The Good Tsar Bias

Ian Kershaw's remarkable book The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich is a really clever piece of public opinion archeology. It attempts to reconstruct the rise and fall of Hitler's popularity in Nazi Germany, drawing primarily on secret reports compiled by the Gestapo, the Security Service of the SS, and the clandestine agents of the banned Social Democratic Party -- a task fraught with methodological pitfalls, given the enormous levels of repression the Nazi party was capable of exercising over the German population. (Suffice it to say that preference falsification was rife, compounded by biased reporting by the public opinion researchers of all these organizations, but Kershaw nevertheless manages to extract much useful information from his sources). Among other things, the book makes the case that, at least until the war started turning sour in late 1942, Hitler was far more popular than the Nazi Party, which quickly grew to be disliked, even despised, by the vast majority of Germans,  despite the initial improvement in economic conditions they experienced in the early years of the Third Reich:

At the centre of our enquiry here is the remarkable phenomenon that Hitler’s rising popularity was not only unaccompanied by a growth in the popularity of the Nazi Party, but in fact developed in some ways at the direct expense of his own Movement. (p. 83)

In Kershaw's telling, the contrast arose primarily from the fact that the "little Hitlers" (as Party functionaries were sometimes derogatorily called) were constantly encountered in everyday life, where they were perceived, not without ample justification, as corrupt and overbearing, while Hitler operated on a "higher" plane, concerned with the "big questions" of war and peace:

The ‘little Hitler’ type was ... by no means omnipresent, but was nevertheless sufficiently widely encountered to provoke extensive criticism and to tarnish irreparably he image of the Party. In a sense, the Party functionaries were reaping the harvest of the prejudice which they themselves had helped to sow against local politicians and ‘bigwigs’, and had to face the daily dissatisfaction and discord as the rebound from the utopian hopes in the Third Reich which they had stirred up. The ‘little Hitlers’ in the forefront of the local scene had to bear the brunt of the discontent. In stark contrast, the ‘Hitler myth’ - clearly in part a subconscious mechanism to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the Third Reich - stood aloof from the dissension on a lofty and untouchable plane (p. 97) 

The Führer ... appeared to be on an elevated plane far removed from the humdrum problems of everyday life and was presumed to be preoccupied with the 'mighty' issues of the nation, pondering matters of foreign and defence policy, of war and peace, holding the fate of the nation in his hand. It was a domain which, in peacetime at any rate, scarcely affected material interests in any direct or obvious way, but one which could be called upon to engender - even if only temporarily - high emotional involvement and maximum national unity (p. 121)

Hitler's increase in popularity at the expense of the Nazi Party was not just a result of perceptions about their different spheres of responsibility; it was also amplified by the strategic choices people made in order to express dissatisfaction in a highly repressive environment where open criticism of the Führer could carry severe consequences. For example, Church leaders who wished to criticize Nazi anti-Christian policies during the "Church struggles" of the mid-1930s attempted to protect themselves against retaliation by preemptively praising Hitler and declaring themselves loyal supporters of him, but as a result they ended up reinforcing perceptions of a good Hitler vs. the bad party underlings who perverted his intentions: "The professions of loyalty to the Führer were in part a ploy to offset criticism of the Party, the SS, of the Church’s number one Nazi hate-figure, Alfred Rosenberg. ... [but] whatever the motives, the actual effect was the enhancement of the myth of the ‘good’ Führer detached from and set against the evil of the Party radicals" (p. 113). And the tactic was also available to other critics of the regime's policies, such as opponents of the murders committed under the Action T4 euthanasia program.

The divergence between Hitler's popularity and the party's unpopularity was not without important political effects. Time and again, Hitler was able to use his position "above the everyday" to discipline the Nazi party and cement his position at the expense of "radicals" -- for example, during the Röhm purge and the "Night of the Long Knives," as well as during the aforementioned "Church struggles." And it would seem that Hitler's personal popularity prevented widespread dissatisfaction with the Third Reich during peacetime from developing into a more serious challenge to the regime; at the very least, it kept in check the party's many centrifugal tendencies, discouraged potential competitors for Hitler's position, and probably helped him accumulate ever more absolute power.

The point that interests me here, however, is that, according to Kershaw, ordinary Germans rationalized the dissonance involved in both disliking the Party Hitler claimed to represent, even embody (more than once, Hitler claimed that "the Führer is the Party and the Party is the Führer", to cite a 1935 statement - p. 83) and supporting, even adoring, Hitler, by means of a particular kind of exculpatory rationalization: "that Hitler was being kept in the dark about the real state of affairs" (p. 102). Or, more vividly, as a Party member from the Upper Palatinate put it in 1934, "Hitler would be all right, but his underlings are all swindlers" (p. 83).

