Mussolini has analogs the world over today, as leaders of all stripes stage photo ops framing them as godlike and invulnerable physical embodiments of the state. Podgy Kim Jong-un exhausts a poor white horse with symbolic gallops at Mount Paektu, then commissions paintings about it. Nicolás Maduro, pre-abduction, drilled with Venezuelan troops in airport hangars, looking for all intents and purposes like a divorcée at zumba. And, of course, Vladimir Putin stalks Siberia in Y2K shades, baring his torso to the wilds of Tuva like a Muscovite Action Man. One 2009 photoshoot baked his outdoorsman image permanently into the global imagination: there he fished, he rode, he swam butterfly, he sat in a tree wearing khaki. The horse in question belonged to a local shepherd; by way of thanks for the lift, Putin gave the shepherd’s son his Swiss watch. At a time when Russian oligarchs were flouncing about on yachts in Monaco, Putin — who had just been replaced as president by Dmitry Medvedev — was busy embodying rugged Russian masculinity (while holding on to most levers of power). Three years later, he was back in office. 

Putin has long been the master of the muscly political stunt. He’s done spearfishing, judo, ice hockey; he’s been to the bottom of Lake Baikal in a submarine. But the president is now 73, and his body, Russia’s sovereign instrument, has changed. For years there have been rumors that Putin has employed a fleet of body doubles. This would make sense: for a leader whose somatic strength stands in for the nation’s, being seen to be physically present matters; lookalikes make you safer and more available. Ukrainian intelligence officials have long pointed to changes in Putin’s height, ear shape and so on to suggest the use of “at least three people [body doubles] who periodically appear”, Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s spy chief, said in 2022; others say anti-aging procedures or even the use of steroids are more likely to account for the president’s changing looks. Putin himself naturally denies all these theories; even so, apparent slip-ups keep happening; last week, the deputy prime minister for agriculture called the president a different name — “Pal Laich” — which sleuths claim is a nickname for a supposed body double called Pavel Nikolaevich. 

Whether the president uses stand-ins or not is small potatoes in the grand sweep of dictatorial precedent; historians suggest that figures from Saddam Hussein to Joseph Stalin probably dodged assassinations and bamboozled foreign intelligence with their own doubles. In Stalin’s Soviet context in particular, deception and staged imagery were entirely normalized, part of the grammar of leadership. The greater concern for Putin seems to be longevity.

Because presidential fixations seem so often to become government fixations — consider Trump’s upcoming 80th birthday UFC match at the White House — the Kremlin has made anti-aging research a priority. As such, according to the Wall Street Journal, Russian scientists are cooking up experiments with organ printing, cryotherapy and xenotransplantation, in which human organs are grown inside the bodies of miniature pigs. They claim to have their sights on perfecting organ replacement by 2030 — probably little more than a political fantasy unanchored in published research, given that many Russian programs have been tourniqueted from Western funding since the invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless the “New Health Preservation Technologies” initiative has enjoyed an injection of $26 billion, and is developing a gene-therapy treatment, “one of the most promising avenues in the fight against aging”, according to the Kremlin’s deputy science minister. 

Much of this has to do with the president’s well-known fear of physical decline. Putin is known to be a fan of cryotherapy, and during Covid he was a notorious germophobe, making use of comically long meeting tables to enforce distance and intimidate visitors. Commissioning cripplingly expensive longevity research during a meat-grinder war might seem the move of an egotist, but it reflects the paranoia shared by many a tyrant. Democracy replaces its leaders; continuity of power does not rest on the discontinuity of flesh. In Putin’s strongman mythos, by contrast, l’etat c’est moi; the survival of the ruler is that of the regime — and nowhere is this more true than in states as subject to subterfuge as cabal-ready Russia.

Even in democracies, the strongman’s bodily anxiety pervades his public image. In America, President Trump seems constantly to be negotiating media speculation about his physical frailty. The thousands of cameras he encounters each day threaten to catch him nodding off at cabinet meetings, or “hiding a limp”, or pastily prowling the halls of the White House “out of drag”. The press loves nothing more than ogling at bruising on his hand — frequently covered by the cakiest foundation this side of Sunderland. Putin and Kim, who are tougher on unfriendly cameramen, are rarely caught out like this. But what Trump (so far) lacks in press-bullying power he makes up for with continuous references to his own virility, starting in 2015 when a doctor’s letter supposedly prophesied the ascent of “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”.

A century on from Mussolini’s strongman stunts, the heft of the god-king still stands in for a nation’s solidity. Yet as Putin, Trump, Kim and Maduro continue to age in public, they are subject to unprecedented scrutiny — unavoidable even for those who tightly control the press. For these social media-age leaders, transparency and availability presents a mortal quandary: how can I continue to flex my muscles to a public who can now watch, analyze and publicize my decay? Gaits and grimaces are the aging strongman’s Achilles heel. For Putin at least, the solution lies with regime scientists and, horrifyingly, perhaps even pens of organ-bearing miniature pigs. 

