Is There More to Repression in Authoritarian Regimes?

I wonder if I can ask you perhaps a slightly unfair question, recognizing that there are great scholars of authoritarian political systems who did not grow up in communist or post-communist systems. That being said, I wonder what you think your own personal background and the fact that you lived in a pre-collapse communist country. How does that shape you as a scholar that we may not see those same attributes in someone who, for example, grew up in the United States but is spending their life studying authoritarian regimes? I have not really thought about this before. These are the best questions, the ones that catch people off guard. Maybe the way to describe how I often feel when I read studies