The helmsman must ride with the waves or he will be submerged with the tide.
Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai to Henry Kissinger, February 1972
It was on 12 September 1971 that the second most powerful man in China, Lin Biao, decided to flee to Russia after learning that Chairman Mao Zedong was about to purge him. Lin was at his country estate near Beijing at the time; his private jet was on the tarmac at Shanhaiguan airport, only a few miles away. What could be simpler? The plan might well have succeeded but for a moment of human weakness: just before leaving the house he bade farewell to his daughter Dodo, a fanatical party loyalist, who tipped off his praetorian guards. They fired at Lin’s limousine as it sped out of the gate, but the shots bounced off the rear window’s bulletproof glass. Half an hour later, with military jeeps in hot pursuit, the car arrived at the airport and screeched to a halt beside his plane. Accompanied by his wife and son, Lin leaped aboard and ordered the captain to take off at once, ignoring protests that there hadn’t been time for refuelling. The pursuing guards were only two hundred metres behind as the Trident taxied down the runway. Two hours later, its fuel supply exhausted, the plane crash-landed in Mongolia and exploded on impact. ‘That’s what you get for running away,’ Mao said on hearing of Lin’s death. He celebrated with a large glass of mao-tai liquor.
The long-simmering rivalry between Chairman Mao and his ambitious deputy had come to a rolling boil in 1970, when one of Lin Biao’s supporters on the politburo, Chen Boda, wrote an article titled ‘On Genius’. Lavishly praising Mao’s glorious achievements, it proposed that the great helmsman should assume the position of ‘chairman of state’, which had been left vacant since the purging of the previous incumbent, Liu Shaoqi. To readers outside the inner circle this may have seemed uncontroversial, but Lin Biao happened to know that if the post was restored Mao would refuse to take it. Lin could thus manoeuvre himself into the office and undermine Mao’s authority.
The Great Helmsman understood what his ambitious deputy was up to. ‘Lin Biao had made the same mistake as Liu Shaoqi,’ one of his associates commented, ‘and in Mao’s eyes it was an egregious crime. Lin Biao wanted two chairmen in China, and Mao would have only one.’ He purged Chen Boda and launched a campaign to criticise him. Dealing with Lin Biao was not so easy: he had the army on his side. Several generals owed their careers, perhaps even their lives, to his patronage. Where would their loyalties lie in a crisis?
Mao saw enemies everywhere. Three young women were banished from his harem for being ‘too close’ to the scheming Lin. When he fell ill, as he often did at times of political crisis, three of Beijing’s leading physicians diagnosed pneumonia – but he refused to believe them, suspecting a plot by Lin Biao. His long-serving doctor Zhisui Li was summoned back from the remote clinic in China’s far northeast where Mao had banished him a few months earlier. He too realised that the chairman had pneumonia – the X-rays left no doubt – but also knew that if he said so he’d be denounced as a member of the Lin Biao clique, for ‘Mao’s paranoia was in full bloom’. When he assured Mao it was nothing more serious than bronchitis, the patient thumped his chest jubilantly. ‘Lin Biao wants my lungs to rot,’ he crowed. ‘You just show those X-rays to the doctors and see what they say now.’
Lin Biao himself was hardly a picture of health, mental or physical. He was prey to many strange phobias, including a horror of water: he hadn’t taken a bath in years. (On this point, at least, he and the man he wished to topple were in full accord: Mao hadn’t washed since 1949, preferring to be rubbed clean by a servant with a hot towel.) Lin’s hydrophobia was so intense that he couldn’t bear to see the sea: he planted a thick forest of trees around his seaside villa at Beidaihe, east of Beijing, to block the ocean view. Winds and breezes terrified him. His wife warned visitors to walk very slowly in Lin’s presence because ‘the stir of air’ when they moved might provoke a panic attack.
Thus the most populous country on earth was governed by a pair of raging hypochondriacs and psychological basket cases, each plotting the other’s downfall. It’s hard to imagine two more unsavoury figureheads. Lin’s own wife described him in her diary as a man ‘who specialises in hate, in contempt (friendship, children, father and brother – all mean nothing to him), in thinking the worst and basest of people, in selfish calculation’. Mao, despite his smiling public persona, was also a bubbling cauldron of fear and loathing. Dr Zhisui Li, who probably spent more time alone with him than anyone, first noticed the symptoms of irrational fear as early as 1958, when Mao became convinced that his new indoor swimming pool was poisoned. ‘None of us who swam in it suffered any ill effects, and Mao’s attitude left me more curious than concerned. Only in retrospect, as the condition worsened, did I see in his suspicion the seeds of a deeper paranoia.’
