The Field Guide to Tyranny
The elements of dictators’ biographies, from rise to fall, come together in almost every case to make one standard narrative.
Illustration by Christian Northeast. Photographs (from top to bottom): Heinrich Hoffmann / Getty; Apic / Getty; Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / Getty; Universal History Archive / Getty
Dictatorship has, in one sense, been the default condition of humanity. The basic governmental setup since the dawn of civilization could be summarized, simply, as taking orders from the boss. Big chiefs, almost invariably male, tell their underlings what to do, and they do it, or they are killed. Sometimes this is costumed in communal decision-making, by a band of local bosses or wise men, but even the most collegial department must have a chairman: a capo di tutti capi respects the other capi, as kings in England were made to respect the lords, but the capo is still the capo and the king is still the king. Although the arrangement can be dressed up in impressive clothing and nice sets—triumphal Roman arches or the fountains of Versailles—the basic facts don’t alter. Dropped down at random in history, we are all as likely as not to be members of the Soprano crew, waiting outside Satriale’s Pork Store.
Only in the presence of an alternative—the various movements for shared self-government that descend from the Enlightenment—has any other arrangement really been imagined. As the counter-reaction to Enlightenment liberalism swept through the early decades of the twentieth century, dictators, properly so called, had to adopt rituals that were different from those of the kings and the emperors who preceded them. The absence of a plausible inherited myth and the need to create monuments and ceremonies that were both popular and intimidating led to new public styles of leadership. All these converged in a single cult style among dictators.
That, more or less, is the thesis of Frank Dikötter’s new book, “How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century” (Bloomsbury). Dikötter—who, given his subject, has a wonderfully suggestive, Nabokovian name—is a Dutch-born professor of history at the University of Hong Kong; he has previously written about the history of China under Mao, debunking, at scholarly length and with a kind of testy impatience, the myth of Mao as an essentially benevolent leader. “How to Be a Dictator” takes off from a conviction, no doubt born of his Mao studies, that a tragic amnesia about what ideologues in power are like has taken hold of too many minds amid the current “crisis of liberalism.” And so he attempts a sort of anatomy of authoritarianism, large and small, from Mao to Papa Doc Duvalier.
Each dictator’s life is offered with neat, mordant compression. Dikötter’s originality is that he counts crimes against civilization alongside crimes against humanity. Stalin is indicted for having more than 1.5 million people interrogated, tortured, and, in many cases, executed. (“At the campaign’s height in 1937 and 1938 the execution rate was roughly a thousand per day,” Dikötter writes.) But Stalin is also held responsible for a nightmarish cultural degradation that occurred at the same time—the insistence on replacing art with political instruction, and with the cult of the Leader, whose name was stamped on every possible surface. As one German historian notes, you could praise Stalin “during a meeting in the Stalin House of Culture of the Stalin Factory on Stalin Square in the city of Stalinsk.” This black comedy of egotism could be found even among neo-Stalinist dictators of far later date. In 1985, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Romania’s Communist leader, ordered up such television programs as “The Nicolae Ceauşescu Era” and “Science During the Nicolae Ceauşescu Epoch.” By law, his portrait was featured at the beginning of every textbook.
Dikötter’s broader point is that this manner spread to the most improbable corners of the world. His most interesting chapters, in some ways, are on the “tin-pot” dictators—like Duvalier, in Haiti, and Mengistu, in Ethiopia—who, ravaging poverty-stricken countries, still conform to the terrible type. The reason his subjects exhibit a single style is in part mutual influence and hybridization (North Korean artists made Mengistu a hundred-and-sixty-foot-tall monument in Ethiopia), and in part common need. All share one ugliness because all bend to one effect: not charm but intimidation, and not persuasion but fear.
