6

            Totalitarian and Authoritarian Leadership

The first, and perhaps only, dictator to use the adjective ‘totalitarian’ as one of warm approval was Benito Mussolini in inter-war Italy. It had been employed as early as 1923 by the Duce’s opponents, but two years later was embraced by his supporters and by Mussolini himself. He spoke of ‘our fierce totalitarian will’ and continued: ‘We want to make the nation fascist, so that tomorrow Italians and Fascists . . . will be the same thing.’1 Mussolini liked to describe the system constructed under his leadership as lo stato totalitario, the totalitarian state.² He had borrowed the term from the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who became an ideologist of fascism. Gentile’s German equivalent was Carl Schmitt, an academic lawyer who provided some of the intellectual foundation for Hitler’s dictatorship, arguing that ‘the Führer’ stood higher than any state institution and that he was ‘the highest judge of the nation and the highest lawgiver’.³ Schmitt, too, approved of the notion of the ‘totalitarian state’, but Hitler rarely used the term and, when he did so, prefaced it with ‘so-called’.⁴ Communist leaders and ideologists never applied ‘totalitarian’ to their own systems and only occasionally when referring to fascist states.⁵

Although the notion of totalitarianism predated both ‘high Stalinism’, a term coined to describe the Soviet Union from the early 1930s until Stalin’s death in 1953, and the coming to power of Hitler, it was critics of both fascist and Communist systems who most commonly spoke of totalitarianism. What gave the term traction was the observation in the 1930s that, obvious differences of policy and goals notwithstanding, there were a number of notable similarities between the Soviet and Nazi regimes headed by Josif Stalin and Adolf Hitler, even though they claimed to be polar opposites. Both in the Soviet Union and in Germany there was a hierarchical single party which existed in parallel with, but had a superior authority to, governmental institutions at all levels.6 There was in both countries a political police force which in the 1930s employed terror and violence, although more selectively in pre-war Germany than in the Soviet Union where at times it was on a mass scale. Each of these regimes had also a body of doctrine which purported to explain both history and contemporary society, providing a framework into which all social phenomena could be fitted. The doctrines themselves were very different, of course, with the ideas of Marx and Lenin (even in their Stalinist codified version) much the more sophisticated of the two. Each ideology offered a vision of the future – in the Nazi case that of a racially pure and powerful greater Germany and in the Soviet case of a harmonious, classless society. These imaginary futures were of far less consequence than scapegoating and violent repression in the present. In Germany millions responded to propaganda which portrayed Jews as the source of the world’s ills and of Germany’s misfortunes most specifically, while in the Soviet Union millions approved of the punishment of class enemies and bought into the myth that Stalin’s tyrannical rule meant that the working class had gained power in what was represented as a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’* Both regimes were also characterized by a cult of personality of the Great Leader.

The term ‘totalitarian’ gained still wider currency after the Second World War when it was often applied indiscriminatingly to all Communist states, although there were significant changes over time within these countries as well as substantial differences between one and another. There is, for example, a vast dissimilarity between contemporary China and contemporary North Korea. And to apply the same undifferentiating label of ‘totalitarian’ to Poland and Hungary when they were under Communist rule, to Tito’s Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s and to North Korea under any of the three successive Kims is unhelpful. In these three European Communist countries some elements of civil society existed (the Church was especially important in Poland), while being entirely absent in North Korea. Communist political systems were – and, where they still survive, are – never less than highly authoritarian, but to put them all in the more extreme totalitarian container is to obscure important differences.7

The very notion of totalitarianism is controversial. There are scholars who reject its application even to the Soviet Union from the early 1930s (by which time Stalin had consolidated his power) until Stalin’s death or to Hitler’s Germany from the mid-1930s to the country’s defeat in 1945, making the point that not everything was controlled from above. If, however, totalitarianism were to be defined as a system in which one person decides everything, then there has never been such a system. That, however, is no more a reason for completely eschewing the term than the imperfections of all actually existing democracies are a reason for refusing to call any country democratic. It is evident that total control, especially over people’s thinking, existed only in the pages of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.⁸ But Orwell himself was well aware that in depicting tendencies he observed in Communism and fascism, he was not providing a precise description of social reality but was drawing out ‘totalitarian ideas . . . to their logical consequences’.* For Orwell, totalitarianism was what Max Weber called an ‘ideal type’ (by which, needless to say, Weber was not in any way implying a positive evaluation). Weber argued that it was analytically useful to express in extreme or pure form what was meant by a particular political or social category – as, for example, bureaucracy, the subject of one of his most famous analyses.9

It makes sense, similarly, to present the features of totalitarianism in stark and extreme terms. Particular countries can then be studied to see if they come sufficiently close to the ideal type to be meaningfully described as totalitarian. This is preferable to constantly changing the definition (as tended to happen during the Cold War years), so that Communist states generally, or the Soviet Union specifically, would always remain ‘totalitarian’, no matter how much they might change internally. That tendency led, in turn, to another confusion, most clearly exemplified by the American scholar, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was the Reagan administration’s ambassador to the UN in the first half of the 1980s. She helped to popularize the view that all Communist regimes were totalitarian and that whereas authoritarian systems, or what she called ‘right-wing autocracies’, could be changed from within, totalitarian regimes could not.¹⁰ Thus, the Soviet Union, in particular, would be impervious to change emanating from inside the system or from Soviet society. Proponents of this widespread view confused the abstract notion of totalitarianism with actual Communist states. They failed to see that a number of Communist systems had in the post-Stalin era become more authoritarian than totalitarian and that within the ruling Communist parties themselves, there was diversity of view behind the monolithic façade they presented to their own societies and to the outside world.

Adherents of the totalitarian-and-impervious-to-change school overlooked also the importance of educational advancements under Communism – the development not only of universal literacy but also of substantial higher education sectors within these societies. If Communism contained ‘the seeds of its own destruction’ (to use Marx’s phrase about capitalism), it was through educating people to the point at which they were open to new ideas and less inclined to accept outdated dogmas uncritically. Those who thought that Communist systems were immune to change from within also overlooked the fact that leadership – which played an important part in the transition to Communist rule, as well as in sustaining it – could be an instrument of transformative change.

In political and social reality totalitarian and authoritarian regimes are located on a continuum. At one end there is the totalitarian extreme of Enver Hoxha’s Albania or Kim Il Sung’s North Korea and at the other end the mild authoritarianism of Singapore, which, while not a democracy, has a vibrant market economy and, for most practical purposes, a rule of law. In between there are countries about which there can be legitimate argument as to whether they come close enough to ideal-typical totalitarianism to be called totalitarian or whether they are better described as authoritarian. There may be some dispersal of power within the group at the apex of the hierarchy, but in a totalitarian as distinct from authoritarian system, one man (and all such regimes have been male-dominated) holds preponderant, and often supreme, power. Authoritarian regimes, in contrast, can be either autocracies or oligarchies. In other words, some are ruled by a single dictator and others have a more collective leadership. Even within the oligarchies, a leader’s personality and values have the potential to make a bigger difference to the system than is open to a leader in a democracy where power is more dispersed and both institutions and public opinion impose stricter limits on what a leader may do.

            STALIN’S DICTATORSHIP AND SOVIET OLIGARCHIES

Adam Smith noted that ‘gross abuse’ of power, as well as ‘perverseness, absurdity, and unreasonableness’ were more liable to be found under the rule of ‘single persons’ than of larger assemblies.11 While it would be foolish to deny – and Smith did not do so – that groups are also capable of coming to stupid decisions or of sponsoring dreadful actions, unconstrained personal rule is more dangerous. In the experience of the two major Communist states, the Soviet Union and China, periods of more collective leadership were far less devastating and murderous than those during which Stalin and Mao Zedong wielded their greatest individual power. In the Soviet case there was a basically collective leadership for at least a decade after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, first under Lenin and then under Stalin, while the latter was still gradually strengthening his power base. So long as Lenin was alive, he was the most influential figure in the Communist Party, although his highest formal position was as head of the government (Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars) rather than of the party. Within the party leadership, however, Lenin relied on his political prestige, natural authority and powers of persuasion to carry the day. Inside his own party, he did not employ the type of coercion and terror he visited on those who stood in the way of the Communists’ consolidation of their power. The fact, however, that Stalin became the most notorious mass murderer in the last hundred years of Russian history does not absolve Lenin from creating many of the preconditions for Stalin’s tyranny. It was Lenin who played a decisive role in destroying a fragile political pluralism and in laying the foundations of future dictatorship with his emphasis on centralization of power within a single party, his contempt for parliamentary politics, his rejection of judicial independence, and the creation of punitive political police organs.

Until the late 1920s Stalin, as Lenin’s successor, was gradually consolidating his authority, siding first with one group and then another in the leadership of the Communist Party, while avoiding the appearance of seeking dictatorial power. By 1929 Stalin was clearly the predominant Soviet leader, although some elements of collective leadership were still present even at the beginning of the 1930s. By 1933, however, as a leading specialist on this period of Soviet history has observed, Stalin ‘was already a personal dictator, whose proposals were apparently never challenged in the Politburo’.12 The most notable of Stalin’s rivals, Leon Trotsky, had been successively expelled first from the top leadership and then from the party (in 1927), sent into internal exile in 1928, and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Later, many of the leading revolutionaries of 1917, including Nikolay Bukharin, were to be killed at Stalin’s behest. For a majority this meant execution following Moscow show-trials in 1936–38; for Trotsky it involved assassination with an ice-pick by one of Stalin’s NKVD agents in Mexico in 1940.

