Taxation is often viewed as instrumental to state-building. However, major historical events, from the French Revolution to the American war of Independence, have demonstrated the disruptive potential of tax introductions and reforms that were deemed widely unfair. Taxes can thus also break states, yet no systematic evidence on this exists. This paper investigates the relationship between taxation and regime stability in non-democracies, where citizens cannot hold the government accountable through the ballot box, and resort instead to protests to express their discontent. I demonstrate that tax introductions destabilize authoritarian governments, and that the effect mostly comes from collective action and mobilization in response to indirect taxation. Using an original dataset of tax protests in fifteen Sub-Saharan African countries, I further show that the incidence of explicit tax resistance varies with domestic institutions, resource wealth, and ethnic composition. These results offer key insights into the link between redistributive politics and authoritarian regime stability.