Nostalgia Works Its Magic on Tyrants

Nostalgia is one of the most powerful of all political forces -- and we often underestimate its ability to distort truth and mock reality. A recent poll, for instance, showed that 26% of Russians would vote for Josef Stalin if he were running for president today. Similarly, in Iraq, such has been the experience of bloody instability in recent months that some Iraqis who celebrated his fall only a year ago now actually miss Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps these two dictators would not be surprised by this turn of events; both appreciated the force of nostalgia and used it to promote themselves accordingly: “The Russian people,” said Stalin frequently, “are czarist. They need a czar.” History, he understood, mattered to them, and he reached back to the 16th and 18th centuries to tap the glory of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in building his own image.

Iraqis too looked back on a long-passed age of glory. Iraq having spent so long as the satrapy of other empires, from the Persian to the Ottoman and then the British, Hussein had to cross millenniums to biblical Babylon to find his precursor, Nebuchadnezzar, whose glory he meant to relive and restore.

How do such despots win the admiration of their people? Dictators always promise that they alone can deliver stability -- and they like to pose for the cameras smoking paternal pipes and cuddling babies to get that message across. During their tenure, it is this promise of stability that leads people to embrace them, often overlooking everything else and tolerating terror, atrocity and the cult of personality. Later, after they’re gone, the dictators are missed for the same reason: for the stability they promised.

But this nostalgia usually harks back to a paradise and a hero that never actually existed. In Russia in the late 1920s and the 1930s, Stalin was not delivering stability but rather was waging war and terror on his own people, deporting 28 million and liquidating 20 million more. For many, Stalinist Russia was a dystopia, hell on Earth -- yet now that is forgotten by many people who “remember” something different, absurdly roseate.

Hussein’s case shows how quickly political memory can be distorted: His first decade in power was a perpetual terror, followed by the million lives wasted in a futile war with Iran, then the misconceived invasion of Kuwait, the suppression of the resulting uprisings by slaughter, national dismemberment and economic sanctions while Iraq was terrorized by his ghoulish son, Uday. Not much to reminisce about there, one would think, despite the Arab tradition of taking responsibility for nothing themselves and blaming everything on the wicked West. No hero, no paradise there.

But the myth of the Man on the White Horse is often more powerful than the truth. Countries without an organic growth of democracy and civic society often crave the almighty leader because of tradition.

The strongman offers not just stability but also glory -- the vanity of nations. Hussein won glory, by claiming victory over Iran and by defying America, however disastrously. Stalin’s triumphant defeat of Nazi Germany and establishment of imperium in Eastern Europe granted him the prestige of world conqueror -- which, coupled with the illusion of economic stability, makes him so desirable to the deluded 26% of today’s Russians.

Some dictators can promise this glory and stability even after their deaths. Often these bungling monsters have so broken their countries that no one is strong enough to resist the succession of their sons as hereditary tyrants.

Recently Syria, North Korea, Congo and Azerbaijan have become hereditary monarchies (in republican disguise), with the sons of grisly old dictators Hafez Assad, Kim Il Sung, Laurent Kabila and Heydar A. Aliyev succeeding them. Hussein too wanted his dreadful sons to succeed him.

Only Stalin had such a high regard for his own unique, messianic role in history that he disdained any such absurd promotion of his useless son, Vasily. “But I’m Stalin too,” said Vasily. His father replied with a sort of existential analysis of himself: “No, you’re not and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and portraits, not you, no, not even me.”

Let us leave the last word to that brilliant 19th century liberal, Benjamin Constant, who wrote about Napoleon: “A country that can be saved only by this or that especial man will never be saved for long. What is more, it does not deserve to be saved.”