A very faint idea of this project goes back to my first year as an undergraduate student in 1981, when I came across ‘La fabrication d’un charisme’, a riveting article on Stalin’s cult written before its time by my teacher Bronisław Baczko at the University of Geneva. Professor Baczko was a pioneer in cultural history, and I would like to acknowledge, belatedly, that his body of work has shaped my approach to history to a much greater extent than I realised at the time.
Writing about the cult of personality can be a risky business. Every historian of Mussolini is deeply indebted to Camillo Berneri, who published an illuminating study entitled Mussolini Grande Attore (Mussolini the Great Actor) in 1934, only to be killed by a squad of communists in Spain three years later, probably on the orders of Stalin. Great dictators often attract great writers, and one of the pleasures in working on these tyrants is to be in the company of so many gifted scholars, whether they wrote at the time or with hindsight. My debt to them is indicated, however inadequately, in the footnotes.
I spent many a week in archives across Europe, but would not have been able to make sense of the documents in the Arhivele Naţionale ale României in Bucharest without the help of Ştefan Bosomitu, a researcher with unparalleled knowledge of the Ceauşescu files. In Addis Ababa, Eyob Girma read patiently through dozens of memoirs in Amharic, while Jen Seung Yeon Lee helped with propaganda material from North Korea. A seemingly infinite amount of material on twentieth-century war, revolution and peace can be found at the Hoover Institution, and the staff in both the library and the archives were unstinting with their help.
Robert Peckham rekindled my interest in the history of image and power by lending me a copy of Peter Burke’s The Fabrication of Louis XIV. A number of people have read and commented on draft versions, especially Peter Baehr, Gail Burrowes, Christopher Hutton, Peter and Gabriele Kennedy, Françoise Koolen, Andrei Lankov, Norman Naimark, Robert Peckham, Priscilla Roberts, Robert Service, Facil Tesfaye and Vladimir Tismaneanu. Others were generous in sharing stories and sources, in particular Paul S. Cha, Mihai Croitor, Brian Farrell, Sander Gilman, Paul Gregory, Paul Hollander, Jean Hung, Mark Kramer, Michelle Kung, James Person, Amir Weiner and Arne Westad.
I am indebted to my publishers, namely Michael Fishwick in London and Anton Mueller in New York, and my copy editor Richard Collins, as well as Marigold Atkey, Chloe Foster, Genista Tate-Alexander, Francesca Sturiale and Lilidh Kendrick at Bloomsbury. I would like to convey my gratitude to my literary agent Andrew Wylie in New York and Sarah Chalfant in London. I thank my wife Gail Burrowes, as always, with love.
Hong Kong, December 2018