Regardless of the specifics of the Nazi case, these sorts of rationalizations seem common enough that they deserve a name. We find something like them, for example, in the combination of dissatisfaction with the Venezuelan government and genuine love of Chavez characteristic of many Chavistas even before Chavez' death; or in the contrast between the apparent popularity of Putin and the unpopularity of much of Russia's political class and governing apparatus; and perhaps also in the Franco regime, with the disjunction between Franco's apparent high prestige and the unpopularity of the Falange during the 1940s and 1950s. And they seem rooted, as Kershaw implies, in some kind of general cognitive bias or psychological mechanism that operates in a wide variety of contexts. I don't know if psychologists have already baptized the particular mechanism that produced the contrast between the perception of a "Führer without sin" (as a report Kershaw quotes actually says) and the widely detested "little Hitlers" -- Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases doesn't have quite the thing I'm looking for -- but I propose to call it "the good Tsar bias," for the proverbial attitude of ordinary Russians to the Tsar in contrast to his ministers before the revolution. (Whether ordinary Russians actually held this attitude is a different question -- looking around lazily, I can only find one good reference, in W. Bruce Lincoln's Sunlight at Midnight, p. 188 -- but the belief that they did was already proverbial in the 1930s. Even the Security Service of the SS made reference to the "good tsar" idea to account for the widespread finding of their public opinion researchers that people hated the Nazi party, but did not blame Hitler for their everyday woes; Kershaw quotes a report from them that claims that before WWI in Russia people used to explain their dissatisfaction with the government by saying that "Father Tsar knows nothing of it, he would not wish or tolerate it" before going on to warn that "Russia's fate proves this principle is dangerous" -- p. 102.)

The bias comes from the failure to notice that, as Brad Delong used to say, "the cossacks work for the Tsar"; some cognitive or emotional dissonance management mechanism prevents people from acknowledging connections between the proximate and the more remote causal agents of their dissatisfaction that, in retrospect, seem obvious. After all, why, if the leader is so good, does he surround himself with such poor collaborators? In the Hitler case, Kershaw talks about the "naïvety" of the people expressing belief in the "good Führer", and claims that this seems explainable only due to a "prevailing psychological necessity to have a national leader of stature existing in an elevated sphere outside of and removed from the 'conflict sphere' of the everyday political arena" (p. 119). But the dissonance management mechanism seems a bit more general than this.

Though the "good Tsar bias" seems to be related to what psychologists call the just world bias, insofar as it appears to serve as a compensatory form of system justification, it does not seem to be quite the same thing. The "good Tsar" bias does not incline people to say that the world is just, or to rationalize injustice as somehow deserved, only to deny that those leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the nation (the Tsar, the Führer, the King, etc.) bear responsibility for bad outcomes in everyday life; that responsibility, instead, is assigned to subordinates. In this respect, the bias appears to be more closely related to what Dan Kahan and others have called "identity-protective cognition": the closer a leader is tied to the symbols of the nation or group with whom they identify, and the closer people's identification with the nation or group is, the more difficult it should be for them to accept that the leader is responsible for bad outcomes, since such acceptance threatens one's identity, and the more likely it will be for them to displace that responsibility onto subordinates as a protective measure. And leaders, like Hitler, who are the focus of high-intensity rituals associated with big national occasions -- plebiscitary elections, victories in war, even set-piece speeches on the occasion of good economic news -- are precisely the sorts of leaders who become associated with important community symbols; indeed, in important ways, they come to symbolize the community, as long as the rituals are successful. For this reason, competitive systems of leadership selection should mitigate the bias, since they prevent leaders from being too closely identified with the symbols of the nation, whereas traditional monarchies should amplify it, given the typical association of the monarch with the symbols of the community as such. And wherever the bias operates, leaders should be able to more easily accumulate power at the expense of subordinates.

But even leaders who are closely tied to the symbols of the community cannot always avoid association with some bad outcome; and in these cases the bias should diminish. Despite the best efforts of Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry (and the total monopoly over the media that the Nazi Party commanded, enforced by draconian measures against listening to foreign broadcasts), the defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad irreparably tarnished Hitler's own image, since he had repeatedly taken responsibility for the conduct of the war and stressed the importance of taking the city. The outcome could simply not be blamed on malicious or incompetent subordinates. Indeed, we may even observe an inversion of the bias, in which the subordinates are generally exculpated, and superiors are generally blamed, for bad outcomes; I suspect something like that went on at the end of the war in Germany. 

