New history books reviewed
ROGER MOORHOUSE welcomes a study of totalitarian leaders that reveals how these despotic figures built elaborate cults of personality in order to consolidate their power
In 1978, the Czech dissident (and later president) Václav Havel wrote an extended essay, published by the samizdat underground, entitled The Power of the
Powerless. One of the most important texts on understanding modern totalitarianism, the essay contains the parable of a greengrocer who displays the sign ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ in his shop window – not as a symbol of his enthusiasm for communism, but as an indicator of his craven submission to it. The greengrocer, Havel tells us, does not believe in the communist cause, he is merely going through the motions, doing what is expected by the regime. He is “living a lie”.
The world of Havel’s mythical greengrocer would doubtless chime with that presented by Frank Dikötter in How to Be a Dictator. The author, a professor at the University of Hong Kong and an authority on modern Chinese history, has penned an illuminating study of some of the 20th century’s most egregious cults of personality, all of which fashioned preposterous new realities to which their people seemingly had no choice but to submit.
Dikötter casts his net widely, including some of the most odious characters that modern history has to offer. Of course several of the usual suspects are present, such as the faux-imperator Mussolini, the anti-personality Hitler and the original Big Brother, Stalin. But a host of less well-known cults are also included, from the grasping selfaggrandisement of Romania’s undeniably
vile Nicolae Ceaușescu to the voodoo manipulation of Haiti’s ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier.
Each of Dikötter’s eight subjects is presented, in essence, in a potted biography, which explains their background and rise to power. Dikötter then outlines the peculiarities of their rules: the excesses, the vanity projects and the megalomania. The studies are well-drawn and full of illuminating nuggets. We learn, for instance, that Mussolini took on many of the trappings of sainthood; his birthplace of Predappio became a place of pilgrimage; and some schoolchildren learned a new credo, beginning: “I believe in the supreme Duce…” The cult of Stalin, meanwhile, flourished at the same time as the USSR was wracked by the Great Purge. In between signing death warrants, the Vozhd met with fawning artists, writers and painters, all eager to burnish his image further.
Beyond the usual suspects, the more unfamiliar subjects are perhaps the most hideously engaging. Mengistu Haile Mariam, for instance, the Marxist dictator of Ethiopia from the 1970s to the early 1990s, had the former emperor Haile Selassie buried beneath his desk. Meanwhile in Haiti, 'Papa Doc' Duvalier modelled himself on the character of Baron Samedi, the top-hatted Voodoo spirit of the dead. In China, meanwhile, whole sectors of industry were devoted to churning out postcards, badges and photos of the Great Helmsman, Mao, not to mention printing the countless millions of copies of his ‘Little Red Book’.
The vaunting arrogance of Ceaușescu never ceases to amaze. A former cobbler who rose to power in communist Romania thanks largely to cunning and brute force, he was nonetheless portrayed to his benighted people as an intellectual titan, a towering ideologist of world Marxism, and a leader to rank alongside Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Alexander the Great. The overwrought eulogies were even extended to his wife, Elena, who was lauded as Romania’s premier scientist, engineer and academic, garnering a host of awards and titles in the process.
While the Ceaușescus got their comeuppance in front of a Christmas firing squad in 1989, and Mussolini’s corpse was strung up from a Milan petrol station in 1945, some of Dikötter’s subjects had the extraordinary good fortune to die in their beds. Kim Il-sung, for instance, the wheyfaced founder of communist North Korea, spent more than 40 years as Suryong, or Great Leader, before dying of a heart attack at the age of 82. His death was greeted with a veritable tidal wave of competitive grief, with many mourners seeking to outdo one another by feigning swoons and collapses, or shaking their fists in mock rage.
Such reactions are certainly remarkable, and – like Havel’s greengrocer – appear to point to a society that is merely conforming to what is ordered or expected, rather than expressing genuine emotion. That is very much Dikötter’s position. As he tells the reader, the illusion of popular support must be created, and for that, the cult of personality is a vital tool. The people acquiesce in the fiction, he suggests, out of fear and then habit.
Dikötter does an excellent job of exposing how the various personality cults that his subjects fostered assumed a role right “at the
The vaunting arrogance of Ceaușescu never ceases to amaze. He portrayed himself as a leader to rank alongside Caesar, Napoleon and Alexander the Great
very heart of tyranny”; they were an essential component of any self-respecting totalitarian system. But there is more to totalitarianism – and there is more to ‘being a dictator’
– than personality cults alone. Other legitimating factors, including ideology, progress and liberation, also served to bolster popular support for those regimes.
Also, though the cynical interpretation favoured by Dikötter – of populations conforming without believing – might have been realistic during the late-model communism of Havel’s Czechoslovakia or Kim’s North Korea, or even Mao’s China, it is less clear that the early totalitarian regimes of Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin necessarily followed the same pattern. Back then, in a simpler age, it is reasonable to assume that a good proportion of popular enthusiasm was genuine; that people honestly ‘believed’. Hard evidence is fragmentary and necessarily sparse, but the assumption is a fair one.
The lack of such nuanced arguments is frustrating, but Dikötter’s book is nonetheless a very useful and well-written examination of some of the worst examples of cults of personality that the 20th century witnessed. It doesn’t suffice on its own to explain the phenomenon of totalitarianism, but it certainly throws that dystopian world – with its toadying sycophants, megalomaniacs and ridiculous excesses – into sharp relief.