Most of the 1920s, in contrast with the 1930s, were a time when some debate still took place within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, although other political parties had been outlawed. After the Russian Civil War Lenin’s New Economic Policy included economic concessions to the peasantry which persisted during the period of more collective leadership until the late twenties. From 1929 Stalin spearheaded the campaign of compulsory collectivization of agriculture, which by the end of 1933 had resulted in the deportation from their locality of more than two million peasants. Famine, which was a consequence of the high grain procurement quotas the state demanded from the collectivized peasantry, brought about the deaths of more than five million people in Ukraine, southern Russia and the North Caucasus.13 Stalin took a particularly close interest in the collectivization process, and personally insisted on the introduction of the death penalty (by a decree issued on 7 August 1932) for theft of grain from collective farm fields.¹⁴

Stalin was determined to achieve the speedy industrialization of the country and, accompanied by rapid social mobility, this made great strides in the 1930s, but at a terrible price. It was obviously impossible for Stalin personally to take every major decision in the Soviet Union, even when he was at the height of his power. Power was wielded not only by Stalin but by bureaucracies at different levels of the system, and these bodies acquired, and attempted to defend, institutional interests of their own. Stalin, however, did succeed in destroying ‘the oligarchical system’ that had developed in the 1920s and, as the Russian scholar who has studied his rule most closely observes, at the root of his personal dictatorship was his ‘limitless power’ over ‘the fate of any Soviet official, including the members of the Politburo’.¹⁵

Stalin took a more detailed interest in some institutions than others. In particular, he kept the organs of state security – the political police – under his close control, and supervised the repression. In two years alone, 1937–38, more than 1.7 million people were arrested and at least 818,000 of them were shot.¹⁶ They included vast numbers of imaginary enemies of the Soviet state and of Stalin, and somewhat smaller numbers of real anti-Communists. Among the victims were several members of the Politburo as well as a large proportion of the senior army officer corps. The latter included, as an especially notable casualty, Marshal Tukhachevsky who had fought on the Bolshevik side in the civil war and later played a key role in the modernization of the Red Army. With his tight control over the NKVD, Stalin wielded a power of life and death over his ‘colleagues’. He also spread his net far wider. Some social groups were targeted more than others. The old nobility, clerics, intellectuals and peasants were, in proportion to their numbers, more likely to be arrested than were industrial workers. By the later 1930s, when Stalin was increasingly looking for the enemy within, high party and state officials were frequent victims of his chronic distrust. And successive heads of the political police, the very body that carried out the purges, stood exceptionally high chances of being executed. No social group or individual could feel immune from the risk of arrest for crimes that (unlike those of the NKVD) were often more imaginary than real. It has been rightly observed that Stalin’s use of mass repression ‘set his regime apart from its Leninist predecessor and from the selective use of repression employed by successive Soviet regimes’.17

Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, illustrated both the potential and the pitfalls of leadership within a system that some would still regard as totalitarian but by then is more aptly described as post-totalitarian authoritarianism. Like Stalin, he used the most senior position in the party – the General Secretaryship, renamed First Secretaryship during the Khrushchev era – to bring his supporters into the top leadership team and thus gradually enhanced his already strong position. It did not, however, become anything like the grotesque power that Stalin accumulated. Khrushchev, whose own hands in the Stalin era were very far from bloodless, displayed courageous leadership when he attacked Stalin, whose genius and godlike infallibility had been hailed for three decades, in a closed-session speech to delegates at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 and, openly, at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961. He made the 1956 breakthrough speech against the wishes of some senior members of the Presidium of the Central Committee (as the Politburo was known at the time).

Among those anxious to preserve the late dictator’s image intact, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov were especially vocal. Molotov declared at a Presidium meeting that ‘Stalin was the great continuer of Lenin’s work’ and that ‘under the leadership of Stalin, socialism was victorious’.¹⁸ Khrushchev replied: ‘Stalin was a betrayer of socialism, and by the most barbaric means. He annihilated the party. He was no Marxist.’ Rather than protect Stalin’s memory, Khrushchev insisted, they needed to ‘intensify the bombardment of the cult of personality’.¹⁹ One of Khrushchev’s closest allies in the party leadership on the issue of destalinization, Anastas Mikoyan, later wrote: ‘He had the character of a leader: persistence, obstinacy in pursuit of a goal, courage, and a willingness to go against the prevailing stereotypes.’ When Khrushchev was seized of a new idea, Mikoyan added, there would be no measured response. He ‘moved forward like a tank’. That could have its disadvantages, but, said Mikoyan, it was an excellent quality for a leader engaged in the battle for destalinization.20

The fears of Khrushchev’s opponents within the leadership about the consequences of attacking Stalin seemed to them all too justified when the February 1956 speech had huge repercussions within the international Communist movement. It shook the faith of many party members worldwide and stimulated unrest in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Hungary. Before the end of the year, revolution against Communist rule had broken out in Hungary and it was put down ruthlessly by Soviet tanks. Blaming Khrushchev for destabilizing international Communism, a majority of the Presidium attempted to depose him in 1957. Khrushchev outmanoeuvred them by appealing over their heads to the Central Committee, the larger body in which he had more supporters, many of them recently promoted by him. In principle, the Central Committee had a still higher authority than the Presidium (Politburo), but normally it did the bidding of that smaller group. Given an open split in the inner leadership team, the Central Committee had a choice of whom to follow. In 1957 they rallied behind Khrushchev. It was a different story in 1964 when a much more overwhelming majority of the Presidium had decided to get rid of Khrushchev (with only Mikoyan prepared to put in a word for him). This time the Central Committee gave their full support to the party leader’s opponents. Khrushchev had, they believed, acted increasingly capriciously and unilaterally. As they saw it, he had undermined the interests of virtually every institution and elite group within the system.

While Khrushchev deserves real credit for beginning the process of destalinization, his own progression from heading a collective leadership in the mid-1950s to making impulsive and arbitrary decisions by the early 1960s was damaging and dangerous. The decision to place Soviet missiles in Cuba, which brought the world close to nuclear war in 1962, was Khrushchev’s. Domestically, he was doing more harm than good to the economy. Like Stalin, he was taken in by the quack scientist Trofim Lysenko, backing his useless nostrums for increasing agricultural production and ignoring the evidence produced by serious specialists. Infuriated by opposition from within the Academy of Sciences and the Agricultural Academy, Khrushchev called in July 1964 for the Academy of Sciences to be abolished and the Agricultural Academy to be banished from Moscow and reconstructed in the countryside.21 These things did not happen, for already his senior colleagues were playing for time and just waiting for the optimal moment to remove a leader who had become increasingly autocratic as well as irascible and unpredictable. They struck on 14 October 1964, calling him back from vacation to Moscow to send him into compulsory retirement. A Pravda editorial two days later did not even mention Khrushchev by name but spoke of ‘harebrained scheming, half-baked conclusions and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality, bragging and bluster, attraction to rule by fiat’ and an ‘unwillingness to take into account what science and practical experience have already worked out’.²² Although that was not the whole story of Khrushchev’s leadership, it was certainly part of it.

With the elevation of Leonid Brezhnev, in succession to Khrushchev, as leader of the Soviet Communist Party in 1964, eighteen years of more collective leadership ensued. Once again the general secretary was able to use the political resources available to the holder of that office to strengthen his authority over time, and in the 1970s a series of ever more absurd honours were heaped on Brezhnev, including the Order of Victory, the highest award for military valour, for Brezhnev’s role in the Second World War (which had not seemed quite so remarkable at the time) and the Lenin Prize for literature, the highest award available to writers, which Brezhnev received for his slim volumes of ghosted memoirs. Brezhnev and his Politburo colleagues were happy to allow the KGB to use a variety of methods to quell any overt manifestations of dissent within Soviet society – from warnings to lengthy imprisonment in labour camps or incarceration in mental hospitals. How could you be sane, the question seemed to be, if you thought you could challenge the power of the Soviet state? With dissidents who enjoyed great prestige, both internationally and with a significant minority of Soviet citizens, different methods were used. Thus, the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – anti-Communist but more Russian nationalist than liberal – was forcibly expelled from the country, with his Soviet citizenship revoked, and the physicist and liberal critic of many of the party leadership’s actions, Andrey Sakharov, was sent into internal exile.

As these measures underline, Brezhnev was a conservative Communist. Even the anti-Stalinism that Khrushchev had set in motion was put into reverse. Stalin was not fully rehabilitated, but it became easier to praise him in print than to criticize him. Brezhnev’s basic position was that all rocking of the boat should be strictly discouraged. But in dealing with the various Soviet elites – the higher echelons of the party, the military, the KGB and the ministries – his style was conciliatory. The Brezhnev era was the golden age of the Soviet bureaucrat. Stalin had threatened (and often taken) their lives. Khrushchev had threatened (and often removed) their security of tenure. With Brezhnev presiding in the Kremlin, they were allowed to grow old together, in comfort and with little to fear. With its lack of freedom, shortage of consumer goods, and long queues even for basic foodstuffs, it was far from a golden age for the average citizen, and yet when Russians were asked in a serious survey conducted at the end of the twentieth century what was the best time to have lived in Russia in those last hundred years, the Brezhnev era was mentioned more often than any other.23 It was seen as a time of predictability and stability.

Under Stalin anyone could be arrested, even if they were not in the least critical of the regime. The secret police had quotas to fulfil, Stalin was chronically suspicious, and you could be the subject of an anonymous denunciation by a neighbour who coveted your apartment. In the Brezhnev era, you had actually to do something to attract hostile attention from the authorities. These could be activities that would be regarded as perfectly legal in a democracy, but which in the Soviet Union led to severe sanctions – such as calling for greater national autonomy (in, for instance, Ukraine or Lithuania), circulating banned creative literature in typescript, or writing a letter of protest (about, for example, the hounding of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov). In contrast, Soviet citizens who observed all the outward proprieties could feel reasonably secure. Under Stalin, hundreds of thousands of arrests were quite arbitrary. In the Brezhnev era there were discernible rules of the game.

A number of senior figures in the Politburo in addition to Brezhnev carried weight in the 1970s, among them Mikhail Suslov, Aleksey Kosygin, Andrey Gromyko and Dmitriy Ustinov. The regime was never less than highly authoritarian, but in their own homes people were no longer afraid to speak freely, in contrast with Stalin’s time. Paradoxically, there were more true believers that the Soviet Union was building a new society, one that would be vastly superior to anything in the contemporary West, during the years of Stalin’s terror in the later 1930s than were to be found in the 1970s. That kind of optimism also existed, and had even taken a new lease of life, under Khrushchev. This had been, among other things, the era in which the Soviet Union put the first person in space, a source of great pride for most Russians. The Brezhnev era, in contrast, was one of growing cynicism. It was a period of ‘doublethink’, to use Orwell’s term, in which people could simultaneously proclaim the superiority and eventual triumph of the Soviet system while envying the standard of living in the West, yearning for its products and dreaming of spending some time there. Crucially, however, essentially collective leadership was at least a vast improvement over Stalin’s dictatorship. The conditions of life in 1977 were qualitatively better for Soviet citizens, whether manual workers, peasants or well-educated professionals, than they were in 1937. The collective caution of the top leadership team did not inflict remotely as much pain on their own people as Stalin had done.

            PERSONAL RULE VERSUS OLIGARCHY IN CHINA

A similar pattern can be discerned in the other Communist giant, China. The greatest disasters occurred during the period when Mao Zedong wielded untrammelled power. In contrast, the Chinese Communists had some notable achievements in the early years after the success of their revolution in 1949 and again after Mao’s death. Between 1949 and 1957, the new Communist government brought inflation under control, largely eliminated corruption, and made substantial strides in industrialization. During this time hundreds of thousands of people were killed by the new regime, and so the period should certainly not be idealized, but there were more real achievements and fewer premature deaths than in the years of Mao’s greatest individual exercise of power.