Readers, are there any other good examples of this bias? 

The Tedium of Authoritarianism

As part of my research on Francisco Franco, I recently had the opportunity to spend some time at the Archivo General de la Administración near Madrid, looking at old files from the wartime years produced by the National Press and Propaganda Delegation of the Falange and the Vice-secretariat for Popular Education that subsumed it after 1941. (Between 1938 and 1966, newspapers in Franco’s Spain were subject to prior censorship, with the Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular in charge of providing guidance to the media and administering the actual censorship apparatus between 1941 and 1945). These were the years when the Franco regime was at its most “fascistic,” most concerned with mobilizing and indoctrinating the population via the media. I was especially interested in old “consignas” – instructions to the newspapers about what to publish or not to publish, often quite detailed, sometimes even including directives about the exact wording of articles or the typography to be used for the headlines. While reading through these “consignas,” it struck me that they provided much evidence of what we might call the censor’s dilemma: a press that uniformly reports one message directed from above is a boring press, incapable of genuinely holding the attention of its readers and thus ultimately of indoctrinating them; but a press that shows originality may stray into dangerous territory, promoting unapproved and subversive thoughts.

The Spanish censors of the time were perfectly aware of the need to produce a lively, stimulating press if any indoctrination was to happen at all, and hence to avoid the excessive use of “official” speeches and obvious propaganda. For example, in a circular from 1940, the national press chief complains about the excessive publication of political speeches without commentary, and exhorts newspaper directors to exercise original thinking and journalistic judgment rather than publishing every speech sent to them; while in 1941 he urges newspapers to be original in the special issues they are supposed to produce to commemorate the Día del Caudillo (1 October, the anniversary of Franco’s elevation to Chief of State in 1936) and the death of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange (20 November), rather than to regurgitate the text of the scripts sent to them from the National Delegation, and bitterly alludes to the halfhearted fulfillment of such instructions in the past. Other documents encourage newspaper directors to find the “less well-known” anecdotes about particular figures they are ordered to celebrate, like Miguel Primo de Rivera, though these anecdotes still needed to be “exemplary.” In 1942 several newspapers are reprimanded for their lack of attention to their editorials section, where, understandably, they never publish anything that is not officially suggested (“absteniéndose de publicar ninguno que no sea sugerido oficiosamente”), and are ordered to produce more original content; and at around the same time some provincial chiefs are admonished not to micro-manage the newspapers in their jurisdiction, presumably so as to avoid losing the attention of local audiences, bored to death by an unremitting diet of speeches and other “official” announcements. Occasionally newspaper directors are implored to try to take away the “official flavor” (“quitándole … todo sabor oficial”) of the articles they are ordered to publish and the propaganda campaigns they are supposed to run; and even the film section is sometimes criticized for a lack of interesting and original writing.

Yet one senses that the effort is doomed; already in 1944 the exhortations to originality cease, and ever more detailed scripts (“guiones”) to newspaper editors, specifying in great detail what needs to be published and how, become more common. And the press remained boring and distrusted, as confidential reports, declining circulation, and other evidence indicates. (I can testify to that, having spent a lot of time over the past few months reading 1940s issues of Arriba, the regime’s mouthpiece). Even Franco himself agreed, as Stanley Payne reports in his classic book on the Franco regime: in the late 40s and 50s, Franco “often ignored the Spanish press since his censorship rendered it predictable and rarely interesting.” (Though “[h]e did sometimes look at the New York Times, considering it a “bulwark of international Masonry” on which he needed to be informed and with which he could practice his limited English”; Kindle locs 9311-9314).

At the end of the day, a boring Spanish press didn’t matter that much to the regime after 1945, since Franco was content with a demobilized and acquiescent population; but the censor’s dilemma seems real enough whenever governments are explicitly interested in deeply molding a population’s beliefs by controlling what they can read or see. Joseph Goebbels, for example, was perfectly aware of it:

Goebbels knew that people would not tolerate a diet of unremitting propaganda. Already in May 1933 he began turning down requests from Nazi Party bosses keen to hear their voices on the radio, and limited broadcasts of political speeches to two a month. Radio, said the Propaganda Minister, had to be imaginative, modern, up-to-date. ‘The first law’, he told radio managers on 25 March 1933: ‘Don’t become boring!’ They were not to fill their programmes with martial music and patriotic speeches. They had to use their imagination. Radio could bring the whole people behind the regime. Despite this warning, the radio network was initially used for broadcasting large quantities of political propaganda, with fifty speeches by Hitler being transmitted in 1933 alone. On 1 May 1934 broadcasts of the Mayday celebrations, with their speeches, songs, marches and the rest, took up no fewer than seventeen hours of radio time. No wonder that there were reports that listeners were growing blasé in the face of such excesses and listening, when they could, to foreign radio stations. Only gradually was Goebbels’s oft-repeated advice heeded.

