The PhD dissertation develops a novel theoretical and empirical framework centred on strategic elite behaviour in authoritarian regimes, specifically faced with exogenous shocks, such as pandemics and war. I argue that elites are primarily driven by personal career considerations, determined by the autocrat and the logic of regime stability, with the public interest on the backseat. In turn, authoritarian elites remain constrained by the structural characteristics of their political environment when formulating public policies and communication strategies. In particular, while the extant literature has made significant progress in explaining the behaviour of authoritarian elites in their conduct of politics and policy, such as during elections, we know little regarding the logic of their informational strategies, as reflected in their political rhetoric or policy texts. The four articles of the dissertation apply a series of state-of-the-art statistical and text-as-data methods to a wide range of unique data from elite public speeches, social media posts, and legislative acts. Specifically, I focus on the behaviour of important elites – governors and deputies – in a prominent electoral and personalist autocracy, Russia, during two recent crises – the COVID-19 pandemic and the full-scale Russia-Ukraine war. I demonstrate that elites’ political and electoral concerns explain (1) the stringency of regional public health policy measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) the degree of sycophancy towards the authoritarian leader, (3) the variation in performance legitimation messages during the war, and (4) the overall rhetorical adaptation to the prolonged military conflict. The dissertation’s findings illuminate the logic of how and under what conditions different types of authoritarian elites minimise public dissatisfaction and the threat of anti-regime mobilisation during severe crises without resorting to large-scale repression. This makes an important contribution to the literature on comparative authoritarianism generally, as well as elite politics, authoritarian legitimation, and propaganda more specifically.