The elements come together in almost every case to make one standard biography. There’s the rise, which is usually assisted by self-deluding opportunists who believe that they can restrain the ascendant authoritarian figure; old Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, countering Trotsky, played just as significant a role in Stalin’s ascent, largely through abstention, as the respectable conservative Franz von Papen did in Hitler’s. (“We can control him” is the perpetual motto of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator.) Next there is the attainment of power, and the increasingly frantic purging, followed by a cult of personality made all the more ludicrous by the passage of time, because it is capable only of inflation, not variation. Along with that comes some re-identification with figures from the national past. The exploitation of the imaginary Aryan history, bestrode by Valhallan gods, became central to the Hitler cult. In the same way, Dikötter shows, Duvalier took up the animism of Haitian vodou and presented himself as the avatar of the cemetery spirit Baron Samedi.
Then comes the isolation of the dictator within his palace—friendless and paranoid—and the pruning of his circle to an ever more sycophantic few. The dictator, rather than exulting in his triumph, withdraws into fearful seclusion. Finally, after all the death and brutality imposed, the dictator’s power, and often his life, ends with remarkable suddenness. You can watch video footage of Ceauşescu, in Bucharest, 1989, confidently addressing an assembled audience and realizing in a single moment that the crowd has turned. “Comrades! Quiet down!” the dictator cries out, while his wife shrilly shouts, “Silence!” The firing squad was only a few days away. Mussolini was ejected just as abruptly, and Hitler would have been, too, if he hadn’t killed himself first. Stalin seemed to make it to a natural end, but, as that terrific movie “The Death of Stalin” shows, he probably died sooner than he otherwise would have, because his flunkies were too terrified to do anything when they found him unconscious in a pool of his own piss.
Still, Dikötter’s portrait of his dictators perhaps underemphasizes a key point about such men: that, horribly grotesque in most areas, they tend to be good in one, and their skill at the one thing makes their frightened followers overrate their skill at all things, like children of a drunken father who take a small act of Christmas charity as proof of enormous instinctive generosity. Compare Dikötter’s account of Hitler’s rise with John Lukacs’s account, and one recalls how Lukacs, without softening the portrait one bit, recognized that Hitler did some things extremely well. Hitler’s occasional moments of shrewdness and even statesmanship—in seeing that Stalin would trust him not to invade Russia, or that France was not prepared to fight—made his followers more convinced than ever of his genius.
The difference between charismatic leadership and the cult of personality—different points in the trajectory of the dictator—is that the charismatic leader must show himself and the object of the cult of personality increasingly can’t show himself. The space between the truth and the image becomes too great to sustain. Mao, like God, could be credibly omniscient only by being unpredictably seen. Imposing an element of mystery is essential. And so most of the subjects here rarely made public appearances at the height of their cults. Stalin and Hitler both remained hidden for much of the war; to show themselves was to show less than their audiences wanted.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s image was everywhere, but, when preparing to greet Richard Nixon, he made much of the imagery disappear. “All signs of the Chairman were removed from window displays,” Dikötter writes. “Thousands of statues were dismantled, discreetly sent off for recycling.” The king or the emperor has his glory channelled into the national religion or ritual; the dictator, rising with a revolution against the old order, is in some sense an iconoclast, and has to be more enigmatic. Months went by in which nobody saw Mussolini; Stalin refused to take part in his own victory parade after the Second World War, leaving the task to his top general, Georgy Zhukov; Duvalier holed up in his palace, then suddenly appeared shopping in little Port-au-Prince boutiques. Sometimes there, sometimes not, now you see him, now you don’t—less the hero of a thousand faces than the overseer with a million eyes. You never know when you’ll see Big Brother—or when he’ll see you.