Even in the first half of the 1950s, Mao Zedong unquestionably had a higher authority than any of his colleagues, but his individual impact on policy was quite limited. That was partly because China was drawing heavily on Soviet experience, while carefully avoiding at that stage some of the worst Soviet excesses in the collectivization of agriculture. The Chinese leadership shared a commitment to rapid economic development and technological advance, although opinions differed on the speed and manner in which this could be achieved. Mao in those years held a ‘relatively centrist position’ that ‘served to ameliorate conflict and build a consensus rather than polarize differences within the leadership’.24 Until the mid-1950s, as two leading specialists on Chinese politics have noted, ‘Mao seemed tolerant of debate in the Politburo, even accepting defeat on economic policy.’²⁵ It is not accidental that in all the time China was under Mao’s leadership, these years saw the most solid accomplishments. Disaster beckoned when Mao decided he knew better than any specialists and bulldozed his colleagues into approving in 1958 what was called the ‘Great Leap Forward’.

The Great Leap was immediately preceded by the Hundred Flowers movement, which gained its name from Mao’s remark, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom in culture’ and ‘let a hundred schools of thought contend’.²⁶ Nikita Khrushchev was not the only one who thought that what Mao wanted was to get critics to reveal themselves, so that he could identify and deal with them. Yet one impetus to this apparent liberalization had been Khrushchev’s own exposure of at least some of the crimes of Stalin. It had become prudent for Mao at such a time to attempt to demonstrate that he was nothing like the Soviet dictator. Mao was willing to encourage criticism of specific errors, while having absolutely no desire to let loose fundamental critiques of the Communist system. The criticism that did ensue was clearly more than he had bargained for, with serious differences of opinion within the Communist Party revealed. Mao’s own position in the Politburo was weakened in 1957, and his response was to re-emphasize the importance of class struggle and to launch an ‘anti-rightist campaign’. It led to the expulsion from the party of several hundred thousand members.²⁷ The Great Leap Forward, which he next embarked upon, was an exercise in mass mobilization in which Mao stopped listening to engineers and technologists, including well-qualified specialists from the Soviet Union, and sidelined the institutions of the Chinese central government. Inspirational ideology, so it appeared, was about to make expertise redundant. Huge ‘people’s communes’ were created in the countryside, as Mao sought to bring closer the ultimate goal of building Communism, as well as setting the more prosaic target of overtaking Britain economically within fifteen years. No heed was paid either to material obstacles or to professional advice. Once this mass mobilization was underway, false reporting suggested increased grain output, whereas in reality there had been a drastic drop. Mao’s man-made catastrophe was not helped by nature, for there were serious floods in 1959 and 1960.

Along with the deliberate killing of tens of thousands of those who dragged their feet, rather than making the ‘Great Leap’, at least thirty million people – forty-five million according to a recent high-end estimate based on research in provincial Chinese archives – died prematurely between 1958 and 1961, mainly of starvation and also of disease, to which malnourished and exhausted workers were especially prone.28 Liu Shaoqi, who was at the time the number two person in the Politburo and Mao’s putative successor, went as close to criticizing Mao as was possible in a speech in January 1962 when he attributed the disastrous consequences of the Great Leap 30 per cent to bad weather and the withdrawal of Soviet aid, but 70 per cent to bad political decisions.²⁹ The venture had been Mao’s personal initiative and was driven ruthlessly by him. The tragedy it produced was on such a scale that a more orderly government had to be reintroduced in the early 1960s to put the state and society together again. The collegiality of the first half of the 1950s was not, however, restored. In 1962, with the Great Leap Forward abandoned, Mao ‘disrupted the ongoing national recovery effort by forcing his colleagues to accept renewed class struggle’ and made it clear that he would tolerate no opposition.³⁰

Institutions which had been downgraded, especially in the three-year period of 1959–1961, were, nevertheless, restored to something approaching Communist normality. Mao believed that it was his radical initiatives that were now being watered down and rendered more innocuous by the bureaucracy. Although his position in the early 1960s as the pre-eminent leader was hardly in doubt, other leaders also enjoyed considerable authority. They included such senior officials as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the First Secretary of the Beijing party organization, Peng Zhen. Mao not only wanted to place himself on a still higher pedestal, he also retained an enthusiasm for ultra-radical ideas. Having been very critical of Soviet ‘revisionism’ under Khrushchev, he became increasingly concerned that China was losing its revolutionary élan. This was combined with an egocentric preoccupation with his own legacy which he preferred to entrust to radical revolutionaries rather than to bureaucrats or reformists. His solution was to launch what was called the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. It lasted for a decade and during that time made life impossible for bureaucrats and for pragmatic reformers alike. Mao set about radicalizing China’s youth and encouraging them to reject everything old and established and to build anew. School teachers were prime victims of revolutionary persecution. Dismissed from their jobs and abused, they were in many cases in rural areas tortured to confess to political crimes.31 Universities stopped functioning for several years in the late 1960s, as students became emissaries of Maoism. Mao himself played an incendiary role, urging the distribution of arms to workers and students active in the revolutionary cause. ‘Arm the left’ became a slogan and one that was acted upon.³² Violence got so out of hand that by 1969 the military were brought in to reduce the level of disorder. The Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976, although with a lesser intensity in the first half of the 1970s than in the second half of the 1960s. In the long run, it achieved precisely the opposite of what Mao had intended. The revulsion against the turmoil was such that the pragmatists and reformers gained ascendancy in the post-Mao era, with Deng Xiaoping (as already noted in Chapter 4) playing the most decisive role.

The Chinese Communist Party has been cautious about criticizing Mao – his face still adorns the country’s paper money – so crucial was his role in the party’s history. He was the leader before the revolution, during the successful revolutionary struggle and for over a quarter of a century thereafter when he latterly acquired dictatorial power over the party and the rest of society. Yet the post-Mao leadership, with Deng especially prominent, could hardly avoid condemning the Cultural Revolution, since many of them had suffered from it, and as the task of repairing the damage fell to them. Nor, while propagating the idea that over his career Mao Zedong had done more good than harm, could they disguise the fact that the person who bore responsibility for the turmoil was none other than Mao. In a ‘Resolution on Party History’ of 1981, the Central Committee declared:

The ‘cultural revolution’, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic. It was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong.³³

In reality, many more deaths were caused by Mao’s earlier folly, the Great Leap Forward, but the vast majority of those who perished then belonged to the rural community who constituted at that time overwhelmingly the greater part of the Chinese population. On a global scale of suffering, that was a still greater tragedy than the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. The Cultural Revolution, however, lasted for much longer and the people who were attacked during it included officials and the most highly educated segment of the population. Whereas the Great Leap Forward meant revolutionary turmoil in the countryside, the Cultural Revolution was both an urban and a rural phenomenon. Initially, it affected mainly the towns, but from the winter of 1968–69 the countryside was also hard hit by zealots and thugs in the name of revolution. Recent research puts the number killed in the countryside alone in a range between 750,000 and 1.5 million people and as many again afflicted with permanent injuries.34 The number who died in the towns as a direct result of the Cultural Revolution has been estimated at ‘approximately half a million Chinese, out of an urban population of around 135 million in 1967’.³⁵

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution had a dire effect on Chinese education as well as on economic growth, and it affected the political elite adversely to a far greater extent than had the Great Leap Forward. Indeed, a higher proportion of officials were removed from their posts in the course of the Cultural Revolution than were ousted even by Stalin in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, although a lower proportion were imprisoned or executed in China. As an illustration of the scale of the loss of office, there were thirteen members of the Secretariat of the party’s Central Committee in 1966, but only four still in place in 1969, and between 60 and 70 per cent of officials in the central organs of the party were dismissed.³⁶ For these various reasons, nothing in Chinese history in the years since the revolution seemed worse to the post-Mao leadership than the Cultural Revolution, and they could hardly absolve Mao of responsibility for it.

            From Mao to Deng

In the launch of this ‘last revolution’ of Mao’s lifetime, his wife Jiang Qing, who was part of a group of radicals, played a major role, even though she and Mao no longer had a particularly close relationship. An actress by profession, Jiang used her position as Mao’s wife to further her own political ambitions, and interpreted part of her task as encouraging Mao to be Mao, that is to say a revolutionary who would not allow time-servers and pen-pushers to get in the way of purification through conflict. In particular, Jiang reinforced Mao’s belief that the country needed a cultural revolution. What ensued was in reality an anti-cultural revolution. Many treasures of Chinese culture were destroyed – among them historic buildings, paintings, museum exhibits and books. The youthful Red Guards were encouraged to attack the ‘Four Olds’ – old thought, old culture, old customs and old habits. Old party officials also had a very hard time, with the obvious exception of old Chairman Mao, whose personality cult was taken to new heights (or depths). Deng Xiaoping was condemned as a ‘capitalist roader’ in 1966, removed from office and put under house arrest in 1967 before being sent to work in a factory. Liu Shaoqui was removed from his posts in 1967 and condemned as a ‘traitor, renegade and scab’. He died under house arrest in 1969.

Mao’s death in 1976 was soon followed by the comeuppance of Jiang Qing and her three principal allies who constituted the ‘Gang of Four’, which (for a time, at least) had been a ‘Gang of Five’, with Mao as the fifth and overwhelmingly the most important. He did not, however, try to anoint any one of the four former partners-in-crime as his potential successor. When by 1976 Mao was too ill to attend government and Politburo meetings, they were chaired by Hua Guofeng whom Mao had nominated as acting premier with an eye to his succession. Hua occupied a middle position between the radical ‘Gang of Four’ on the one hand and Deng Xiaoping on the other. During these last months of Mao’s life, Deng, according to his daughter, attended the Politburo only when summoned, for he felt ‘much better at home with his children and grandchildren than having to look at the mad faces of the “Gang of Four”’. When he did attend, he practised a selective deafness. When one of the Gang of Four, such as Zhang Chunqiao, attacked him, Deng claimed not to have been able to make out what had been said. However, as Zhang complained bitterly, when Hua, at the other end of the table, announced in a low voice ‘meeting adjourned’, Deng immediately pushed back his chair and got ready to leave.37 A month after Mao’s death, the Gang of Four (all of them members of the Politburo) were arrested. Their ultra-revolutionary activities had depended on the acquiescence, and at times active encouragement, of Mao. With Mao gone, those in the party and government elite who had suffered at their hands were able to consolidate their forces. At their subsequent trial, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were both sentenced to death, although the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1991, by which time she was suffering from cancer, Jiang hanged herself. Zhang was released from prison after serving twenty years.38

Mao’s short-term successes in leading a revolution, involving mass mobilization and violence, against the party and state establishment turned out to be wholly counterproductive. The reformism that followed Mao’s death, including the creation of a substantial private sector and movement to a market economy, far exceeded the ‘revisionism’ of Khrushchev or of the Brezhnev leadership in the Soviet Union which Mao had found shocking. It was an unintended consequence of the Cultural Revolution that those party officials and intellectuals who had survived it were inoculated for life against the kind of crude, unthinking, ultra-left revolutionism which had been so traumatic for them personally and which had so damaged the social and economic development of China.³⁹

That was at least a beneficial side-effect in the midst of the misery the Cultural Revolution heaped on China – and there was one other. Those who attempted to introduce marketizing measures in the Soviet Union, even in the Gorbachev era, ran up against tremendous opposition from entrenched bureaucracies in the economic ministries and from the party apparatus. Those bureaucratic structures had been so shattered in China during the Cultural Revolution that there could be no similar powerful bureaucratic resistance to the still bolder marketizing reforms which Deng Xiaoping espoused. The collective leadership that succeeded Mao, in which Deng quite soon emerged as the most influential member, listened to specialist opinion. The policies they pursued were far more rational than were Mao’s from the late 1950s onwards, by which time he had placed himself on a higher pedestal than any of his colleagues.