Trump meets this challenge in a different way, with constant verbal assurances of his fitness. Over the weekend he claimed to have achieved a perfect cognitive test score, amounting to “extreme intelligence”; compare this with his taunts over “Sleepy Joe” Biden’s latter-day dodderiness and it becomes clear that virility is as critical in the political sphere in America as in Russia and North Korea. Jill Biden’s memoir View from the East Wing, published yesterday, anatomizes the real danger of presidential frailty; Joe’s cognitive decline amounted to a sort of zombie government run by unelected advisers, a sickness in democracy itself. The former first lady recounts her husband’s nighttime agony with undiagnosed prostate cancer, and her astonishment that “the most powerful man in the world, a man who has a medical team — not just a doctor, a medical team — around him 24 hours a day could wind up with cancer so advanced”.

And perhaps that’s the real anxiety, one that unites all leaders, autocratic or otherwise: unlike the fortunes of parties and political alliances, the mysterious processes of the body cannot always be spied on or wrangled. The ravages of age are utterly democratic, and sometimes elude fleets of medics and billions in government research funding. No wonder some rulers make a fetish of health: it’s one of the only things they cannot control.

Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.

Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.

Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas. Stalin never returned to the verse of his adolescence, but the young poet known as “Soselo” had won anthology places for the fragile tenderness of Georgian lyrics such as “To the Moon” (translation by Donald Rayfield):

Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope.
So, lovely moon, as before
Glimmer through the clouds;
Pleasantly in the azure vault
Make your beams play.

Later, as a vigilant, hands-on editor, Stalin knew how to cut the theoretical waffle, keep things concrete and tell a striking story. In mass-circulation works such as the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with its 36 million copies printed in the decade after 1938, he especially liked to strike out “laudatory accounts of his own role”. He insisted that cloying hero-worship made his stomach turn. “What are people supposed to do?” Stalin asked sarcastically as he toned down the official Short Biography of himself published in 1946. “Get down on their knees and pray to me?” No court jester dared answer: “Yes”.

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Of all the mind-scrambling glimpses of the despot as an “emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual” gathered in Stalin’s Library, none quite matches the record of a Central Committee meeting, held in September 1940, about the limits of artistic expression. The General Secretary spoke up firmly on the side of freedom. “You have to let people express themselves,” Comrade Stalin argued. Artists should avoid fairy-tales that toe the party line.

Take the wonderful Chekhov, who “has no heroes but rather grey people”. Stalin approves. Even the enemies of the Soviet Union should not be depicted as monsters “lacking all human traits”. Even Trotsky — here you imagine stifled intakes of breath around a smoky Kremlin chamber — was a “capable person” who must be shown with all his “positive qualities”. Was a capable person: just a couple of weeks earlier, Ramón Mercader had, on Stalin’s orders, buried an ice-axe in Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City. Thus putting a definitive end to his character development, positive or negative.

How many other people did Stalin kill? If Cold War-era historians such as Robert Conquest laid 15-20 million deaths at his door (in The Great Terror), post-Soviet research has led scholars such as Timothy Snyder to suggest a revised estimate of between six and nine million (Bloodlands). Even the lowest figure freezes the imagination. For almost a century, allies, enemies, victims and a wondering posterity have struggled to understand how this gigantic annihilation of life and hope emerged from the ideas and deeds not of a “psychopath” — Roberts rightly rejects the term — but a shrewd, calm, widely-read and thoughtful politician-manager who had learned both to “rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule”. Trotsky lies dead in a Mexican morgue. A shame: such a smart guy…

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Stalin, then, presents a challenge to anyone who claims a specific link between deep reading and the pursuit of ethical or social virtue. Learning nurtures wisdom in many ancient traditions. But the years since the millennium have seen a small explosion in research that tries to prove a non-trivial link between consistent reading and the empathy that allows us to inhabit other souls and walk a verst (or many) in their shoes. If literature doesn’t exactly make you better, runs the refrain of many experimental papers in psychology and neuroscience, then regular exposure to it — especially fiction — will enhance those social skills that demand an understanding of the world perceived through other eyes.

“Specifically, engaging with narrative fiction and mentally simulating the social experiences represented may improve or maintain social skills, especially skills of empathy and social understanding,” reports one widely-cited Canadian paper from 2009, referenced in the back-up materials for World Book Day (celebrated on 3 March). Toronto novelist-psychologist Keith Oatley, one of its authors, has emerged as a leading champion of reading as an empathy shot. (Interestingly, his University of Toronto co-researchers on that paper included Jordan B Peterson, later to find wider fame elsewhere.)

A survey of the evidence from 2016 affirms that “Readers of fiction score higher on measures of empathy and theory of mind (ToM) — the ability to think about others’ thoughts and feelings — than non-readers, even after controlling for age, gender, intelligence and personality factors”. The World Book Day outreach projects aim to put books into non-readers’ hands, on the basis that “Reading for pleasure is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success — more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.” Here, empathy as social asset takes a back seat as voluntary reading becomes a sort of educational superpower.

