In a garage run by the municipality of Addis Ababa, Lenin is lying on his back, surrounded by weeds and empty oil drums. Few people come to visit him. Those who do are warned by local workers not to wake him.1
He is large and weighty, and bringing him down from his pedestal was hard work. Heavy machinery had been required, as ropes could not even make him shake. He was not, of course, the first one to go. After the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, Lenin was dismantled a thousand times, sometimes attacked with hammers or decapitated, occasionally mothballed. Other despots, too, were toppled. Across Albania jubilant crowds tackled statues of Enver Hoxha, who had controlled the country for forty years. For decades portraits, posters, slogans, busts and statues had gone up, but the tide had turned.
It took many observers by surprise. Dictators, the thinking went, were unshakable, like their statues. They had captured the souls of their subjects and moulded their thinking. They had cast a spell on them. But there never was a spell. There was fear, and when it evaporated the entire edifice collapsed. In the case of Ceauşescu, the moment he faltered when challenged by demonstrators in front of the party headquarters on 21 December 1989 can be pinned down almost to the minute. That moment took several decades to arrive.
There is no cult without fear. At the height of the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people across the globe had no choice but to acquiesce in the glorification of their leaders, who backed up their rule with the threat of violence. Under Mao or Kim, mocking the leader’s name was enough to warrant assignment to a labour camp. Failure to cry, cheer or shout on command carried a heavy penalty. Under Mussolini or Ceauşescu, editors received daily instructions on what should be mentioned and what was proscribed. Writers, poets and painters, under Stalin, trembled at the thought that their praise might not appear sufficiently sincere.
When the term ‘cult of personality’ is bandied about to characterise any and every effort to glorify a leader, this trivialises what occurred in modern dictatorships. When democratically elected presidents or prime ministers groom their image, or pose in front of children who sing their praises, or engrave their name on gold coins, or surround themselves with flatterers, they engage in political theatre. It may be repulsive, or appear narcissistic and even sinister, but it is not a cult. To have followers proclaim that their leader is a genius is not a cult either. In the first stage of a cult, a leader needs to have enough clout to abase his opponents and force them to salute him in public. But with a fully developed cult of personality no one can any longer be quite certain any more who supports and who opposes the dictator.
One such is Kim Jong-un, from the third generation of his family, in control of North Korea since 2011. In 2015, after having executed some seventy high-ranking officials, including several generals and his uncle-in-law, he handed out badges bearing his portrait to his inner circle. Statues dedicated to the family went up in every province the same year. Like Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un tours the country, offering on-the-spot guidance with his entourage eagerly writing down his every word. He walks like his grandfather, he smiles like his grandfather, he even looks like his grandfather.2
Kim is but one of many dictators who have thrived, despite the spread of democracy since 1989. Assad fils stepped in the shoes of Assad père in 2000. In an echo of the ‘humble country doctor’ François Duvalier, Bashar al-Assad at first presented himself as a ‘mild-mannered ophthalmologist’. Then the doctor spread a culture of fear, covering Syria with his image while suppressing dissent with an iron fist.3
New dictators have appeared. In the early years of the twenty-first century Turkey appeared to be a democracy in the making, with a vibrant civil society and a relatively open press. Then along came Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Elected president in 2014, he began building up his image as the country’s strongman. In 2016 he used a failed coup as a pretext to clamp down on all opposition, suspending, dismissing or imprisoning tens of thousands of people, including journalists, academics, lawyers and civil servants. And even as he purged his opponents he glorified himself. His speeches were broadcast several times a day on television, his face plastered on numerous walls, while his supporters likened him to a second prophet. Turkey is still a far cry from the fully fledged dictatorships that dominated the twentieth century, but those, too, took time to build up.4
In the wake of the Cultural Revolution the communist party in China amended its constitution explicitly to forbid ‘all forms of personality cult’, making slow but inexorable progress towards greater accountability. But the regime has been turning back towards dictatorship. After Xi Jinping was elected General Secretary of the party in 2012 his first act was to humiliate and imprison some of his most powerful rivals. Then he disciplined or purged hundreds of thousands of party members, all in the name of a campaign against corruption. As the regime makes a concerted effort to obliterate a fledging civil society, lawyers, human rights activists, journalists and religious leaders are confined, exiled, and imprisoned in the thousands.5
The propaganda machine has consistently idolised Xi. In the capital of Hebei province alone some 4,500 loudspeakers were installed in November 2017, before a major party congress, calling on all people to ‘unite tightly around President Xi’. 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. ‘To follow you is to follow the sun’ went a new song launched in Beijing. Trinkets, badges and posters with his portrait are ubiquitous. His thoughts became compulsory reading for schoolchildren the same year. Fear goes hand in hand with praise, as even mocking the Chairman of Everything in a private message online can be treated as a heinous crime punishable by two years in prison. In March 2018 he became Chairman for life, as the National People’s Congress voted to abolish limits on his term.6
Nonetheless, dictators today, with the exception of Kim Jong-un, are a long way from instilling the fear their predecessors inflicted on their populations at the height of the twentieth century. Yet hardly a month goes by without a new book announcing ‘The Death of Democracy’ or ‘The End of Liberalism’. Undeniably, for more than a decade democracy has been degraded in many places around the world, while levels of freedom have receded even in some of the most entrenched parliamentary democracies. Eternal vigilance, as the saying goes, is the price of liberty, as power can easily be stolen.
Vigilance, however, is not the same as gloom. Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century. Most of all, dictators who surround themselves with a cult of personality tend to drift off into a world of their own, confirmed in their delusions by the followers who surround them. They end up making all major decisions on their own. They see enemies everywhere, at home and abroad. As hubris and paranoia take over, they seek more power to protect the power they already have. But since so much hinges on the judgements they make, even a minor miscalculation can cause the regime to falter, with devastating consequences. In the end, the biggest threat to dictators comes not just from the people, but from themselves.