Deng’s role has been discussed at length in Chapter 4. The main point which needs underlining in the present context is how different was not only the content of his policy but also his style of leadership as compared with Mao. Deng, during his period of greatest influence – from 1978 until the end of the 1980s – did not hold the highest rank within the party and state. He did retain, however, until 1989 the leadership of the party’s Central Military Commission, and his confidence that he could rely on the support of the army was a significant underpinning for his authority. By 1990–91, Deng’s ideas were losing ground in Beijing, partly because of the developing crisis in the Soviet Union, culminating in the break-up of the Soviet state at the end of 1991, which dramatically illustrated for veteran Chinese Communists the potential dangers of liberalization. Deng was weakened also by the mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and their bloody outcome. Conservative Communists and Maoist leftists alike blamed a decade of reform for whetting the appetite of young people for politically liberal change. Reform and the opening to the outside world were castigated for allowing in the evil influence of capitalism and individualism. All this strengthened the hands of those who emphasized once again the importance both of class struggle and of central planning and who made clear their hostility to further liberalization of the economic system. With a less determined, skilful and widely admired politician than Deng available to respond, the conservative backlash could have been more successful and far-reaching. Deng’s contention was that only a decade of reform had enabled the party to survive the upheaval of 1989.40 He opposed democratization but refused to be deflected from the economic course which he had presided over.

Throughout the period when Deng Xiaoping was China’s paramount leader, his views prevailed more often than not. Yet, serious argument went on within the party leadership. Some leaders, notably Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were prepared to contemplate more significant political reform than Deng would countenance, while also backing the radical economic reform which Deng espoused.* Others, such as Hua Guofeng (Mao’s hand-picked immediate successor) and Li Peng (prime minister at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre) strongly opposed any political relaxation and were very suspicious of Deng’s marketizing economic policy. After Deng had ceased to be the most powerful figure within the leadership, ‘Deng Xiaoping theory’ was added to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as part of the official ideology (making it a still more heterogeneous and contradictory motley). Yet Deng, unlike Mao, saw himself as a pragmatist, not a theoretician, and had not aspired to such ideological sanctification, any more than he had (in sharp contrast with Mao) sought to promote a cult of his personality.

His immense contribution to economic systemic change apart, Deng also oversaw one very important development in China’s political system. A besetting difficulty for authoritarian regimes, and for Communist systems quite specifically, has been that of managing leadership successions.* They posed two different but serious problems. On the one hand, they led to excessively long tenure of the party leadership, as the person at the top of the hierarchy appointed more and more of his favoured people to senior positions, and they, in turn, supported him out of fear for their security of tenure under his successor. On the other hand, when a leadership change became inevitable, often only as a result of the death of an elderly incumbent, intra-party conflict could become sharp enough to threaten the system’s stability. One of Deng’s pragmatic achievements was to pave the way for the compromise figure of Jiang Zemin to become leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 1989 (following the Tiananmen Square massacre) and from 1993 president. More importantly, he presided over an institutionalization of the succession, whereby the very highest party and state offices would be held for ten years only – through the two five-year terms which separated party congresses. Deng even managed to have a decisive influence on the choice of Jiang’s successor long ahead of the changeover. That person, Hu Jintao, duly attained the highest party post in 2002. Some time before Xi Jinping, in turn, succeeded Hu as party leader in November 2012, it had become clear that he would be the choice of the top leadership team. Establishing rules of the game for leadership succession has, for the time being at least, alleviated at least one of the problems faced by authoritarian regimes.

Over the period of a quarter of a century from Jiang’s elevation to the party chairmanship in 1989, neither he nor his two successors have enjoyed a similar authority to Deng, not to speak of power comparable with that of Mao. The party chairmanship means that the holder of this office is the most important member of the top team, but that leadership has been collective. Not that all has been sweetness and light, as was illustrated by the fall and arrest in 2012 of the ambitious provincial leader Bo Xilai, whose wife was accused of murdering a British businessman. Possible cover-up by Bo of a real crime was used to the political advantage of those who were his rivals for promotion to the highest echelon of the party, the Standing Committee of the Politburo. He was convicted of this in 2013 and found guilty also of corruption in a trial which was closed to the public but was nevertheless reported (especially widely in the outside world). Within the leadership, the role of the party chairman has increasingly become one of balancing competing intra-party interests rather than of dominating the policy process.41 In relation to the broader society, and especially the various elites, the system has become one of consultative authoritarianism, as the leadership (again in sharp contrast with Mao) has drawn on the knowledge of experts outside government. The system retains the faults endemic to authoritarian regimes – above all, lack of accountability of the top leadership to the wider public, given the absence of competitive elections other than at local level. Among the major problems is massive corruption, involving high party and state officials. Nevertheless, the post-Mao years have been a time of fast economic growth and dramatically improving living standards for the great majority of the population of China. Even without a leader of Deng Xiaoping’s political standing, China under an essentially collective leadership has over the past two decades made much greater progress, with far less violence and loss of life than disfigured the years when Mao wielded despotic power.

            THE LEADER UNDER COMMUNISM

The Soviet Union and China were far from alone in the Communist world in having an individual leader (Stalin and Mao), around whom a cult of personality was created, with that person wielding vastly more power than anyone else. This occurred even in Yugoslavia, which, under Tito’s leadership, developed by the 1960s and 1970s into a far milder authoritarian regime than its Soviet and Chinese counterparts. Moreover, the leaders of Yugoslavia’s constituent republics became increasingly significant political figures as the federal forms of the country acquired greater political substance. Tito’s prestige had been important for holding the multi-national Yugoslav state together, and from the time of his death in 1980 the danger of its disintegration increased.

During his years in power, however, Tito did nothing to discourage the creation of a personality cult around him. It never reached anything like the absurd levels of Stalin’s, Mao’s, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s in Romania, or Kim Il Sung’s in North Korea, and, compared with a number of other Communist leaders who presided over the creation of myths of their greatness, such as Ceauşescu, there was real substance to Tito’s popular standing. He had led the highly effective Partisan resistance to German occupation during the Second World War; he was the leader of the Communist Party when it seized power through its own strength (rather than by courtesy of the Soviet army); and he was the national leader who had been prepared to stand up to the Soviet Union when Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform. Tito went on to become an important figure among the leaders of non-aligned countries who stood apart from both the American and the Soviet camps during the Cold War. Milovan Djilas, one of the Partisan leaders who fought alongside Tito in wartime and became a prominent figure in the post-war Communist government – until he began arguing for the country’s democratization – had an appropriately nuanced view of Tito. Writing shortly after Tito’s death in 1980, Djilas described him as ‘a politician of formidable resourcefulness, unerring instinct, and inexhaustible energy’.42 However, he noted Tito’s ‘inborn sense of superiority’ and ‘his conviction that he deserved special care’. Moreover, ‘in the end autocratic power transformed proud and decent impulses into self-serving and undemocratic ones, and [Tito’s] closest and most faithful comrades became both leaders and toadies’.43

In Communist countries the elevation of one leader far above the collective was a striking departure from the ideas that had inspired the revolutionaries. Leader-worship was an intrinsic component of fascism, but was far removed from the ideas of Marx and Lenin, though Lenin’s certitude of belief and his conviction that the Communist Party had to be strictly centralized, disciplined and hierarchical created preconditions for future personal dictatorship. Nevertheless, even under Stalin, obeisance was paid to ideas which, in principle, were higher than the leader. Stalin could hardly have launched a campaign of privatization of Soviet industry in the 1930s or 1940s, for this would have been too fundamental a break with the official ideology. Not, of course, that he had any desire to do so, for he was, in many respects, a true believer. Even when he did depart from the ideas of Marx and Lenin, he could not admit to doing so. As Alan Bullock appositely summed up the differences in relation to doctrine of Hitler and Stalin: ‘In the case of Hitler, ideology was what the Führer said it was; in the case of Stalin, it was what the General Secretary said Marx and Lenin said it was.’⁴⁴

Stalin, however, played a full part in the build-up of the cult of his personality, which set him by the 1930s far above those who had been his fellow-revolutionaries during the first two decades of the twentieth century. After Khrushchev delivered his ‘secret speech’ at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, in which he denounced Stalin, he was sent a letter by an old Bolshevik, P. Chagin, who had joined the party in the summer of 1917. Chagin recalled an evening in April 1926 when Stalin, on a visit to Leningrad, was invited to supper by Sergey Kirov (who in that year became head of the Leningrad party organization). As the editor of a Leningrad newspaper at the time, Chagin was also a guest at the gathering. During the conversation Kirov said: ‘Without Lenin, it is, of course, difficult, but we still have the party, the Central Committee, and the Politburo, and they will lead the country along the Leninist path.’ Stalin, who was pacing up and down the room, responded:

Yes, it’s all true – the party, the Central Committee, the Politburo. But keep in mind, our people understand little of all that. For centuries the people in Russia were under the tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, and especially the Russian peasants, have been used to being led by just one person. And now there must be one [italics added].⁴⁵

Stalin was doubtless sincere in expressing such views (which constituted a non-Marxist version of historical determinism), but they were also self-serving, for he was in no doubt about who was going to be the ‘one’. In another private conversation a decade later, Stalin said that ‘the people need a tsar’, meaning ‘someone to revere and in whose name to live and labour’.46 This view was shared by many Soviet propagandists who believed that it was easier to instil and fortify admiration for a great leader than to get the majority of the people enthusiastically to embrace Marxism-Leninism. At a time when the cult of his personality was rampant, and regarded by Stalin as no less than his due, he would occasionally, and hypocritically, suggest that a publisher was overdoing it. Thus, in 1938 he told the children’s literature publishing house that they should burn a book called Stories of Stalin’s Childhood because a ‘cult of personalities’ and of ‘infallible heroes’ was inconsistent with ‘Bolshevik theory’.⁴⁷

