Authoritarian governments share one obsession: to control the story. Not just the news cycle or the history books; they need to control the interior story, the one you tell about your own life.

When they come to power, authoritarian leaders repeatedly use their power to narrow media access, punish unfavourable coverage, and reshape public history, mirroring tactics used by totalitarian regimes to control narratives and suppress dissent. Anyone writing what President Trump considers unfavourable or critical of his administration, for example, is attacked in the media, the courts, or by the justice system.

According to the Center for American Progress, “The Trump administration’s actions in its first eight months follow the authoritarian playbook: dismissal of career civil servants; the persecution of political opponents; as well as attacks on the free press, universities, and civil society organizations.”1  While the Democrats and other organizations have begun investigations into the government’s actions, the question remains.

How to resist?

I contend that memoir, journaling, and personal essays are a direct refusal of authoritarian control.

When Primo Levi wrote about Auschwitz, he did not write policy analysis. He wrote what he ate, what he smelled, who he watched die, and how his mind worked while it happened. That specificity is the point. A regime attempts to destroy the specific. It trades in abstractions: the people, the nation, the enemy (i.e. “the left”, “immigrants”, “Dumbocrats”) and the cause. Personal memory, however, punctures abstraction. You cannot silence or disappear a man’s hunger or his mother’s name as easily as you erase a bureaucratic record or an investigation into executive powers.

This is why authoritarian states ban memoirs, burn diaries, and jail writers who publish them at home or abroad. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not bring down the Soviet Union with a policy paper. He did it with Gulag Archipelago, a first-person account built from personal testimony. The state’s response told you everything about the threat: immediate suppression, then exile.

Authoritarian regimes deport or disappear people without due process and the opportunity to speak or share their stories. This pressure is not historical. PEN International reported 140 cases worldwide in 2025, including 32 writers imprisoned, 23 facing judicial harassment, and 12 subjected to enforced disappearance. The danger remains immediate.

A current example is the activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi in Iran. Her smuggled writing from prison details beatings, solitary confinement, interrogations, and medical neglect, and those pages are being gathered into a memoir (see White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners (2022)). She has also written before about torture and confinement in ways the state tried to punish and suppress. The point is not only that she suffered. The point is that she wrote down what the state wanted hidden.

Russia offers another example. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has written a memoir about his imprisonment and Russia’s drift toward autocracy, with publication now set for 2026. Alexei Navalny’s prison writing worked the same way. It turned confinement into testimony and made the state’s fear legible to readers far beyond the prison walls.

Memoir does three things that threaten this kind of authoritarian power.

First, it establishes individual experience as political fact. The regime says there were no mass detentions, no torture, no famine. The memoirist says: I was there, I remember the date, and I remember the guard’s face. One specific human memory is harder to refute than a statistical claim, because it asks the audience to disbelieve a person, not a number.

Second, memoir builds solidarity across time. Readers today who encounter Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai are not reading history as abstraction. They are borrowing her eyes, and that transfer of perspective is politically dangerous to any system that depends on isolation. Authoritarian power works by convincing each person that their suffering is personal, private, and unconnected to anyone else’s. Memoir destroys that lie.

Third, memoir forces a reckoning with complicity. The most disruptive memoirs are not only about victims. They are about ordinary people who made choices, rationalized, looked away, and then, later, wrote down what they did. This is unbearable to systems that depend on collective amnesia. The memoirist Heda Margolius Kovaly’s account of surviving the Holocaust and then living inside Stalinist Czechoslovakia was dangerous precisely because she did not excuse herself or anyone around her (see Under A Cruel Star – A Life in Prague 1941–1968, published under various titles).

The memoirist does not need a publisher with a large press run. People have hidden diaries under floorboards, memorized their own accounts in prison, and passed pages hand to hand across borders. The form itself is resistant to suppression, because it requires only a person with a memory and the decision to write it down rather than bury it.

The United States has its own version of this literature, resisting authoritarian tactics and policies. First-person accounts of detention, raids, and deportation turn ICE from an acronym into a lived record of fear, separation, and state power. Who wasn’t horrified at the media footage of six plainclothesmen from the Department of Homeland Security abducting American Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk from the streets of Massachussetts in broad daylight and later transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana? Öztürk’s first-hand writing after being held in detention describes the experience in the facility as a place of horror. Other detention narratives from Voice of Witness, and related projects, describe shackles, strip searches, hunger, and transfer between facilities in blunt, direct language.

What authoritarian systems fear most is not armed opposition or international sanctions, since those they're practiced at absorbing. What they struggle to absorb is a person who says, clearly and with specific detail: this happened, I was there, and I will not pretend otherwise. That sentence is a political act, and memoir and other first-hand accounts are how those sentences get made permanent so the truth is told and not lost.

Memoir is an act of resistance. Pick up your pen and write.