As one German historian notes, you could praise Stalin “during a meeting in the Stalin House of Culture of the Stalin Factory on Stalin Square in the city of Stalinsk.” This black comedy of egotism could be found even among neo-Stalinist dictators of far later date. (“At the campaign’s height in 19 the execution rate was roughly a thousand per day,” Dikötter writes.) But Stalin is also held responsible for a nightmarish cultural degradation that occurred at the same time-the insistence on replacing art with political instruction, and with the cult of the Leader, whose name was stamped on every possible surface. Stalin is indicted for having more than 1.5 million people interrogated, tortured, and, in many cases, executed. Dikötter’s originality is that he counts crimes against civilization alongside crimes against humanity. “How to Be a Dictator” takes off from a conviction, no doubt born of his Mao studies, that a tragic amnesia about what ideologues in power are like has taken hold of too many minds amid the current “crisis of liberalism.” And so he attempts a sort of anatomy of authoritarianism, large and small, from Mao to Papa Doc Duvalier.Įach dictator’s life is offered with neat, mordant compression. Dikötter-who, given his subject, has a wonderfully suggestive, Nabokovian name-is a Dutch-born professor of history at the University of Hong Kong he has previously written about the history of China under Mao, debunking, at scholarly length and with a kind of testy impatience, the myth of Mao as an essentially benevolent leader. That, more or less, is the thesis of Frank Dikötter’s new book, “How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century” (Bloomsbury). All these converged in a single cult style among dictators. The absence of a plausible inherited myth and the need to create monuments and ceremonies that were both popular and intimidating led to new public styles of leadership. As the counter-reaction to Enlightenment liberalism swept through the early decades of the twentieth century, dictators, properly so called, had to adopt rituals that were different from those of the kings and the emperors who preceded them. Only in the presence of an alternative-the various movements for shared self-government that descend from the Enlightenment-has any other arrangement really been imagined. Dropped down at random in history, we are all as likely as not to be members of the Soprano crew, waiting outside Satriale’s Pork Store.

Although the arrangement can be dressed up in impressive clothing and nice sets-triumphal Roman arches or the fountains of Versailles-the basic facts don’t alter. Sometimes this is costumed in communal decision-making, by a band of local bosses or wise men, but even the most collegial department must have a chairman: a capo di tutti capi respects the other capi, as kings in England were made to respect the lords, but the capo is still the capo and the king is still the king. Big chiefs, almost invariably male, tell their underlings what to do, and they do it, or they are killed. The basic governmental setup since the dawn of civilization could be summarized, simply, as taking orders from the boss. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.ĭictatorship has, in one sense, been the default condition of humanity.

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