The cult of personality of the leader was not embraced in all Communist countries. Thus, for example, János Kádár, who was the top person in the Hungarian leadership for more than three decades – from 1956 to 1988 – avoided it. Kádár was far removed from the image of a heroic leader, but his survival in the highest office for so long was based neither on extremes of oppression nor on projecting an image of his greatness. By virtue of his position at the head of the party, he was the principal arbiter of Hungarian policy, but no dictator. In the earliest years after the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he had presided over severe repression, but from the early 1960s onwards Kádár pursued a cautiously reformist course. From then until the mid-1980s Hungary underwent more economic reform and experienced greater cultural relaxation than any other European Communist state during that quarter of a century. Kádár was a master of ambiguity and of judging how far it was safe to go in deviating from Soviet orthodoxy. When Khrushchev took his denunciation of Stalin into the open at the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961, Kádár seized the opportunity to intensify Hungarian destalinization. Ideologically, he went further than was permitted within the Soviet Union itself. His declaration in late 1961 that ‘whoever is not against us is with us’ reflected a willingness to accept political quietism and contrasted with Khrushchev’s campaigning style.⁴⁸

Still more, it was a world away from Maoist ‘Great Leaps’ and ‘Cultural Revolution’. Instead of mass mobilization campaigns to get everyone embracing, or at least mouthing, the official ideology, there was an acceptance that people could get on with their own lives and thoughts, so long as they did not openly challenge the system. Concessions to the market in Hungarian agriculture meant that it became a relative success story, at least in comparison with other Communist countries. Hungary had economic reformers who pushed for this and for other modifications of the economic system. It was not Kádár who was the driving force, but he did not stand in the way.49 In comparison not only with other Communist leaders but in relation to the wide opportunities open to him, Kádár lived modestly and, in the tradition of his rural childhood, kept chickens in the garden of his home. In sharp contrast with Mátyás Rákosi, his main predecessor as Hungary’s Communist leader, he entirely eschewed a personality cult.⁵⁰

Hungary under Kádár was sometimes called ‘the happiest barracks in the camp’ (a reference to the Soviet bloc of European Communist states). To say the country was ‘happy’ is something of an exaggeration, and it was not an adjective anyone would reach for in describing Kádár himself. Moreover, Poland at various times and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were freer, but Hungary over a lengthy period was generally the least repressive barracks in the camp. Hungarian citizens’ perceptions of Kádár himself underwent a remarkable change. He was widely regarded as a national traitor in 1956 and for the remainder of the fifties, having become the Soviet-endorsed leader charged with ‘restoring order’ in Hungary, following the crushing of the Hungarian revolution. Over time he came to be viewed as the ‘least bad’ of the various realistic options available to the country, given the external constraints imposed from Moscow. That developed into a grudging respect – or even more. When he died in the summer of 1989, over a hundred thousand people congregated for his funeral. More remarkably, one decade later (and ten years into Hungary’s post-Communist democracy), the lugubrious and unheroic János Kádár emerged in more than one opinion survey as the ‘greatest Hungarian’ of the twentieth century.⁵¹ While he was no liberal democrat, he was just as far removed from being a dictator in the style of Romania’s Ceauşescu, a Communist potentate who, because of his deviation at times from Soviet foreign policy, was over many years treated with greater respect in Western capitals than was Kádár.

            Fidel Castro in Power

Communism in Cuba has had a vigorous nationalist component, closer to the anti-colonialist Communism to be found in Asia than the Communism of the ruling parties in Eastern Europe. The patriotic aspect was certainly important for Castro who, as noted in Chapter 5, had not yet become a Communist at the time he acquired power as the leader of the successful revolutionary struggle in January 1959. His hero, José Martí, had not only sought Cuba’s liberation from Spanish colonial rule, he had also warned against this being replaced by a less formal domination from the United States. In 1961 Castro merged his revolutionary July 26th Movement with the Communists. His desire for social justice and anti-capitalism, together with the sheer difficulties of running an economy in which big business had been nationalized or frightened off, led within a very few years to the adoption of orthodox (and thus highly authoritarian) Communist economic and political institutions. Castro’s Cuba was officially recognized to be part of the international Communist movement in 1963.

By the time Castro, with his health declining, ceded the leadership of the country in 2008 to his brother Raúl, he had been in power for half a century. His political longevity derived in substantial part from his personal appeal, but also from the adoption of the characteristic institutions of a Communist system (with their proven instruments for control). It has additionally owed much to the counterproductive policies pursued by the United States. Early attempts to overthrow the Castro regime, followed by a policy of isolating and endeavouring to undermine it, enabled Fidel both to appeal to Cuban patriotism and to sustain a siege mentality.* So long as Cuba was a Soviet ally during the Cold War, the policy of successive American administrations was slightly more understandable than it became after the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist and Cuba could no longer be seen as a threat to the United States other than by the most fevered imagination.* A policy of maximum engagement with Cuba would have made it harder for Castro to resist liberalizing and democratizing measures. No such liberalization took place so long as Fidel was leader, and only modest economic reform has ensued since he was succeeded by Raúl (accompanied by some limited relaxation also of American policy towards Cuba under the Obama administration). Until the demise of Communist rule in Russia, Cuba benefited from its trade with the Soviet Union, which supplied it with both energy and armaments. It had, accordingly, a hard time in the 1990s when that help was no longer forthcoming from post-Soviet Russia. Material conditions deteriorated drastically; there were food shortages and lengthy electricity blackouts.⁵²

It was a surprise to many observers that Havana remained Communist after Moscow had become capitalist. A moderate degree of political relaxation probably helped, although this, in many contexts, can stimulate demand for more far-reaching change. The most important policy shift was an extension of religious tolerance, so that religious belief no longer prevented someone from holding official office.⁵³ Economic assistance arrived at the end of the decade, with the coming to power of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1999 providing a new source of subsidized oil. Living standards in Cuba, however, remained low. The main success stories (true of a number of Communist countries but in Cuba more than most) were in health and education. It was an especially impressive achievement that Cuba in the twenty-first century has had an infant mortality rate and average life expectancy very similar to that of the United States, notwithstanding the vastly greater wealth of the USA.⁵⁴

Improving the educational and health prospects of the poor, especially the rural poor (for there was a high level of urban literacy already in pre-revolutionary Cuba), has been matched neither by a spread of pluralist democracy nor of political liberty. Opponents of the Cuban Communist regime have over the years been repressed, although the number of political prisoners has greatly declined over time.55 The use of the safety valve of emigration has meant that many potential opponents of the regime were abroad rather than in Cuba. Several hundred thousand citizens were able to leave either for other parts of Latin America or for the United States in successive waves of permitted emigration. Cuba under Fidel, having adopted a Soviet-type economic system, did not reform it even to the extent of Kádár’s Hungary. Castro remained deeply suspicious of any kind of ‘market socialism’. Nor did he try to emulate the political reforms of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Although fully capable of taking decisions independently of the Soviet Union, Castro during the 1960s and 1970s internalized the orthodox Communist conception of ‘socialism’. He stuck with it doggedly, even while it was being abandoned in Russia. Thus, for example, Castro, who over the years had many meetings with Felipe González, the leader of the democratic Socialist party in Spain and Spanish prime minister from 1982 to 1996, resisted the reforms the Spanish social democrat suggested to him.⁵⁶

So long as he held office as party leader and president, Castro was the dominant figure in the policy-making process as well as the custodian of the ideals of the revolution. His prestige, intelligence and personality were such that he did not need an artificially constructed cult. To a perhaps surprising extent, given how long his leadership lasted and the problems ordinary Cubans faced, he retained respect and loyalty. While Cuba has been far from free of corruption, Castro personally was untainted by it. He remained contemptuous of materialism. During the 1990s, when the issue for many Cubans was obtaining the basic material necessities of life, rather than materialist excess, the survival of the system owed a good deal to residual loyalty to Castro. An American specialist on Cuba, Julia Sweig, has emphasized the importance of ‘Fidel Castro’s personal leadership and charisma during this time’ for ‘Cuba’s defiance and survival’, adding: ‘It was through his ubiquitous presence that many Cubans, even as some of their neighbors receded into apathy or left for good, continued to see the revolution as a set of ideals in which they personally had a stake.’⁵⁷

            North Korean Extremes

Of the world’s five remaining Communist states, four in Asia and one in the Caribbean, the only one in which a full-blown cult of personality of the leader is still to be found is North Korea. Three generations of the one family, albeit in descending order of adulation, have now been the subjects of myth-creation on a grand scale. The personality cult excesses are most abundant in relation to Kim Il Sung, the state’s first Communist ruler. Kim did enjoy some genuine support as the North’s leader during the Korean War, which (with massive Chinese assistance on the side of the North Koreans, and vast participation from the United States and other democracies on the South Korean side) ended in stalemate. Most North Koreans believed that South Koreans had started the war by invading the North and that, under Kim Il Sung’s leadership, they had subsequently emerged victorious from the conflict.58 Along with a regimented society closed to the outside world went a manufactured cult of the leader which defied parody. All of the country’s advances, such as they have been, are attributed to Kim and to his family. It is difficult to imagine that outside North Korea a Communist Party would describe its late leader, as Kim Il Sung was portrayed, as being ‘superior to Christ in love, superior to Buddha in benevolence, superior to Confucius in virtue and superior to Mohammed in justice’.⁵⁹

Children, by the time they reached kindergarten age, had learned to say ‘Thank you, Great Fatherly Leader’ when they received a snack.⁶⁰ Typically, Kim was the ‘Sun of the world, supreme brain of the nation’.⁶¹ Moreover, he ‘not only protected the political life of the people but also saved their physical life, his love cured the sick and gave them a new life, like the spring rain falling on the sacred territory of Korea’.⁶² Apart from acquiring godlike attributes, Kim’s most distinctive innovation in the world of Communist politics was to combine lip-service to Marxism-Leninism with the creation of hereditary rule, grooming his son, Kim Jong Il to succeed him, which he did on the father’s death in 1994. This, then, has been a totalitarianism combined ‘with sultanistic aspects’.⁶³ Interestingly, the dynastic aspiration had long been signalled by a change in the North Korean Dictionary of Political Terminology. The 1970 edition had the following entry: ‘Hereditary succession is a reactionary custom of exploitative societies whereby certain positions or riches may be legally inherited. Originally a product of slave societies, it was later adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule.’⁶⁴ That definition disappeared from the 1972 edition of the book. When Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, the dynasty was carried on by his youngest son, Kim Jong Un.⁶⁵ The dictatorial rule of the three generations of Kims has done little to improve the lives of North Koreans who have suffered famines and a miserable standard of living. Teenage defectors from North Korea are ‘on average five inches shorter and 25 pounds lighter than their South Korean counterparts’.66 So oppressive and intrusive has been the regime that it has come closer than most totalitarian regimes to mirroring the kind of system and society portrayed in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

            THE LEADER UNDER FASCISM

The creation of myths about the greatness of the leader was a radical departure from Marxism-Leninism, an excrescence within Communist systems, however valuable its function in consolidating support for the regime within predominantly peasant societies. In contrast, the cult of the leader was central to fascist thinking and of the utmost importance in the two major fascist regimes of the twentieth century – Benito Mussolini’s and Adolf Hitler’s. But what all leadership cults had in common – in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and in those Communist states which indulged in them – was their utility in generating support for the regime on the part of those least interested in ideological formulations. Mussolini, as we have seen, embraced the idea of the totalitarian state. For him and those around him it was a desired goal. Yet highly repressive though Mussolini’s rule was, it was somewhat further away from the totalitarian ideal type than either Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.