[…]

But some still complained that even the music was boring, and they missed the radio plays that had been so popular under the Weimar Republic. As the Security Service of the SS complained in 1938, the ‘dissatisfaction of radio listeners’ was demonstrating itself in the fact that ‘almost all kinds of German radio listeners … now as before regularly listen to German-language broadcasts from foreign stations’. (Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939, Kindle locs 2579-2595).

The Nazis, unlike the post-1945 Franco regime, were not satisfied with a merely acquiescent population; they wanted to reach more deeply into the beliefs of the German people, converting them into genuine partisans of their worldview. And boring radio and newspapers did not serve this purpose; in fact, they contributed to alienation from the regime, as the propaganda minister was well aware. But for all of Goebbels’ exhortations, the incentives of the media were all in the direction of publishing “safe” content - pre-approved, indistinguishable from everyone else’s, and ultimately incapable of holding the attention of the unconverted. Consider the story of the Frankfurter Zeitung, a newspaper which (due to its international reputation and the fact that it was at the time owned by the chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben) was allowed a certain freedom of action early in the third Reich. The paper

not uncommonly failed to print stories emanating from the Propaganda Ministry, even when they were ordered to do so by Goebbels. They attempted, sometimes successfully, to carry articles emphasizing the humane values which they considered the Nazis to be trampling on. Many of the forty new members of the editorial staff appointed between 1933 and 1939 came from parts of the press that had fared badly under the Nazis, including Social Democrats, Nationalists and Catholics. Many of them, such as Walter Dirks, or Paul Sethe, became famous West German journalists in the postwar years. Two other well-known writers, Dolf Sternberger and Otto Suhr, who had Jewish wives, were also able to remain in their posts. Staff writers printed ostensibly historical articles about Genghis Khan or Robespierre whose parallels with Hitler were obvious to the average intelligent reader. They became adept at conveying facts and reports that were unpalatable to the regime with formulae such as ‘there is no truth in the rumour that’ and headlines that denounced as lies stories which were then expounded in considerable detail. The paper soon acquired a reputation as virtually the only organ in which such things could be found, and its circulation actually began to increase once more. The Gestapo was well aware of the fact that the Frankfurt Newspaper in particular contained articles that ‘must be described as malicious agitation’ and thought that ‘now as before the Frankfurt Newspaper dedicates itself to the representation of Jewish interests’. (The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939, Kindle locs 2693-2705)

But this situation could not last, especially once the Nazis consolidated their power:

Yet with time, and especially after 1936, the regime forced the paper more and more onto the defensive. Innumerable compromises with the Propaganda Ministry’s instructions were unavoidable. Direct resistance was barely possible. Already in August 1933 the English journalist Henry Wickham Steed noted that the once-proud liberal newspaper had become a ‘tool of unfreedom’ under the new regime. The foreign press quickly stopped citing stories carried in the paper, taking the view that they had now become mostly indistinguishable from the torrent of misinformation and propaganda pumped out on a daily basis by Goebbels’s Ministry. In 1938, realizing that it no longer needed to influence public opinion, since there was effectively no public opinion left in Germany, I.G. Farben secretly sold the firm to a subsidiary of the Nazi Party’s Eher Publishing House without even troubling to inform the paper’s editors or staff. On 20 April 1939 the Nazi Party’s publishing mogul, Max Amann, formally presented the newspaper to Hitler as a birthday present. Its function as a vehicle for free, if disguised, comment was over; its readership declined further, and it was eventually closed down altogether in 1943. (The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939, Kindle locs 2709-2718)

Over time, the desire to control content won out over the desire to encourage any sort of independence or originality. The propaganda ministry issued ever more detailed instructions to newspapers about what to publish and how, just as in the Spanish case, probably contributing to an overall decline in press readership and the migration of the reading public towards less boring forms of media, such as illustrated magazines focused on non-political topics:

whatever the journalists of the Frankfurt Newspaper might have been able to achieve, the majority of editors and journalists lacked the ability or the inclination to vary the propaganda they were required to serve up to their readers with any touch of independence or originality. The number of newspapers declined from 4,700 to 977 between 1932 and 1944, and the number of magazines and periodicals of all kinds from 10,000 to 5,000 between 1933 and 1938. And the contents of those that remained became increasingly homogeneous. […] The result was a crescendo of dissatisfaction amongst the newspaper-reading public, relayed through the regular surveillance reports of the Gestapo. ‘The uniformity of the press’, noted the Gestapo office in Kassel in its monthly report for March 1935, ‘is felt to be unbearable by the people and also in particular by those who are National Socialist in their views.’ […]

