accused of sexual violence by multiple women and found liable in one case. There’s the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, accused of sexual assault. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been accused of sexual assault. We can think back to the Kavanaugh hearings during the first Trump administration, which to me were the first real illustration of how this movement that Donald Trump leads treats gender-based violence. What do you think the effect of that is on us as a society?
Snyder: I knew we were going to get around to this — we can’t forget Cesar Chavez, too, most recently.
Gessen: Yes, I mean, I’m not trying to imply that gender-based violence is limited to the right or to the Trump administration. We obviously know that it’s not — Eric Swalwell, the Democrat from California, is the most recent example. But there’s this concentration in this administration — and I would also say there’s something else that’s specific to this administration, which is a shamelessness about it.
Snyder: Yeah, there’s almost a pride about it.
What do I think it does to us? At its most basic level, it travels through a society, and it gives license to all kinds of, I’ll say, bad actors in normal society. There is evidence that domestic violence is on the rise. There are a number of states where domestic violence homicides are on the rise.
There’s research around — for a long time, it was held that there were three women a day killed in the U.S. Now it looks like it’s closer to five. I do think it normalizes abuse; certainly, it normalizes emotional abuse and coercive control. We haven’t talked all that much about coercive control.
Gessen: Can you define that?
Snyder: Coercive control is exactly what it sounds like: You are coercing somebody into doing things that they might not or probably would not otherwise do. You’re most often coercing them through threats of violence or through the destabilization of their reality.
We see this in the Trump administration — I think we all saw this in that famous meeting of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, where JD Vance just belittled him and told him: You’re showing no gratitude.
And I also think, and I don’t know if this has a parallel to authoritarianism or not, but certainly in the States we have this glorification of what I would call gendered violence, of male violence.
Senator John McCain’s whole identity was based around his own experience as a victim of violence during the Vietnam War. On the other hand, you have somebody like Senator Joni Ernst, who is I don’t know how many years into being a senator before she talks about her own experience as a domestic violence survivor and sexual assault survivor, or rape survivor.
Male violence in this country is not something to be ashamed of, but domestic violence carries this real shame to it. This public failure to hold or acknowledge those victims of violence — do you see any connections there?
Gessen: I do, as a matter of fact.
Obviously, you pointed out that this isn’t new, but I think it’s kind of on steroids under this administration, this glorification of male violence and this violent posturing. I even think of JD Vance saying that the pope should be careful when talking about religion or Pete Hegseth the other day saying to Congress members, “Be careful what you say” or “How dare you challenge me?” The secretary of what they’re now calling “war,” not “defense.”
Snyder: That’s right.
Gessen: This sort of “be careful what you say,” and directed at a totally inappropriate person, is a display of that bullying violence. Totalitarian societies — which we’re not yet one by any means — but that’s what they want to create.
The totalitarian societies are mobilized societies. They are societies united by having enemies and by being ready to act violently together. That’s what you see in Russia, where Putin mobilized the entire country against Ukraine. That’s really when Russia became totalitarian, not just autocratic. That’s the glorification of what you’re calling male violence — it’s exactly serving that purpose.
Let me bring this to what nobody listening expects, which is a somewhat hopeful conclusion.
Snyder: It’s so out of character for both of us. [Chuckles.]
Gessen: I know. It’s crazy, but I actually think that the conversation we just had offers a little bit of a way to think about what we’re living through in this country right now, and maybe some recipes for action. Tell me: What works in the domestic violence field?
Snyder: It’s so hard for me to be positive; it’s not my natural state. [Chuckles.]
I do think conversations like this are so important because at the same time as our administration and our leaders might be normalizing violence, we can actually normalize conversations around caring and community outreach. One of the things I think about so often is in all of my domestic violence victim interviews — and this is going back 20 years now — I have never once done an interview where a victim hasn’t said some version of “I’m not your typical victim” to me. Nobody sees themselves as — I don’t even know what that means — a typical victim of domestic violence.
One thing is to just talk about it: to talk about coercive control, of financial control, emotional control, to allow people to recognize their own victimization. One of the people I consider one of my personal heroes, Judith Herman, the great intellectual thinker, says — I’m paraphrasing her here — but she says: To speak about experiences in sexual or domestic life is to invite public humiliation, to invite ridicule and disbelief. The silence of women gives license to every form of sexual and domestic exploitation.
Now, that may not sound positive to you, but what it says to me is the recipe is very simple: We have to talk about it, and we have to allow each other the space to recognize what it is.
Gessen: I would add to this, and correct me if I’m wrong, that having connections outside of the abusive situation, having community support and having meaningful social connections is essential for somebody being able to get out from under the abuse.
Snyder: Absolutely essential.
Gessen: That makes me think of Minneapolis.
Minneapolis is the best example we have, so far, of people actually being able to resist the Trump administration’s actions, and it was a resistance effort that changed things in the city and even changed policy, it appears, in the administration. It is by far the most successful resistance effort, and what I would focus on in that effort is (a) language: That city named what was happening; they called it an occupation.
Snyder: Right.
Gessen: They weren’t calling it ICE raids. They saw what was happening to them as a very specific thing that called forth a collective effort of resistance.
The other thing that was super important to that effort was the mutual-aid networks that had existed since Covid and since the George Floyd protests. They had a long history. They were well established. There were bonds of trust. People were able to work together, help one another and also use the language that helped them act.
Snyder: Yes, and it seemed like it grew organically from those established communities. You’re right, it is powerful, and also — shout-out to my fellow Midwesterners there, because we are cornfed, strong people.
Minneapolis — it makes me think of the Gloria Steinem awareness talks that she would hold in her living room throughout the 1970s and 80s, and how we need to bring those back. We need to bring back ——
Gessen: Consciousness raising.
Snyder: That’s what it was called. You know, I’m so young that I didn’t remember. [Chuckles.]
Gessen: [Chuckles.] I know — I’m here to tell you, it was called consciousness raising.
Snyder: Exactly. Yes.
Gessen: C.R., for short.
Snyder: [Chuckles.] Thank you, my friend.
Gessen: All right, so here’s the recipe: Talk to one another, call things by their proper names.
Snyder: Call them by their names.
Gessen: And help one another.
Snyder: Yeah, kind of like what you and I do for each other.
Gessen: Thank you, Rachel.
Snyder: Thank you, Masha.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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