            Mussolini

Mussolini had been an anti-clerical socialist before the First World War. By the end of the war he had turned strongly against socialism and Communism, but he was still anti-Catholic. Before long, he found it prudent to drop much of his hostility to the Church, since an accommodation with the Vatican made more sense than struggle. Moreover, they shared some beliefs. Mussolini talked repeatedly about the need for reassertion of authority, discipline and order, and ‘his passionate opposition to socialism, liberalism and the doctrines of materialism’ was well received by many in the Church.⁶⁷ Having been a republican, Mussolini reconciled himself also to keeping the monarchy, so long as he rather than the king wielded supreme power. Since the monarch could, in the earliest stage of Mussolini’s rise, have ordered the army to crush the growing fascist movement, its leader decided that it would be unwise to make an enemy of King Victor Emmanuel III. Mussolini’s fascist movement developed very quickly. With a group of like-minded war veterans, he established the nationalist Fasci di Combattimento (Fighting Leagues) in 1919, and soon the Blackshirt gangs they spawned were interpreting the name literally, fighting against socialists, liberals and other democrats. The fascist party, which Mussolini headed, had some twenty thousand members by 1920, and that number had grown to almost 220,000 by the end of 1921. Part of its appeal was the promise of jobs for those who joined the movement, but there was also a sense of mission and of sacrifice for the nation. The party appealed to young people, and especially to rural youth. A quarter of the members by 1921 were agricultural labourers; farmers counted for another 12 per cent.68

Mussolini became prime minister in 1922 as a result of threat and bluster. He appealed to the king not to oppose the ‘fascist revolution’.⁶⁹ But he also threatened a mass march on Rome by his Blackshirts against the existing civil authority. The king refused to sign a decree presented to him by the prime minister, Luigi Facta, declaring a state of emergency in the country, which could have facilitated the use of troops against Mussolini’s ragtag army of insurgents. It was not entirely clear, however, that either the army or the police could be relied upon, for within their ranks there was sympathy for Mussolini and his cause. Whether for that reason, or as an attempt simply to avoid bloodshed, the king invited Mussolini to head a coalition government.⁷⁰ Brutality continued through the 1924 election campaign that saw Mussolini’s government-supported list of candidates win two-thirds of the votes. They were condemned in parliament by a well-known socialist politician, Giacomo Matteotti, who complained of violence and intimidation in the election. Mussolini, he added, had made it clear that, even if he had been in a minority after the election, he would not have given up power. Less than two weeks later Matteotti was stabbed to death.⁷¹ Mussolini had clearly sanctioned the killing, although he denied it.

Conservative opinion continued to support Mussolini both at home and abroad. In London, The Times noted his success in combating Bolshevism and said that his fall ‘would be too horrible to contemplate’. In January 1925 Mussolini put an end to parliamentarism and seized full dictatorial power. The king once again facilitated this, having evidently decided that right-wing authoritarian rule was preferable to weak parliamentary government and party competition.72 By the end of 1926 Mussolini had banned all political parties other than his own and, having established a special tribunal for the purpose, either imprisoned or put under police surveillance most of the Communist leaders and other prominent anti-fascist activists in Italy.⁷³

There were several attempts on Mussolini’s life in 1925 and 1926, but he survived unscathed. The Pope said that Mussolini was ‘truly protected by God’, and the Archbishop of Naples declared in a sermon that Mussolini had been preserved for ‘some high destiny’ that would be ‘for the greater good of our Italy and perhaps of the whole world’.⁷⁴ Robert Paxton has noted that long after Mussolini’s regime had settled into a routine, he still liked to talk about the ‘Fascist revolution’. What he meant was ‘a revolution against socialism and flabby liberalism, a new way of uniting and motivating Italians, and a new kind of governmental authority capable of subordinating private liberties to the needs of the national community and of organizing mass assent while leaving property intact’.⁷⁵ Mussolini was, however, prepared to manoeuvre in order to get his way and secure as much assent as possible. He told an old friend of his what an effort had been involved in seeking ‘equilibrium’ among such influential institutions and interests within the country as the ‘government, party, monarchy, Vatican, army, militzia, prefects, provincial party leaders, ministers, the head of the Confederazioni [corporatist structures] and the giant monopolistic interests’.⁷⁶ Establishing totalitarian power remained for Mussolini a rather distant aspiration.

The creation of a leadership cult was the principal mechanism for enhancing his authority and maintaining power. A powerful orator, Mussolini in the mid-1920s offered the supposed benefits of the ‘strong hand’ and of establishing ‘order’. As Christopher Duggan has observed, ‘After the turmoil of the previous few years, the myth of “order” was mesmerising. It was ironic that those who had been the chief instigators of the violence and who had done more than anyone else to undermine the rule of law and bring the state into disrepute should emerge as the principal beneficiaries of the widespread craving for stability.’⁷⁷ The project of building up an image of Mussolini’s greatness came at that time largely from within the fascist party organization, for the party, which was less popular than the Duce, hoped to benefit from some of the reflected glory. Simultaneously, however, the cult of Mussolini put a distance between him and the roughhouse tactics of the Blackshirts. In general, when things went wrong, the problems could be blamed on others. During the 1930s, as Duggan notes, fascism’s failings were regularly ‘imputed to the Duce’s incompetent, corrupt or treacherous entourage, with Mussolini himself viewed as ignorant of the sins of those around him or otherwise magnanimously forgiving of them’.78

Even an Italian journalist who would have liked fascism to have been more monolithic accepted that there had been ‘various currents’ within it and ‘the only unifying element was the myth of the leader and his presumed infallibility’.⁷⁹ In the course of the 1930s, Mussolini himself increasingly came to believe in that myth, saying: ‘I have never made a mistake when I followed my instinct; I have always gone wrong when I listened to reason.’ It was characteristic of fascism to elevate ‘instinct’ above reason.⁸⁰ There were, however, important differences between Italian and German fascism. Whereas anti-Semitism was absolutely central to Hitler’s creed, this was not the case with Mussolini. The Minister of Finance in his government from 1932 to 1935 was Jewish, and Jews had been more than proportionately represented in Mussolini’s party from its earliest existence.⁸¹ It was during the period of growing friendship with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s that the issue of Jewish influence in Italian society began to be raised sharply and legislation discriminating against Jews was introduced in the autumn of 1938.⁸²

By the time it became evident during the later stages of the Second World War that Italy was on the road to defeat, Mussolini’s ‘contempt for his opponents’ was ‘extended to include his followers’.⁸³ His earlier enormous popularity dwindled fast when the suffering inflicted by the war appeared to be all for no purpose. When Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci were captured and shot by Communist partisans in April 1945, and subsequently strung up by their feet so that large crowds could gawp, it was quickly forgotten how popular Mussolini had earlier been. One young journalist who was present summed up the rapid shift from eulogizing to cursing the fallen leader as ‘Tyranny at the top, credulity and conformism at the bottom’ and the change from one political mythology to another as people ‘who would have rushed to any piazza in Italy to scream deliriously for Mussolini’ reacted as if they had been opposed to him all along.⁸⁴

            Hitler’s Rise to Power

Even though they sometimes used the language of revolution, both Mussolini and Hitler, as Robert Paxton notes, ‘were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state’ who did so ‘in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counsellors’.85 Hitler had attempted a putsch in Bavaria in 1923, hoping to seize power in Munich as a stepping-stone to Berlin, but he was arrested and spent a year in prison. After that experience he decided to campaign for electoral office rather than grab power unconstitutionally. That was not because he had been converted to a belief in the rule of law, but because relying on his growing appeal seemed the more dependable route. Dictatorship could come later. Hitler used his time in prison to read and to work on his book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which was published in two volumes in the mid-1920s. His fixation on an imagined Aryan ‘racial purity’ and obsessive anti-Semitism are running themes. Hitler was able to tap into the sense of humiliation and injustice in Germany in the 1920s, following the First World War. Viewing the country as being in a state of crisis and collapse, he insisted that ‘of all the causes of the German collapse . . . the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognise the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace’.⁸⁶ Hitler also inveighed against pacifism, writing, ‘Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.’⁸⁷

Harsh peace terms imposed by the victorious allies in 1919, hyper-inflation in the early 1920s, followed by serious unemployment enabled the National Socialist (Nazi) organization Hitler had established in 1919 to make some progress during the 1920s, but a degree of economic recovery in the second half of that decade helped to ensure that they remained a fringe party. This changed after the Wall Street crash of October 1929. The knock-on effect meant that German banks withdrew their loans to businesses and by 1932 more than one worker in three was unemployed.⁸⁸ Hitler’s party was a major beneficiary of that economic crisis. In the parliamentary election of 1928 they had secured twelve seats and 2.6 per cent of the vote. In the election for the Reichstag of September 1930, that rose to 107 seats and 18.3 per cent. The Nazi Party had become the second largest in the parliament, and more than six million people had voted for it.⁸⁹ Hitler’s major biographer, Ian Kershaw, offers a generalization which has, indeed, a much wider application than to inter-war Germany when he writes: ‘There are times – they mark the danger point for a political system – when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the people they are supposed to be representing. The politicians of Weimar’s parties were well on the way to reaching that point in 1930.’90

Two years later Hitler’s support was still stronger. The aged Reich President, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, came to the end of his seven-year term of office and stood for re-election. Hitler entered the contest against him, as did the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann. Hindenburg did not have an overall majority on the first round of voting and Hitler was the runner-up. In the second round he secured 37 per cent of the votes, and more than thirteen million people voted for him.⁹¹ Hitler believed that, as a consequence of that showing, he was entitled to be offered the Chancellorship, the main position of power as head of the government, but he was rebuffed by Hindenburg. (The latter’s majority was secured partly thanks to the votes of Social Democrats, since, conservative though Hindenburg was, he was clearly preferable to Hitler.) The Nazis had mixed fortunes in 1932. There were Reichstag elections in both July and November of that year and the party got two million votes fewer in November than they had received in the summer. Hindenburg thought he was cleverly taking advantage of the Nazis’ comparative weakness, therefore, when he finally acceded to their demand that Hitler be made Chancellor, appointing him to that post at the end of January 1933, but surrounding him within the government by conservatives rather than fascists. He believed that Hitler’s powers would thus be constrained.

