Minicast #10 - How to Be a Dictator - Very Rough Draft

In a fit of manic fascination, I took out ten biographies out from the library, nearly all of which are well over five-hundred pages. After three weeks of Jewish holidays and an automatic renewal, I'm finally finishing biography #2 - Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I'm disappointed to say that it's a rather dull book which I've persisted with for fear of the precedent it will set that I can start still more books without finishing them. I don't know the actual figure, but I like to say that I read 400 books a year and finish seven.

Scholarly writing is, by its nature, a little dry. There are only so many ways to make a subject interesting to the layman when a scholar is beholden to the truth. The truth always conspires to make reality duller than we inevitably wish. There's usually no great conspiracy, no grand illumination, no sudden explicator which sets the truth out to us in a lacerating revelation of fire. Yet simultaneously, reality grounds a book to the point that our flights of fancy can weed out the true believers. The dullest books of all are usually the ones which excite a cult of the initiated. If we're part of the cult, the hidden meanings are endless, but if we're not, and it takes decades of study to understand the cult's fascination, there is no more boring experience. I could name a hundred thinkers for whom that's true, and I'm sure many listeners could do the same.

But substantial biographies are, by their nature, as grounded in the mundane realities of the moment as any book can be, and as such, give ample opportunities for a writer to set exciting scenes. You would think that the most effective mass murderer in European history would give ample opportunities for this kind of scene-building, but no, this biography is completely concerned with the little details of Kremlin intrigues - who was up, who was down, why Stalin had this or that one shot. So told is this story from the inside that one often forgets that this clique killed up to 25% of their own population!

What this biography does make clear is something scholars of all kinds have gone to enormous lengths to disprove - which is that Stalin was a dictator in every sense. He did not delegate. He controlled everything. He read everything. His instructions were detailed to the dotted i on every subject. Stalin was just as evil as Hitler, and in many ways just as unstable a personality. But if he lasted decades longer than Hitler, no small reason is because he made sure to become an extremely meticulous authority every subject. Hitler, as Montefiore notes and many before him, was a political gambler who ascended to power by daring the most enormous risks during a period when World War I left his opponents congenitally timid. Stalin, on the other hand, was a man who inhaled details before he made any decision at all. He ascended to power by being Lenin's General Secretary, basically a Chief of Staff to whom , and by the time Lenin died, so many of Lenin's advisors were Stalin appointments that it was a given Stalin would be his heir, even though Lenin warned in a memo against Stalin's election in the most ominous manner. Beginning with Stalin, the party's 'General Secretary' was the dictator.

Stalin was many evil things, but his evil compounded itself exponentially by the fact that he was very much a genius. I had generally assumed it a myth that Stalin took it upon himself to personally guide the development of every major artist in the Soviet Union, but after reading this biography, there's no question: it's no myth at all. Most dictators, perhaps most politicians, fancy themselves intellectuals. But eyewitness accounts state that Stalin read something like four-hundred pages a day on average, apparently not including government memos, and he was extremely eager to discuss his reading with the country's most distinguished intellectuals, whose work he of course watched like a hawk to ensure intellectuals came to the conclusions he desired. Intellectuals, probably out of Stockholm syndrome, consulted him all the time, and the more terrified they were of him, the more often they wrote him. Stalin, like a true Orwellian dictator, occupied their thoughts, and the more thoughts a person has, the more thoughts among them totalitarian can occupy.

This is where I should mention that famous dictum from Thomas Carlyle in 'On Heroes' where he introduced the 'Great Man Theory of History' which states: 'Find in any country the ablest man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him; you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit."

In the Age of Trump, this theory begins again to look better than risible. If democracy ends up giving us an authoritarian anyway, who in their right mind would not give up an election or two to ensure that the dictator is at least competent.

Yet at the same time, intellect has many, many limitations. And there is no better example of this than Stalin - who famously said: 'Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.' Stalin and Lenin both were men of colossal intelligence, they understood that if they wanted to completely remake a society, they had to liquidate the people within it. But you cannot remake society without destroying it. How was Stalin to know how to properly arm for war against Hitler when he'd liquidated his entire general staff? How was Stalin to meet his farm production quotas when he'd liquidated the entire merchant class twice over who knew how to manage the farms? And how was Stalin to survive the sickness that killed him when he'd liquidated all the best doctors in the USSR? In so many ways, the greater the intelligence, the greater the capacity for stupidity.

Stalin was as meticulous as a human being becomes, but his pathological need to understand every detail was due in part to the grand sweeping theory of historical materialism that attracted him to the life of the mind to begin with. As the man who went further to put Marx into practice than any human being ever had, and ties with Mao for ever did, he had to master the details that not even Lenin concerned himself with nearly as much. But when so much mastery and control is put into the service of an overarching theory so obviously wrong, the detailed mastery can only serve to warp people's lives still moreso, not less. And this is why, (discover concluding sentence...)