The really significant historical question is how the modern authoritarian’s cult of personality differs from the monarch’s or the emperor’s. Roman emperors, after all, were actually deified. It matters that the twentieth-century cult of political personality rose in the context of the broader twentieth-century cult of celebrity. Monarchs coming to power in the centuries preceding mass media could be mythologized and poeticized because myths and poems were the chief cultural material around. The dictators competed with movies, and with stars. Charlie Chaplin said once, “When I first saw Hitler, with that little mustache, I thought he was copying me.” Though Chaplin was retrospectively rueful, it was not a crazy notion—and he would use it to fantastic comic effect in “The Great Dictator,” still the best satiric study of dictator style ever created. Fandom and fanaticism made their historical appearance hand in hand. (Even today, Donald Trump likes dictators not only because he likes authoritarians but also because they present themselves, in ways he understands, as kitsch celebrities, with entourages and prepackaged “looks.”)
Dikötter makes a case that there has been a dictator style, stretching across the planet. Is there also a dictator sound—a specific way that they use language? “The Ogre does what ogres can, / Deeds quite impossible for Man,” Auden wrote in 1968, after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. “But one prize is beyond his reach, / The Ogre cannot master Speech.” The idea that language was the last bulwark against lunacy was central, in the middle of the last century, to minds like Camus and Orwell. Lucidity is a test of integrity, as Orwell insisted in “Politics and the English Language.” Tyrants can’t talk sense.
But what if, dreadful idea, the reverse is true—what if language is exactly what the ogres have mastered, and bad people tend to have a better command of language than good ones, who are often tongue-tied in the face of the world’s complexities? What if the tragedies of tyranny were, in the first instance, tragedies of eloquence misapplied—of language used for evil ends, but used well? For centuries, students learned Latin by memorizing the writing of the great Roman tyrant and republic-ending ogre Julius Caesar. They did it exactly because Caesar’s style was so clear, efficiently sorting out Druids and Picts, always focussed on the main point.
The worst dictators tend to be the most enthusiastic readers and writers. Hitler died with more than sixteen thousand books in his private libraries; Stalin wrote a book that was printed in the tens of millions, and though that is easier to do when you run the publisher, own all the bookstores, and edit all the book reviews (only Jeff Bezos could hope to do that now), still, he did his own writing. Mussolini co-authored three plays while ruling Italy and was the honorary president of the International Mark Twain Society, writing a greeting to the readers of his favorite author while installed as Duce. Lenin and Trotsky, whatever else they may have done, both wrote more vividly and at greater length than did, say, Clement Attlee or Tommy Douglas—social-democratic politicians who did great good in the world and left few catchy slogans behind. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “The revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao’s apologias for mass killing, may not be admirable sentiments, but they are memorable aphorisms—far more memorable than the contrasting truth that some political power grows out of the barrels of some guns some of the time, depending on what you mean by “power” and “political,” and whom you’re pointing the gun at.
This contrarian hypothesis is nicely put in Daniel Kalder’s “The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy” (Henry Holt). In many ways the literary companion to Dikötter’s book, “The Infernal Library” is the work of a non-academic scholar with a staggering appetite for reading. The same dictators fill both books, but Kalder’s focus is on their words more than their acts. He has worked through a reading list that would leave most people heading desperately for an exit, and an easier subject. Anyone can read “Mein Kampf” who has the stomach for the maunderings of a self-pitying, failed Austrian watercolorist. But Kalder has actually made his way through the philosophy of António de Oliveira Salazar, for decades the semi-fascist quasi-dictator of Portugal, and gives his 1939 tome, “Doctrine and Action,” a fair review. We may have heard that Stalin’s “Foundations of Leninism” was printed in the millions, but Kalder has read it, and with a certain kind of devil’s-due respect: “He is clear and succinct, and good at summarizing complex ideas for a middlebrow audience: the Bill Bryson of dialectical materialism, minus the gags.”
Kalder’s point is the disquieting one that the worst tyrants of the past century were hardly the brutal less-than-literates of our imagination. (Hitler, twenty and poor in Vienna, put down “writer” as his occupation on an official document. He wasn’t, but it was what he dreamed of being.) Their power did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It grew out of their ability to form sentences saying that power grew out of the barrel of a gun, when in fact it was growing out of the pages of a book. Mao was even more effective as an advocate than as a general. The trouble with these tyrants’ language was what they used it for.