The seeds were lovingly nurtured by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a hysterical harridan who lived on a diet of tranquillisers and sleeping pills. All the rooms in her various houses had to be kept at a constant temperature of precisely 21.5 degrees centigrade in winter and 26 degrees in summer, but even when the thermostat confirmed that her requirements were being met she would scream at her attendants: ‘You falsify temperature! You conspire to harm me!’ She was also morbidly sensitive to sounds. At her main Beijing residence, according to Mao’s biographers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, ‘staff were ordered to drive away birds and cicadas – and even, at times, not to wear shoes, and to walk with their arms aloft and legs apart, to prevent their clothes from rustling’. When she stayed at her villa in Canton, all traffic on the Pearl River – a commercially crucial waterway – had to be suspended for the duration, and workers at a distant shipyard had to down tools lest the clanging enraged her. A wise precaution, given that anyone who incurred her wrath could expect to be jailed or tortured.
‘Comrade Jiang Qing is not very well,’ a new secretary was warned by his predecessor. ‘She is particularly afraid of sounds and of strangers. As soon as she hears a noise or sees a stranger, she … starts to sweat and flies into a temper. Whatever we do in this building – talking, walking, opening and closing windows and doors – we must take special care to be noiseless. Please do be very, very careful …’ On his first summons to her office, the trembling novice found her reclining on a sofa: ‘She raised her head, opened her eyes and fixed me with a peevish, dissatisfied stare. She said: “You can’t talk to me standing. When you talk to me, your head must be lower than mine. I am sitting, so you should crouch down.”’ He crouched. A few minutes later Madame Mao complained that the secretary’s voice was giving her a headache and making her sweat. ‘If I fall ill because of your carelessness about the volume and rate of your speech,’ she warned, ‘your responsibility will be too gigantic.’ She pointed at her forehead: ‘Look, you look, I’m sweating!’ The secretary dutifully lowered his voice, thus provoking another tirade. ‘What are you saying? … If I can’t hear you clearly I will also become tense, and will also sweat.’
With Mao, however, she was meek and deferential. Her sadistic omnipotence derived from him; he alone could strip her of it. ‘Jiang Qing is always worried that I may not want her any more,’ Mao said to his doctor. ‘I’ve told her that this isn’t true, but she just can’t stop worrying. Don’t you think that’s odd?’ Although he knew of the mayhem she caused, Mao’s biographers suggest that ‘for him it was worth it to keep everybody off balance and maintain a climate of insecurity and capriciousness, and to keep things on the paranoid track’. As she said after his death: ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog. Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.’ And never more viciously than during the Cultural Revolution, initiated by Mao in 1966 as a ‘vigorous attack’ on bourgeois elements in the party, the government and the armed forces. As first deputy director of the Cultural Revolution’s steering group, Madame Mao threw herself into the job with savage glee. The fact that she loved Parisian clothes and Hollywood movies didn’t inhibit her from destroying anyone who showed ‘bourgeois tendencies’.
Like an appetite that grows as it feeds, her paranoia swelled even as she eliminated the enemies who had supposedly caused it. By the time of Lin Biao’s flight in 1971 she was a nervous wreck, tormented by nightmares in which the ghosts of Lin and his wife pursued her. ‘I have been feeling as if I am going to die any minute,’ she wailed at her secretary, ‘as if some catastrophe is about to happen tomorrow. I feel full of terror all the time.’ In this frenzied state she put a sinister new interpretation on an incident shortly before Lin fled, when she fell off the lavatory in the middle of the night (stupefied by a triple dose of sleeping pills) and broke her collarbone. Convinced that Lin Biao had somehow poisoned the pills, she insisted on having her medicines taken away for testing and her entire medical staff interrogated in front of the full Chinese politburo, including Premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou then talked to Madame Mao all night – from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. – in the vain hope of pacifying her.
