Behind the iron curtain

It is hard to imagine that there may be a sentimental, soft or intellectual side to men of violence. Yet, it is a fact that a delicate and sensitive art form like poetry appeals to many authoritarian leaders. Some have even fancied themselves as poets.

One of the earliest such pretenders was Nero. He donned a stage costume and sang of the capture of Troy, while Rome burned to the ground. A Roman historian Suetonius quotes Nero as being greatly delighted with the beauty of the flames. There were many such contradictions in him and his misdeeds continued all through his reign. Ultimately, the Roman Senate gathered the courage to declare him a public enemy.

When the end seemed inevitable, Nero decided to take his life. Since he lacked the courage to do it himself, he ordered a freedman to cut him with a sword. But right till the last moment, he continued to fancy himself as a great artist. So great was his conviction that before the freedman plunged his sword into him, Nero cried out, ‘Oh, what an artist dies in me!’

In direct contrast was Karl Marx, a genuinely great man of letters. He wasn’t a dictator himself, but the creator of an ‘-ism’ that became authoritarian in practice. Unlike Nero, this was his parting shot, ‘Go on! Get Out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!’

Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini was another man who moulded a nation after his fashion. It might seem hard to believe, but Khomeini was a poet too. His devotees may be keen to read his verses allegorically, but others might regard them very differently:

I have become imprisoned, O beloved, by the mole on your lip!

I saw your ailing eyes and became ill through love…

Open the door of the tavern and let us go there day and night,

For I am sick and tired of the mosque and seminary.

Dictators are not content with just writing poetry or singing songs. They also like to be seen by others as keeping good company and possessing cultivated tastes. Addressing his country in 2004, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini said, ‘In my opinion Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is the best novel that has been written in history…Les Misérables is a book of sociology, a book of history, a book of criticism, a divine book, a book of love and feeling.’

Towards literary immortality

Many dictators are obsessed by the desire for immortality. Some have a fascination for writing and a secret wish that a part of their legacy must be as intellectuals. Just as the dictator wants his words to become action, he also wants his essence to be preserved in his words. Accordingly, the book is his means of achieving immortality. In this, they wish to emulate God. When God says something, it happens. ‘Let there be light,’ He said, and ‘there was light.’

Like God, authoritarian leaders aspire to this union of word and action.

As the dictator does not trust others to truly reflect his greatness, so he writes his history himself. In this respect, they follow Winston Churchill who said, ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.’

At the other extreme, some like Saddam Hussein have sought divine help to ensure their legacy. On his 60th birthday, Saddam commissioned a Quran to be written using 27 litres of his own blood.

However, neither intent nor an appeal to the divine is enough. Even employing a ghost writer does not guarantee a good read. From Mussolini to Mao, dictators have written atrocious books. These are revered as sacred texts while their authors are alive, only to vanish almost as soon as their regimes fall. Hitler wrote two volumes of Mein Kampf, including a Braille edition and a luxury ‘wedding edition’ for newlyweds. The Führer seems to have suffered self-doubt regarding the quality of his work because he also admitted, ‘Ich bin kein Schriftsteller’ (‘I am not a writer’).

Saddam wrote romance novels under the pen name S. Hussein. One of the books written by him was titled Zabiba and the King. It was a sexually charged autobiographical novel set in ancient Iraq. In its strange plot, female bears are tender lovers who seek to please the herdsmen they desire by stuffing them with nuts, cheese and raisins.

Stalin tinkered with poetry but depended on a ghost writer for his literary immortality. Mao made The Little Red Book compulsory reading. But the concept of what should be compulsory reading sometimes varies. For instance, Xi Jinping’s Thought, a compact booklet, is now mandatory reading for Chinese students.

In a similar vein, Haiti’s dictator Duvalier once remarked that ‘when one is a leader, one must have a doctrine’. So he wrote Essential Works and demanded that everyone in the country should learn at least three-quarters of it by heart. It was a tough diktat to follow because 90 per cent of the population was illiterate. But statistics are mere numbers for a dictator, to be used and discarded as convenient. Therefore, regardless of how many people read more than a page of his book, Duvalier was awarded the title of ‘Grand Master of Haitian Thought’ by a Haitian organization. Haiti’s State radio then elevated him to the level of Plato, St Augustine and Rudyard Kipling!

Mao went a step further and considered himself a combination of philosopher, sage and poet. To be fair to him, he did have literary gifts and coined some striking catchphrases, such as ‘A revolution is not a dinner party,’ ‘Imperialism is a paper tiger,’ and ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’

Overall, though, Mao had a love-hate relationship with books, and there were two distinct phases in his life related to this. In the 1920s, Mao ran a bookshop and publishing house in Changsha which he named the Cultural Society of Books. It was in this phase that he started to call himself a communist. Yet, around forty years later, the same Mao was responsible for the mass-scale burning of books during the Cultural Revolution.

Hitler, an avid book reader personally, was another dictator who presided over the burning of books. In the 1930s, the Chief Propagandist for the Nazi party Joseph Goebbels organized large bonfires of books in Berlin. Millions of books by Jewish writers were burnt even as Hitler was exterminating millions of Jewish people. Anticipating perhaps just such a pass in the affairs of men, the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote in 1822, ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.’

Still, and as was the case with many of them, dictators like to be seen on every printed paper in the country. In part, this must be due to an obsession with their image: the population must see him, and him alone, all the time. Even after the massive defeat of the German army in Stalingrad in 1943, when everything including paper was rationed, four tonnes of paper a month were earmarked for Hitler’s official photographer. The pictures of the Führer were considered of strategic importance for the country.

Mao did things on an even grander scale. Seven factories were built in Shanghai to print Mao’s portraits, posters and The Little Red Book.

Ironically, the worst dictators tend to be the most enthusiastic readers and writers. Hitler died with more than sixteen thousand books in his private libraries. Stalin wrote a book that was printed in the tens of millions, though this is easy to do when you are the publisher, own all the bookstores, and edit all the book reviews. Mussolini co-authored three plays while ruling Italy, and was the honorary president of the International Mark Twain Society.

In some cases, the literary gift comes with their genes. Italians do not have to make much effort to excel in art; they are naturally gifted. After all, Italy is the country that produced some of the greatest art in the world during the Renaissance. There must be something special in the soil of the country and its people’s DNA that this tradition has continued almost uninterrupted from ancient days up to now. The form may vary, but the substance of great imagination is a constant. From Marcus Aurelius onwards, there have been philosopher kings and advisors like Machiavelli.

(Excerpted with permission from Rajiv Dogra’s ‘Autocrats’; published by Rupa Publications)