Kalder proposes Lenin as the originator of the modern totalitarian style in prose, adopting Marx’s splenetic polemical tone for the purposes of Communist revolution. Kalder’s Lenin is a useful corrective to the more benign version of Lenin that still crops up from time to time—partly owing, it must be said, to Edmund Wilson’s 1940 book, “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” Wilson’s Lenin may have been insufficiently sensitive to civil liberties, but he was fundamentally humane and philosophical, a first-rate intellect caught in a first-rate crisis. His flaw was a lack of patience with his own deeply felt humanism, self-censoring even his love of Beethoven in pursuit of the public good. (Following Wilson, Tom Stoppard, in his great 1974 comedy “Travesties,” showed Lenin listening longingly to the “Appassionata” Sonata.) Vladimir Nabokov, who knew better, regularly tried to disabuse Wilson of this belief. “What you now see as a change for the worse (‘Stalinism’) in the regime is really a change for the better in knowledge on your part,” he wrote to Wilson in 1948. “Any changes that took place between November 1919 and now have been changes in the decor which more or less screens an unchanging black abyss of oppression and terror.”
Kalder shares that view. After reading Lenin’s “The State and Revolution,” he writes, “It’s impossible to be surprised that the USSR turned out so badly.” Already in 1905, we learn from Kalder, Lenin is dismissive of the very notion of “freedom” within an exploitative society, writing, “The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist, or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.” It’s significant that the “actress” comes in for Lenin’s disapproval; John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, in “The Subjection of Women,” from 1869, had singled out actresses as a cynosure of liberal feminism, since they were the one kind of woman artist whose equality, or superiority, to men was on public display. (Taylor’s daughter Helen, who also worked on the book, was herself an actress.) Demoralizing actresses as mere prostitutes is therefore an essential part of the Marxist attack on bourgeois feminism.
Stalin, in Kalder’s account, not only succeeds Lenin as an author but surpasses him. Against the Trotskyite view of Stalin as a Georgian bandit chief, Kalder argues that Stalin was actually a big thinker and a good writer, capable of popularizing Marx in ways Lenin could not. He was a devoted craftsman of prose, too, as his much marked manuscripts attest. “Because Stalin’s primary means of interacting with the physical world was through paper, it is not surprising that he continued to demonstrate a superstitious awe for the power of the written word,” Kalder observes. “He was still fascinated by books, by novels and plays, and by the arts generally.” Some writers even sought out Stalin for literary advice. The amazing thing is that they got it: one prominent playwright, Alexander Afinogenov, started sending his plays directly to Stalin for a first read, and, despite the burdens of ruling a totalitarian empire, Stalin would get back to him with notes. If you want to know what a country with an editor at its head looks like, there it is.
Stalin, Kalder concludes, “was a naïve romantic, at least insofar as he believed in the transformative power of literature.” He recognized that words shape ideas, and ideas shape souls. In 1932, he cheerfully summoned forty of the leading writers of the Soviet Union to come to dinner, exhorting them with language one might expect from a faculty dean making a case for the humanities: “Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. . . . And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, to the engineers of the human soul.” Of the writers who were in that room, Stalin had eleven murdered before the decade was over. Editorial rigor could achieve no more.