Meanwhile, Mao himself had at last found a kindred spirit whom he could trust. If his supposed comrades were in fact enemies – not just the party bosses in Beijing but also, far worse, the ceaselessly hostile Communist regime in the Soviet Union, the ‘polar bear to the north’ – then mightn’t his ostensible enemies turn out to be friends? Through secret diplomatic channels he began planning a stunt that would astonish the world: a visit to Beijing by President Richard Nixon.
Mao’s doctor was aghast when the chairman confided in him. ‘How could we negotiate with the United States?’ he asked. China was assisting the North Vietnamese side in the war against America, and roaring polemics against Yankee imperialism were the daily fare of the Chinese media. A statement Mao issued in May 1970, titled ‘People of the world, unite, and defeat American aggressors and all their running dogs’, had so infuriated Nixon that he wanted US ships moved into attack positions off the coast of China. (Nixon was drunk at the time. Henry Kissinger ignored the order, rightly guessing that the President would rescind it when he sobered up.) Behind the bellicose rhetoric, however, these two paranoid leaders were discreetly signalling to each other that ideological differences could be outweighed by what they had in common. ‘Didn’t our ancestors counsel negotiating with faraway countries while fighting with those that are near?’ Mao mused. Nixon’s long history of anti-Communism made him even more eligible. ‘I like to deal with rightists. They say what they think – not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.’
He was of course referring to the Russians, and on the subject of Soviet dissimulation he could claim some expert knowledge, since the counterfeit self-presentations and façades required for survival in the USSR were indistinguishable from those in China: children informed on their parents, comrades and neighbours betrayed one another, and the slightest suggestion that life under Communism wasn’t a limitless garden of daffodils and delight could be fatal. Why would anyone say what they think under such conditions? In both these states the habit of reticence was reinforced by the official insistence, in every newspaper or TV programme, that bad things only ever happened elsewhere. As the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky described it:
Abroad, one long procession of natural disasters, catastrophes, demonstrations, strikes, police truncheons, slums and a constant decline in the standard of living; whilst here it’s all new holiday resorts, factories, harvests, boundless fields, beaming smiles, new homes and the growth of prosperity. There the black forces of reaction and imperialism are grinding the faces of the workers and threatening us with war; here the bright forces of socialism and progress are bound to prevail. And all this is pumped out every hour of the day, in thousands of newspapers, magazines, books, films, concerts, radio programmes, songs, poems, operas, ballets and paintings. There is nothing else at all.
He might have been writing about China. But although the propaganda was identical, the treatment of those who doubted it wasn’t quite the same. Under Josef Stalin anyone expressing the mildest scepticism about the Soviet Union’s status as an earthly paradise was dispatched to the Gulag, and would probably never be seen again. This option was no longer available after Nikita Khrushchev had denounced Stalin at the party congress in 1956 (once the old monster was safely dead) and then assured the world in 1963 that there were no political prisoners in Russia. Having said all this, he could hardly revive the inquisitorial techniques of the Great Terror, the mass arrests and show trials that Stalin enjoyed so much. Yet there were still malcontents, and they still had to be dealt with. Collective rebellions in other countries within the Soviet sphere of influence could be crushed in traditional style by sending the tanks in, but what could be done with individual grousers and gripers who sat in poky Moscow apartments reading samizdat publications and writing petitions to the Central Committee? The solution was to use psychiatrists instead of lawyers as the instruments of persecution. If Being determined Consciousness, as the revolutionary articles of faith maintained, then it was impossible to have an anti-socialist consciousness in a socialist society. Anyone who questioned or criticised Soviet policy was displaying symptoms of such a consciousness, and must therefore be mad.
In the Stalin era, KGB goons forced confessions from the state’s alleged enemies with beatings, torture and all-night interrogations, and when these methods were disallowed by Khrushchev’s ‘post-Stalinist humanism’ they feared for their livelihoods. ‘If the KGB investigators weren’t able to frighten, cajole or in some way blackmail the prisoner, it would appear that they weren’t up to their job,’ the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky wrote. ‘It would be quite a different matter, however, if the prisoner were a madman – in that case no one would be to blame.’ Saying one thing while meaning another suited almost everyone at first – the KGB, the party bosses and even Bukovsky’s fellow dissenters, who thought a spell in a psychiatric hospital sounded far cushier than being sent to the camps. ‘We weren’t in the least afraid of being called lunatics – on the contrary, we were delighted: let these idiots think we’re loonies if they like, or rather, let these loonies think we’re idiots.’ Recalling all those stories about madmen by Chekhov and Gogol, and of course The Good Soldier Schweik, the dissidents ‘laughed our heads off at our doctors and ourselves’. It was only when they learned that psychiatric confinement robbed them of their day in court, and of the chance to accuse their accusers in a public forum, that they stopped laughing.