Hitler had other ideas, and he was greatly helped by the burning down of the Reichstag (parliament) building on 27 February 1933. This was a chance event, for it was the work of a young Dutch socialist who had acted alone with the intention of galvanizing German workers to struggle actively against their right-wing government and against capitalism. Hitler took the opportunity to blame the Communists collectively for the arson, cracking down especially on them but also on Social Democrats and other anti-fascists. In an election on 5 March 1933, marked by extreme intimidation, the Nazi Party won just under 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 out of 647 seats in the new Reichstag. In spite of the brutal tactics used against them, with Communists and Social Democrats beaten up and sometimes murdered, the Communist Party gathered more than 12 per cent and the Social Democrats over 18 per cent of the vote.92 The Nazis, however, had not only emerged as by far the largest single party, they also had an overall parliamentary majority as a result of their coalition with conservatives. They did not, in fact, even need to rely on the latter’s support in order to seize power, for the Nazis ensured that Communist deputies elected were not able to take their seats. They had either been arrested or taken flight. In the intimidating presence of the two paramilitary organizations, the SA and the SS, only the votes of ninety-four Social Democrats were cast against an Enabling Act, which, with 441 deputies voting for it, essentially passed power from parliament to the National Socialists.⁹³ (Importantly, the Centre Party – the precursor of the post-war Christian Democrats – who were not natural allies of the Nazis voted for the law.) By the summer of 1933 over one hundred thousand Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists had been arrested, and even official estimates put ‘the number of deaths in custody at 600’.⁹⁴

Already in 1933 Hitler, with the particular assistance of the chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, had instigated a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops and businesses. Dismissal of Jews – defined by ‘racial’, not religious criteria – affected the whole of cultural and educational life. By 1934 around 1,600 out of 5,000 university teachers had been hounded out of their jobs either because they were Jewish or because they were political opponents of fascism.⁹⁵ There was ample cooperation from below as well as encouragement from above. Students played a large part in hastening the expulsion of Jewish and anti-Nazi professors. The regime’s ideology had become increasingly widely imbibed. Hitler, after all, had ‘one great gift: the ability to move crowds with his rhetoric’.⁹⁶

Many of Hitler’s followers were eager for him to take dictatorial power, and he was now able to advance more rapidly in that direction. The one threat to his complete ascendancy was a potential alliance between conservative forces and the army, especially since senior army officers were increasingly concerned about the pretensions of the fascist party’s paramilitary wing, the SA, with its four and a half million members. Not only were they arresting, beating up and sometimes killing Jews, Communists and Social Democrats, they seemed, under their ambitious leader, Ernst Röhm, to be seeking a superior authority to the army. In the circumstances, Hitler chose a crackdown on the SA leadership. This was not just a short-term concession to the army, but an enterprise he decided was to his own advantage, for he had come to suspect the loyalty of Röhm. He had him arrested and shot. Hitler’s praetorian guard, the SS, previously subordinate to the SA, were now elevated above it, and the SA ‘turned into little more than a military sports and training body’.97 The showdown with the SA took place in July 1934 – at the same time as Hitler dealt with a potential threat from a quite different source. The killing of top SA leaders was paralleled by the shooting of a number of respected conservative figures, among them the former chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher and his wife. Yet, with an emphasis on their bringing the SA to heel, Hitler and Goebbels presented the purge as a heroic measure to prevent a coup by Röhm that would have plunged Germany into continuous revolution. This spurious claim was taken sufficiently at face value by many middle-class Germans to lead them to believe that Hitler had saved Germany from chaos.

Until the death of Hindenburg at the beginning of August 1934, Hitler did not, however, attain the fully fledged ‘Führer state’. While Hindenburg was dying, Hitler pushed through an important constitutional change whereby on the president’s death that office would be combined with the Reich Chancellorship. Since it was the president who had been commander of the armed forces, it meant that this important power was being transferred to Hitler who in future was officially to be addressed as ‘Führer and Reich Chancellor’.⁹⁸ From that time on, his absolutism became greater and ideological goals clearer. Although an egomaniac, Hitler had not been driven by lust for power alone. He was also ‘an ideologue of unshakeable convictions’.⁹⁹ Accompanying his racial interpretation of historical development was an impassioned belief in a ‘great man’ understanding of history. He was an ardent admirer of the eighteenth-century Prussian monarch, Frederick II (Frederick the Great). For Hitler, he perfectly exemplified greatness, since he combined absolute rule at home with military success abroad, greatly expanding the boundaries of the state and making Prussia the leading military power in Europe. In the later stages of the Second World War, when it was clear to others that imminent defeat beckoned for Nazi Germany, Hitler was still taking inspiration from the German translation of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick which Goebbels presented to him.¹⁰⁰

By 1934 the normal way of addressing Hitler was ‘Mein Führer’, while he himself, when speaking to most Nazi leaders, used just their surname. He took far greater pains over projecting his image (though that was not the term used then) than in the content of policy. The exceptions were the areas which most obsessed him – eliminating Jewish influence (which ultimately became a policy of eliminating Jews themselves), building up German military power, and foreign policy (discussed in the next chapter). One important respect in which the system was less than totalitarian is that argument on many other policies took place at a level below Hitler, with subordinates following his broad guidelines and trying to do what they thought he would approve. This merely enhanced his immense authority, although leadership by means of inaccessibility, unpredictable interventions, long-winded monologues and lack of interest in policy detail hardly made for efficient government.101

Hitler hated cabinet meetings in which there could be critical discussion. When in 1933 he was still heading a coalition government, containing more conservatives than Nazis, the cabinet met four or five times a month up until the summer recess, but thereafter much less frequently. He preferred one-to-one meetings, which he could be certain to dominate, and he practised strong favouritism among his ministers.¹⁰² By the later 1930s the cabinet never met. By this time, all semblance of collective government had disappeared and no one within the system doubted that the Führer, and he alone, had the ultimate right to take decisions. Policy on which Hitler chose to focus was decided by him, in consultation with whichever individuals he decided to summon at any particular time.¹⁰³

By 1936 Hitler’s popularity in Germany could not be doubted. While an election in that year which gave almost 99 per cent of the vote to the Nazis owed much, for a significant minority within the electorate, to intimidation and fear of the consequences of a negative vote, it seems clear that by this time Hitler was supported by the greater part of the German population. The recovery of the economy, national pride in the country’s renewed military might and a widespread belief in the greatness of Hitler were political realities. No one believed more in his genius than Hitler himself. As Kershaw writes, ‘Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable. The point where hubris takes over had been reached in 1936.’¹⁰⁴ By early 1938 Hitler was remarking to the Austrian dictator Kurt von Schuschnigg: ‘I have achieved everything that I set out to do and have thus perhaps become the greatest German of all history.’105

Fascism was very much a movement of the inter-war period of the twentieth century, and Italy and Germany are the clearest examples of this movement in power. The fact that there were some dissimilarities between those two regimes does not invalidate the use of ‘fascist’ to describe them both; there were, after all, big differences at various times among Communist systems, including international tensions (as the Sino-Soviet dispute testified). Fascism constituted a particular type of political movement. Although the ideology could be changed by the leader far more easily than Marxist-Leninist doctrine could be discarded by their Communist counterparts, fascism was a movement with some common elements. They included glorification of war and violence, expansionism, racism, an aspiration for total control, a fixation on national solidarity and refusal to admit legitimate differences of interest and values within the society, and – not least – a belief in heroic leadership. To these Robert Paxton adds, inter alia, ‘the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external’; ‘the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason’, and ‘right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle’.¹⁰⁶

There were fascist movements between the two world wars in many European countries, including France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway. They took inspiration from Italy and Germany but made, however, only a minor impact on their domestic political systems. As Paxton puts it: ‘Most of these feeble imitations showed that it was not enough to don a colored shirt, march about, and beat up some local minority to conjure up the success of a Hitler or Mussolini. It took a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, comparable skill at alliance building, and comparable cooperation from existing elites.’¹⁰⁷ There has been a tendency to stretch the meaning of fascism to cover too many different regimes, but just as dressing up as a group and beating up others did not necessarily make a political movement successful, so not every brutal and repressive right-wing regime was by that very token fascist. Thus, neither Spain under General Franco nor Portugal under António de Oliviera Salazar was, strictly speaking, fascist, although highly autocratic. In both cases the regimes began as military dictatorships and remained authoritarian, but, in the Spanish case especially, some elements of pluralism had crept in even before the breakthrough to democracy of the 1970s. Significantly, both Spain and Portugal preserved traditional elements of conservatism more than did either Mussolini’s Italy or (especially) Hitler’s Germany. Both Franco and Salazar were Catholics who embraced the Church as an institution and counted on its backing. Nevertheless, Franco flirted with the major fascist dictators, benefiting in the Spanish Civil War from the aid of both Mussolini and Hitler. In the aftermath of that conflict, he engaged in bloody repression, in which some two hundred thousand people were killed.108

Hitler’s ‘genuine and immense popularity among the great mass of the German people’ continued until the middle of the Second World War.¹⁰⁹ (His foreign policy miscalculations, which brought calamity to his nation and destroyed him, are one of the themes of the next chapter.) Nazi Germany combined the cult of Hitler’s personality with the institutions of a powerful modern state. Even after Hitler’s charisma began to fade, in the midst of wartime suffering, the institutions of the state continued to function. For Hitler, however, the main purpose of the state was to promote a great leader to the position of highest authority and to serve him loyally. As early as 1920 he had declared: ‘We need a dictator who is a genius.’¹¹⁰ Hailed by a regional Nazi party leader as ‘a new, a greater and a more powerful Jesus Christ’,¹¹¹ Hitler held millions in thrall as a result of his magnetism, the apparent success until the end of the 1930s of his undertakings, and the shared myth that what Germany needed most of all was a great and strong leader. ‘Success’, wrote Adam Smith, when ‘joined to great popular favour’, often turned the heads of even the greatest of leaders, leading them to ‘ascribe to themselves both an importance and an ability much beyond what they really possessed’ and ‘by this presumption, to precipitate themselves into many rash and sometimes ruinous adventures’.¹¹² While Hitler’s greatness, other than in a capacity to whip up evil, was an illusion, it was an illusion that certainly generated ruinous adventures.