[…] Despite his loudly proclaimed injunction to broadcasters and pressmen not to be boring, Goebbels ended up, therefore, by imposing a political straitjacket on radio and the press that led to widespread popular complaints about the monotonous conformity of these two key opinion-forming mass media and the dull subservience of those who worked in them. Already in 1934 he was telling newspapermen how pleased he was that the press was now reacting to current events correctly without necessarily being told how to. But with his customary cynicism, he concluded a few years later that ‘any man who still has a residue of honour will be very careful not to become a journalist’. (The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939, Kindle locs 2786-2821).

More generally, given the choice between the dullness of a maximally controlled cultural scene and the more stimulating unpredictability of a less controlled cultural life, the Nazis ultimately opted for the tedium of forced acclamation and uniform praise. As a result, they ended up maximizing not genuine commitment but mere acquiescence, as Evans shows in abundant detail:

The mass acclamation which the regime demanded on occasions such as Hitler’s birthday, plebiscites and elections, Mayday and other festivals, was rendered as much out of fear as out of enthusiasm, and people were getting tired of constantly having to go to meetings and demonstrations, the Potsdam district Gestapo office reported two months later in October 1934. In radio, cinema, literature and the arts, as we have seen, all that Goebbels’s efforts to make propaganda interesting did was to make people bored, because individual creative initiative was stifled, the variety of cultural life was drastically reduced by censorship, and the monotony of Nazism’s cultural offerings quickly became tedious. Even the Nuremberg Rallies soon lost much of their power to inspire, despite the fact that those who attended were by definition the most fanatical and the most enthusiastic of Hitler’s supporters. (The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939, Kindle locs 4056-4062).

As Jay Ulfelder reminded us the other day, it is difficult to know what would have happened in the absence of such uniform propaganda; in a counterfactual world many things would have been different, including the content of propaganda. Perhaps both the Franco and the Nazi regimes actually produced the maximal amount of persuasion possible under the circumstances by stressing uniformity, though I doubt it. More likely, it seems to me, is that there are trade-offs between maximizing genuine persuasion (which requires some degree of uncoerced attention and stimulation, or, in other words, the avoidance of complete boredom) and minimizing focal points for opposition; and both the Nazi and the Franco regimes, for all their claims to be engaged in the transformation of national characters through indoctrination, ultimately preferred to minimize opposition. But one can imagine that other regimes might attempt to manage this trade-off differently, tolerating some amount of opposition in exchange for the more genuine commitments that a more stimulating, less predictable cultural life might produce. Indeed, it seems that in some cases a less uniform cultural life is the (inadvertent?) consequence of censorship, and that the commitments produced in these cases are stronger than the commitments produced by boring and uniform propaganda. For example, Barbara Mittler has noted that the “smashing the four olds” campaign during the cultural revolution actually introduced a new variety into the cultural life of many people in China (by, for example, exposing them to the Confucian classics that they were supposed to criticize); and she argues that this accounts in part for the freshness and staying power of cultural revolution culture, which was far less regimented than the kind of culture produced by say, the Nazi regime. (“Cultural Revolution culture … is effective, as is popular culture, because it is nothing but popular culture”).

At any rate, it seems to me that the moral of these stories, so to speak, is that ideological persuasion is a sort of by-product of particular discourses, not something that can be produced intentionally and at will. In the Spanish case, ideological persuasion faltered in the face of terrible economic conditions during the 40s; as one Falangista wrote in a confidential report in late 1939, “frente a todo esto, no caben propagandas” (“in the face of [these conditions], no propaganda can work”). Similarly, Nazi propaganda was less effective the less contact it had with the existing beliefs of the German population and their real conditions of life. But in both cases the attempt to directly persuade a population by tightly restricting the variety of points of views presented failed to produce maximal commitment; wherever persuasion occurred, it was less due to the content of the rhetoric of both regimes and their monopoly over public space than as a by-product of the conditions under which propaganda was received. I suppose this is good news: the tedium of genuine authoritarianism prevents such regimes from truly shaping people’s characters.