In reviewing the history of the Soviet Union one can easily overstate the liberalism of the Khrushchev era, which was forcibly terminated by the Kremlin coup of October 1964, when Leonid Brezhnev and his unsmiling apparatchiks took charge. From a certain perspective it looks like a brief permissive interlude between the murderous zeal of Stalin and the sclerotic inertia of Brezhnev: in 1962, for instance, the journal Novy Mir published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, which would have been unthinkable a decade earlier or a decade later. But Solzhenitsyn’s novel could be permitted because it was, or at least appeared to be, a work of historical fiction, an exposé of those Stalinist excesses that Khrushchev had already condemned. Criticism of current leaders remained a crime; or, rather, a symptom of serious mental derangement. When the twenty-one-year-old Vladimir Bukovsky was arrested in 1963 for possessing ‘anti-Soviet literature’ – a copy of Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, lent to him by an American correspondent in Moscow – he refused to answer his interrogators’ questions. ‘“Don’t worry,” I thought. “Just let me hold out till the trial. Then I’ll give you an earful. You’ll wish you’d never got involved.”’ The trial never came: the KGB sent him to the Leningrad Special Hospital, essentially an ordinary prison (cells, barred windows, armed guards) but in some respects worse. Detention was indefinite, and treatment – including daily aminazine injections – compulsory. Protest was pointless, for every complaint would be lodged in the patient’s file as further proof of his insanity. Bukovsky spent a year there.
At first, some Soviet psychiatrists had enough professional pride to resist the demand that they should commit perfectly sane citizens to the madhouse.* The warden of the Leningrad hospital was openly contemptuous of the ‘Moscow school of psychiatry’ and its presiding genius, Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, the director of the Institute of Psychiatry, who had invented a diagnosis of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ to explain why political dissidents who showed no outward signs of mental disturbance were nevertheless in the grip of a dangerous disability. Whether or not Snezhnevsky created this theory especially to satisfy the KGB, sluggish schizophrenia met their requirements: a sure justification for incarcerating troublemakers without all the fuss and publicity of legal proceedings, and an infallible excuse for overruling the dissenting opinions of other psychiatrists, since Snezhnevsky maintained that only his own pupils were trained to recognise the disorder. Even in the Leningrad hospital, no prisoner could be released without the say-so of a psychiatric commission from Moscow which visited twice a year; naturally the KGB ensured that these commissions were packed with the professor’s former students. By 1970, Bukovsky observed, Snezhnevsky had ‘succeeded in practically subordinating the whole of Soviet psychiatry to himself’.
He had two main accomplices in this dirty work – Dr Georgi Morozov, the director of the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, and Professor Daniil Lunts, head of the institute’s ‘special diagnostic section’. If a dissident in some far-flung corner of the Soviet dominion was pronounced sane by local psychiatrists, Morozov and Lunts were always willing to correct the diagnosis. As Morozov said: ‘Why bother with political trials when we have psychiatric clinics?’
The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya was arrested in December 1969 for publishing a samizdat edition of Red Square at Noon, her account of a street protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. ‘There are no grounds for a diagnosis of schizophrenia,’ a psychiatrist concluded. ‘At the present time she has no need of treatment in a psychiatric hospital.’ After three months in prison the poet was transferred the Serbsky Institute, where Messrs Morozov and Lunts interrogated her. ‘Gorbanevskaya is suffering from a chronic mental illness in the form of schizophrenia,’ they decided. ‘Gorbanevskaya should be sent for compulsory treatment to a psychiatric hospital of a special type.’ The clinching proof of sluggish schizophrenia was her inability to understand why writing Red Square at Noon was a criminal act.