After spending time with Stalin, one finds Hitler and Mussolini, taken as authors, almost anticlimactic. Yet Kalder spots something that is hard to articulate but worth brooding on. When Stalin addressed workers who made tractors, he was actually interested in tractors: they were a means toward a more productive Russia. The better life—based on efficient, electrified, and modernized farms—was visible, however many lives you had to take to get there. By contrast, Hitler and Mussolini were apocalyptic pessimists. Their work expends far more energy on the melodrama of decline and decadence, on visions of Jews giving syphilis to Aryan maidens and on the Roman ruins, than on a positive future. (Part of what drew Hitler to the Wagnerian œuvre was the imagery of downfall.) Kalder has read Mussolini’s memoir, written after his deposition, and is struck by the Italian dictator’s self-pitying conviction that the price of power is complete self-enclosure: “If I had any friends now would be the time for them to sympathize, literally to ‘suffer with’ me. But since I have none my misfortunes remain within the closed circle of my own life.” It is significant that his bleak estrangement is what he most wants to register. It really is all about him. This taste for despair was part of both men’s romanticism, and, in Hitler’s case, directly responsible for the horrific last months of a war already lost. He wanted the world to burn. Germany hadn’t deserved him.
Kalder’s analysis suggests another signal difference. The Soviet Union, and left totalitarianism in general, is a culture of the written word; the Third Reich, and right authoritarianism in general, is a culture of the spoken word. Wanting the prestige of authorship but discovering that writing is hard work, Hitler dictated most of “Mein Kampf” to the eager Rudolf Hess. Hitler was always unhappy with the slowness of reading and writing, compared with the vivid electricity of his rallies. Where the Marxist heritage, being theory-minded and principle-bound, involves the primacy of the text, right-wing despotism, being romantic and charismatic, is buoyed by the shared spell cast between an orator and his mob. One depends on a set of abstract rules; the other on a sequence of mutual bewitchments.
Where does the double tour of dictator style leave us? Dikötter, in “How to Be a Dictator,” seems uncertain whether he is writing an epitaph or a prologue to a new edition. On the one hand, he deprecates the continuities between the twentieth-century cults and the more improvisatory autocrats of our day. “Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline,” he maintains. But he sees ominous signs in Erdoğan’s rise, in Turkey, and notes that, in China, Xi Jinping has become consistently idolized by a “propaganda machine.” In 2017, Dikötter points out, “the party organ gave him seven titles, from Creative Leader, Core of the Party and Servant Pursuing Happiness for the People, to Leader of a Great Country and Architect of Modernisation in the New Era.” Meanwhile, he observes, as “the regime makes a concerted effort to obliterate a fledgling civil society, lawyers, human rights activists, journalists and religious leaders are confined, exiled and imprisoned in the thousands.”
Thousands are better than millions, certainly—though historically thousands have a way of leading to millions. If there is little comfort in numbers, there is even less in words. Auden’s noble picture, in which the poets fight the mute ogre, can’t survive the shock of history. The ogres, it turns out, are part of literary culture and always have been—they speak and write books and read other people’s books. If by protecting the integrity of language we mean upholding the belief that literary culture, or even just plain truth-telling, is in itself a bulwark, the facts don’t bear out the hypothesis. Literary culture is no remedy for totalitarianism. Ogres gonna ogre. Rhetoric is as liquid and useful for the worst as it is for the best. The humanities, unfortunately, belong to humanity.
Perhaps the most depressing reflection sparked by both books is on the supine nature of otherwise intelligent observers in the face of the coarse brutalities of dictatorships. Kalder writes, as many have before, about Mao’s successful courtship of Western writers and leaders, who kept the Maoist myth alive as his cult descended into barbaric absurdity. He also writes of finding, in a small Scottish town, a contemporary English translation of Stalin’s “Speech at a Conference of Harvester-Combine Operators,” delivered in December of 1935, including interpolated parentheticals of audience response: “Loud and prolonged cheers and applause. Cries of ‘Long live our beloved Stalin!’ ” The marvel is that the pamphlet had been translated into English within days after the speech was given. “Then,” Kalder observes, “berserk cultists spirited it across the waves, and read it, and found value in it, in a society where nobody was being starved to death, shot in the head or interned in a slave labor camp.” The capacity for self-delusion on the part of cosseted utopians about the actuality of utopia remains the most incomprehensible element of the story of the twentieth century, and its least welcome gift to the twenty-first. ♦
Measure
Measure