            MYTHS OF DICTATORIAL REGIMES

In the eighteenth century Turgot wrote: ‘Despotism is easy. To do what you want to do, is a rule which a king learns very quickly; art is necessary to persuade people, but none is necessary to give orders. If despotism did not revolt those who are its victims, it would never be banished from the earth.’113 Despotism does sooner or later provoke its victims into overthrowing it (although violent revolution has often been but a prelude to a different variant of authoritarian rule). Even an autocrat, however, cannot rule by force alone, for he must be able to persuade those around him – his praetorian guard, army chiefs or head of the political police – that it is either for the good of the country or in their personal interests (or, more commonly, both) to support him loyally. As Turgot’s older contemporary David Hume put it: ‘No man would have any reason to fear the fury of a tyrant, if he had no authority over any but from fear; since, as a single man, his bodily force can reach but a small way, and all the further power he possesses must be founded either on our own opinion, or on the presumed opinion of others.’¹¹⁴

Thus, persuasion as well as force has to be part of the armoury of an authoritarian leader. Autocrats in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have had at their disposal means and media undreamt of by Enlightenment thinkers – from the amplified mass meeting, used to such effect by Mussolini and Hitler, to electronic surveillance, to radio and television and a monopoly control over the messages they convey.* Linked to the need to influence opinion is the necessity of organization, since ruling a modern state is different from being chief of what eighteenth-century writers called a ‘rude tribe’. Traditional monarchies apart, many authoritarian regimes in an age of democratization feel the need for a façade of democracy, including ‘elections’ offering no real choice, but which can be and are, nevertheless, presented as evidence of popular support for the regime. A monopolistic ruling party will normally play an important part in organizing such elections and mobilizing people to vote. There is evidence, indeed, that autocrats who have a party at their disposal enjoy greater political longevity than those who rely on personalistic rule without a political party. Not only is party organization useful for mobilizational purposes; it may also help ‘to regulate the ambitions of political rivals and bind them to the ruler’.115

The Baath Party was an important support for the power of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, although it was founded in Damascus by Syrians and introduced into Iraq in 1951 by a young Iraqi engineer who was later to be murdered by Saddam.¹¹⁶ While Saddam was fiercely opposed to any domestic Communists – as well as to radical Islamists – the party organization was not dissimilar to that of ruling Communist parties. Like them, it played an important part in subordinating the army and the security services to the party. Political officers were inserted in the army to insure that the military became deeply imbued with the party’s – and, above all, Saddam’s – ideas.¹¹⁷ The party was also the driving force in the building of the personality cult of Saddam Hussein. This went to extreme lengths, as did the obsequiousness of his associates and subordinates in his presence. Towns, mosques, theatres and rivers were named after Saddam. Banners declared that ‘Iraq is Saddam and Saddam is Iraq’, while writers gushed that ‘Saddam is the peak of the mountains and the roar of the seas’.¹¹⁸ Nevertheless, the author of the most detailed study of Saddam and the Baath Party argues that the regime, although undoubtedly tyrannical, should be regarded as authoritarian rather than totalitarian.¹¹⁹

Totalitarian regimes, in order to justify the aspiration for total control of the ruling party and leader, characteristically offer a vision of a glorious future, a new golden age, which, for a time at least (as happened in the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany), inspires a significant proportion of the population. More prosaic arguments used to justify both totalitarian and authoritarian regimes are that they provide order and are a source of stable government. The claim to supply order is seductive, for most people most of the time want a peaceful environment, providing a settled order in which they can bring up their families. If they are told, and believe, that the alternative to the ‘order’ provided by the dictatorial regime is civil war and anarchy, many will give either willing or grudging assent to the powers that be.

There are, however, several fundamental problems with this justification of ‘order’. The first is that a majority of authoritarian regimes have themselves created massive disorder through contempt for a rule of law and by resort to violence and the physical break-up of families, involving the arrest, imprisonment and killing of tens of thousands (as in the case of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet) or millions of their own citizens (as occurred in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China). Nothing could have been further removed from order, however defined, than the Chinese Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The second difficulty is that such regimes, through lack of accountability and responsiveness to grievances, are incapable of resolving underlying problems; they merely repress them. When reform or revolution eventually takes place, the difficulties have usually become more rather than less intractable. A third problem is related to the fact that most states are ethnically diverse and countries under authoritarian rule are no exceptions. In Africa, in particular, but also in the Middle East, national boundaries were determined by imperial powers with little or no regard for local allegiances and ethnic loyalties. As Paul Collier observes, ‘Typically, in ethnically diverse societies autocrats depend upon the support of their own ethnic group’ and the more diverse the society, ‘the smaller the autocrat’s group is likely to be’.120 This leads the autocrat to favour his own group both politically and economically. Resources are quite disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the dominating religious or ethnic group. That exacerbates underlying inter-group tensions as well as damaging economic development.

It is no less of a myth that authoritarian rule provides stability. In an established democracy the defeat and removal of a government is a normal and healthy event. It does not imply a crisis for the system or society. The removal of a government within an authoritarian regime, in contrast, means systemic crisis. In the past few decades this has been well illustrated by the transformation of Eastern Europe in 1989 and the much more tumultuous upheaval in the Middle East since 2011. Democratic leaders until the recent past went on to enjoy a modest and well-earned retirement. Now many of them prefer an immodest and exceptionally well-remunerated retirement, in which they cash in on their celebrity. Either way, their fate has been very different from that of Mussolini (shot and strung up by his feet), Hitler (shooting himself in his Berlin bunker), Ceauşescu (shot, along with his wife, by firing squad) or Muammar Gaddafi (tortured and killed by rebel fighters), although, admittedly, many other dictators have had more natural deaths.

The most persistent myth of dictatorial regimes has been that of the great and far-seeing leader. This applies particularly to autocracies, less so to oligarchies, in which the emphasis is generally on the unique insights and wisdom of the ruling party rather than those qualities in an individual leader. The words for ‘leader’ in Italian (Duce), German (Führer) and Russian (vozhd) changed their meanings during the periods of Mussolini’s, Hitler’s and Stalin’s rule. The word in each case came to signify the leader, someone of virtually superhuman strength, understanding, insight and fatherly care for his people. Credulous followers bestowed on their leaders heroic qualities, in some cases before the leader had fully invested himself with such attributes. Hitler, most notably, went from believing that Germany needed a great and heroic leader to discovering, to his great satisfaction, that he was that person. In the early 1920s – unlike Mussolini at that point – Hitler was not yet trying to build up a personality cult. His followers, however, were already declaring that they had ‘found something which millions are yearning for, a leader’.121 By the end of the 1920s Hitler was convinced that they were right, and the Nazi Party became entirely focused on its leader. ‘For us,’ said Hitler in 1930, ‘the Leader is the Idea, and each party member has to obey only the Leader.’¹²² The personality cult was sedulously promoted in all of these major dictatorships of the twentieth century by the leader himself (although part of Stalin’s cult was a propagation of the fable of his supposed modesty), but they were never short of acolytes and sycophants who played their parts in the creation of the myth of the superman who led them.

*

Dictatorial power owes a vast amount to the social and political contexts in which leaders achieve governmental office, to followers who hope to gain from their patronage, to elites who accommodate them for fear of something worse (as Italian and German conservatives cooperated with Mussolini and Hitler from fear of Communism), and to the irrational belief that one person can embody the wisdom of the nation. They are testimony, in a dangerous form, to the ‘emotional tail wagging the rational dog’.¹²³ They are the apotheosis of the illusion that what humanity needs is a strong leader and a reminder that, if unchecked, the power of such a leader will lead to oppression and carnage.

* Whether those millions constituted a majority or a minority of Soviet citizens remains a subject of debate. The collectivization of agriculture created deep unhappiness in the countryside, and peasants in the 1930s still made up the majority of the population. However, the fact that even in the twenty-first century Stalin frequently tops the poll when citizens of post-Soviet Russia are asked to name the greatest leader of their country in the twentieth century suggests that propaganda which associated all the country’s successes – above all, victory in the Second World War – with him and blamed failures, oppression and atrocities on others had a profound impact and left its mark on the consciousness of a substantial part of the population.

* The fuller context is that of Orwell’s distress about the misunderstanding, especially common in the United States, of Nineteen Eight-Four as an attack on socialism. Orwell made clear that he was, and remained, a ‘democratic Socialist’. (He continued to spell ‘Socialism’ with a capital ‘S’.) Thus, he wrote to an official of the United Automobile Workers in the USA, who had been troubled by the good reception Nineteen Eighty-Four had received in right-wing American publications: ‘My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.’ (Cited by Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p. 569.)

* The German specialist on Cuba and Castro, Volker Skierka, has described the US embargo dating back to the early 1960s as ‘the longest, most uncompromising, and politically most senseless economic blockade that a large country has ever inflicted on a smaller one, and which has had the opposite of the intended effect’. See Volker Skierka, Fidel Castro: A Biography (Polity, Cambridge, 2005), p. 371.

* Domestic political considerations apparently dissuaded Bill Clinton from adopting a more productive policy towards Cuba. He told Taylor Branch on 6 December 1993 that the Spanish prime minister ‘Felipe González had given him a hard time today over the thirty-year US embargo against Fidel Castro’s Cuba – calling it illogical, counterproductive, lonely, and wrong’. However, said Clinton, ‘now was not the time to change’. See Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: A President’s Secret Diary (Simon & Schuster, London, 2009), p. 92.

* It would be wrong to suggest that China has had no political reform in the post-Mao era. There has certainly been no embrace of liberal democracy, but there have been incremental reforms, and the political system (without having had anything like the transformation which has occurred in the economic system) works significantly differently from the way it operated under Mao. See David Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008).

* The most successful authoritarian regime, monarchies aside, in arranging orderly and regular leadership transition over the greater part of the twentieth century was the Institutional Revolutionary Party – the PRI – in Mexico. Mexican presidents were limited to a single term of office and the party leadership thus constantly renewed itself, retaining its single party rule over seven decades. Even after the party was finally voted out in the year 2000, it retained a lot of informal power, and in 2012 the PRI regained the presidency in the person of Enrique Peña Nieto, albeit in a more or less democratic election. See Gustavo Flores-Macías, ‘Mexico’s 2012 Elections: The Return of the PRI’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2013, pp. 128–141.

* A monopoly, at any rate, within the state. Foreign broadcasts – as, for example, those of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe in the case of Communist states – were jammed, but the jamming was not effective in all parts of the country. Thus, the monopoly over the dissemination of information and opinion of authoritarian and totalitarian states was incomplete, even before the intrusion of the internet presented authoritarian rulers with serious problems as well as new opportunities.