Even revolutionary ardour could be interpreted as a sign of madness in the nimble imaginations of the men at the Serbsky Institute if that was what political necessity required – for although some in the West assumed that ‘dissidents’ were anti-Communists, many of them retained a rather touching faith in the old Bolshevik ideals. That was the crime of Major-General Pyotr Grigorenko, a much-decorated Red Army commander who had fallen foul of the KGB in the mid-1960s by setting up a ‘Group for the Struggle to Revive Leninism’ to campaign against the lavish salaries and privileges – and jobs for life – granted to senior party officials. After a few weeks in the Lubyanka he was examined by the Serbsky shrinks, who discovered ‘a psychological illness in the form of a paranoid development of the personality … His psychological condition was characterised by the presence of reformist ideas, particularly for the reorganisation of the state apparatus.’ Off he went to the Leningrad hospital for a year, to clear his mind of these delusions, but on his release the general seemed as pathological as ever, hurling himself into human-rights protests and confronting the regime at every opportunity. When Grigorenko and a few friends were planning a demonstration against Stalinist tendencies in the central committee, General Svetlichny of the KGB hauled them in for a final warning: ‘If you go out on the street, even without disturbing the traffic, with banners reading “Long Live the Central Committee!”, we shall still put you in lunatic asylums.’
Grigorenko carried on regardless. In 1969 he flew to Tashkent to speak on behalf of a group of Tatar agitators, but discovered on arriving at Tashkent airport that the invitation was a trap laid by the KGB, who bundled him into a cell, roughed him up for a few weeks and then sent him for a three-hour session with Professor Fyodor Detengof, chief psychiatrist of the Uzbek Republic. ‘No doubts concerning Grigorenko’s mental health have arisen in the course of the out-patient investigation,’ Detengof reported. ‘In-patient investigation at this time would not increase our understanding of this case, but, on the contrary, taking into consideration age, his sharply negative attitude to residence in psychiatric hospitals, and his heightened sensitivity, it would complicate a diagnosis.’ As ever when potential disaster loomed, the KGB knew how to avert it: send him to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow for a second opinion. Sure enough, Dr Morozov and Professor Lunts diagnosed ‘a mental illness in the form of a pathological, paranoid development of the personality’. The out-patient examination in Tashkent had been misled by the general’s ‘outwardly well-adjusted behaviour, his formally coherent utterances and his retention of his past knowledge and manners’ – all of which, to the more discerning eyes at the Serbsky, were characteristic of a pathological personality. ‘Because of his mental condition Grigorenko requires compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital, as the paranoid reformist ideas described above are of obstinate character.’ He was confined until 1974.
Had Morozov and Lunts confined their attention to obscure and lowly dissenters – ‘the workman Borisov, the bricklayer Gershuni, the students Novodvorskaya and Iofe’, as Vladimir Bukovsky put it – they might have continued their Stakhanovite labours without the outside world noticing anything amiss. But three incidents in 1970 drew foreign attention to the paranoia factory at last. General Grigorenko smuggled out a diary of his psychiatric ordeal which was published in the West; Vladimir Bukovsky secretly recorded an interview with an American reporter in Moscow, which the CBS network broadcast across America; and Zhores Medvedev, a distinguished biochemist, was dragged from his home and family and locked up in a mental hospital for having paranoid ‘reformist delusions’.* Medvedev’s dissident friends Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn used their international renown to make the story front-page news in the West. Later that year, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
This, one might guess, would be a moment of vindication for Richard Nixon, who had made his name in the 1950s as a Red-hunting McCarthyite. Many of the student protesters who needled him carried copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, the ‘little red book’: the whole world could now see where those thoughts led, in the terror and devastation inflicted on China by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Nixon had said all along that the Soviet Union was mad, bad and dangerous: the persecution of Grigorenko and Medvedev, and the testimony of Solzhenitsyn, proved it beyond doubt. But his own thoughts now converged with those of Chairman Mao. Like Mao – or any other Communist despot – he often lay awake brooding about the enemy within. If the most potent threat to his supremacy came from his own subjects, perhaps erstwhile enemies abroad could turn out to be allies in the struggle to impose order on an unruly state. Political rulers have a Masonic solidarity that can transcend ideological differences, such as that between authoritarian Communism and capitalist democracy, bonded by their common desire for obedience and loyalty – and, of course, the retention of power. In the early months of 1972, the year in which he had to submit himself to American voters for re-election, Nixon staged two headline-hogging coups de théâtre that enabled him to pose as a man of vision, a New Seeker who would teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. That February he became the first American president to visit Communist China; three months later, as an encore, he became the first American president to visit the Soviet Union. ‘This has to be one of the great diplomatic coups of all times!’ Henry Kissinger exulted as they landed in Moscow.
Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev, the Marxist monsters whom Nixon had hated from a distance, were friendlier than he had dared hope, perhaps because both recognised him as a kindred spirit.* Briefing the President before the trip to Moscow, Kissinger wrote that Brezhnev hoped to strengthen his authority in the ‘never-ending power struggle’ at the Kremlin by playing the wise statesman, thus dispelling ‘his image as a brutal, unrefined person’, a man given to profanity and drunkenness. Mao, too, was delighted to have Nixon as an ally. ‘He is much better than those people who talk about high moral principles while engaging in sinister intrigues,’ he told his doctor. But of course Nixon was intriguing, not against the Chinese or Soviet leaders, but against opponents at home: while he addressed the Russian people live on Soviet television that May, the Watergate burglars were making the final preparations for their break-in. Both Mao and Brezhnev would follow the Watergate saga over the next couple of years with utter bafflement. ‘What’s wrong with having a tape recorder?’ Mao asked. ‘Do rulers not have the right to rule?’
The sight of Tricky Dick shaking hands with the Great Helmsman may have dismayed some right-wingers – the John Birch Society said that the President had ‘humiliated the American people and betrayed our anti-communist allies’ – but it was even more disconcerting to radicals who had Mao’s picture on their wall and his little red book in their coat pocket. ‘Even in the throes of crisis,’ the historian Andreas Killen notes, ‘capitalism was still capable of swallowing all revolutionary impulses.’ The commodification of dissent that transformed a paranoid Chinese mass-murderer into another adornment of celebrity culture was the natural culmination of a process which the New Leftists themselves had initiated by worshipping the images of Mao, Che and other strange gods.* No one understood this better – or celebrated it more fervently – than Andy Warhol, who began his series of Mao portraits soon after the presidential visit to China.† Communists preached equality, Warhol said, but it was Americans who practised it:
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the bum on the corner is drinking … The idea of America is wonderful because the more equal something is, the more American it is.
True of Coke, maybe, but ironically and emphatically untrue of Warhol’s own products. When he started work on the Mao pictures, a New York dealer expressed concern that they might be shunned by his usual customers, tycoons such as Gunther Sachs and Stavros Niarchos. Warhol reassured him: ‘Nixon had just been to see Mao, and if he was okay with Nixon, he would probably be okay with people like Sachs and Stavros.’
More than okay, as an auction at Christie’s in November 2006 confirmed. A Warhol portrait of Jackie Kennedy went for $15.6 million, one of Marilyn Monroe for $16.2 million, but the most valuable icon of all was a silkscreen of Chairman Mao in a dark-blue jacket against a light-blue background, bought by a property billionaire from China for $17.4 million.
* Others opted for passive resistance through sarcasm. ‘He states that never under any circumstances will he abandon the idea of fighting for a communist system and socialism,’ a panel of psychiatrists in Riga wrote of a Latvian collective farmer who had been arrested for saying that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia harmed the cause of world Communism. ‘On the basis of the above, the commission finds that Yakhimovich displays paranoidal development of a psychopathic personality.’
* Medvedev’s book about his ordeal, A Question of Madness, was published in 1971. On the paperback edition (1974), a Penguin blurb-writer made a direct comparison with the greatest paranoid drama of the age: ‘Beside this, Watergate was just an amiable fairy tale.’
* A sketch of the American President in The Illuminatus! Trilogy makes the point rather well: ‘He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his gruelling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquillisers to keep him from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality, In short, he was much like the rulers of Russia and China.’
* The activist Tom Hayden, later to marry Jane Fonda, lived for a while in a Berkeley commune devoted to the cult of Kim Il Sung, the barmy Great Leader of North Korea. ‘The most beautiful sound I ever heard,’ they sang, to the tune of ‘Maria’ from West Side Story. ‘Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung. Say it loud and there’s music playing; say it soft and it’s almost like praying …’
† But then, he also understood Richard Nixon. ‘What the Nixon White House and the second [Warhol] factory had in common was a sense of being under siege,’ writes Bob Colacello, who edited Warhol’s magazine Interview. ‘Nixon was paranoid; so was Andy Warhol.’ Warhol, who taped all his conversations, was neither surprised nor shocked by the revelation that Nixon did so too. ‘Everyone,’ he said, when asked for his reaction, ‘should be bugged all the time.’