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Stalin, by the way, did read plenty of fiction, drama, poetry and narrative history in addition to political and economic analysis. He loved the novels of Émile Zola, made writer Maxim Gorky the most fêted private citizen in the USSR, and ran the Stalin Prizes for creative writing from his own office. Dmitry Shepilov, Pravda editor and court intellectual, later wrote that Stalin “was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else”. Sinister tales abound of his creepily close-focus attention to the literary arts in Soviet Russia.

One of the best known, not mentioned in Roberts’s book, concerns the arrest and persecution of the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1934, Stalin phoned the detained poet’s friend, Boris Pasternak. “Mandelstam’s case is being analysed”, Stalin reassures Pasternak:

“Everything will be worked out. Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me? If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.”

Then Stalin dons his critic’s hat to ask “But is he or is he not a master?” Pasternak replies “That’s not the point!”, and requests a meeting. But Stalin hangs up. In the event, the Kremlin Mountaineer — the title of Mandelstam’s famous anti-Stalin satire — did not exactly murder the poet. Exile, jail and illness killed Mandelstam in 1938. It was not quite an execution; not an exoneration either. More a lethal “m-da”.

Although it lies beyond the author’s remit, Stalin’s Library tests to destruction the consoling notion that long, wide, extensive reading confers the gift of empathy — or rather, that empathy is a value to cherish. Roberts, though, maintains that whatever vital sparks of humanity the Soviet autocrat lacked, the ability to conceive the independent life of other minds was not among them. Indeed, he credits Stalin with “too much human empathy” as the grand paranoiac envisaged the hearts of his rivals seething with non-existent plots and stratagems to oust him. What the ultimate scholar-slayer missed was any shred of the “compassion or sympathy” that might stay his hand before he sent the bodies of those minds to a slow, cold fate in the Gulag or a quicker end in the basement of the Lubyanka.

In his reading, Stalin preferred strong characters — real or fictional — with firmly-marked personality and agency, not blurred ciphers of a class or an epoch. “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine,” he proclaimed about the great Tsars in the course of a critique of the over-theoretical Soviet textbooks of the 1930s, “They rested on certain classes … but they acted, they were historical figures”. Stalin may never actually have said anything like “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (though the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky did). But the apocryphal wisecrack at least captures an empathetic reader’s ability to feel the weight of individual lives and minds.

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Stalin did not lack empathy, then, for writers or their work. He grasped too — as censorious heresy-hunters still do not — that books acquire meaning and value separate from their creators’ beliefs. Defending the genius of the “reactionary” Nicolai Gogol, he urged that “the world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers”. Nothing in Stalin’s long, complex and sometimes subtle engagement with culture disproves the advocates of intensive reading as a highway to empathy. The flaw, rather, lies in treating that quality as a firm proxy for interpersonal goodwill.

However robust and reliable on its own terms, research on the reading-empathy connection comes out of a cognitive science that finds it hard to define and describe a social world far beyond its probings of the story-stimulated mind. The 2016 paper I cited on “Reading fiction and reading minds” leaps from a scrutiny of the brain’s “default network”, and its activation by reading, to the assertion that: “Historically, highly literate societies, especially societies that produced psychologically rich literature, function more empathically and less violently than less literate societies.”

Show me a society with a greater “psychologically rich literature” than Russia. Now show me one that, in modern times, has brutalised its own people and its neighbours with more savagery. China, perhaps, or Germany? Both are also powerhouses of “psychologically rich literature”. Without the norms, laws and institutions to scale up private understanding into public civility, the solitary reader’s empathy will be, at best, an advantageous knack. After all, every low-grade swindler, conman and fraudster depends on a serviceable theory of other minds and how they work. And, if your milieu and your ideology impose no veto on mass persecution and state murder, the ability to mess with your victims’ heads simply adds another weapon to the oppressor’s armoury.

Perhaps the empathy that books deepen can only do collective good if a community — whether a household or a nation — decides to reward the sort of fellow-feeling that brings help and not harm to others. Whereas in the moral wasteland of Stalin’s Russia, the insight into other minds conferred by some of these 25,000 volumes served as just another manipulative tool of domination. Reading alone, could not make Stalin less Stalinist. If anything, his lifelong bookworm’s habits seem to have turned him — to quote his own formula for the writer’s role — into a more cunning and devious “engineer of human souls”.

And even if Eichmann had pretended, what then? It would have made no difference. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Saul, by becoming Paul, had merely transmuted all that was most baneful about the Jewish conspiracy against the Nordic race into a more infectious, and therefore more lethal, form. Hitler, who traced the glories of ancient Greece and Rome to Völkerwanderung from the northern reaches of Europe, also attributed the downfall of classic civilisation to the virus introduced by Paul into the bloodstream of the Roman Empire. Its devastating effects had been evident ever since. Lethal variants had evolved. In January 1942, even as war was raging in the snows of Russia, Hitler placed Operation Barbarossa in the context of 2,000 years of history:

“The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.”

Two particularly toxic evils, both of them derived from Christian teachings, threatened the Nordic race with ruin. First, there was the insistence that the weak, the sick, the persecuted merited compassion. So infuriating did Hitler find the objections of church leaders to the Reich’s on-going sterilisation of mental and physical defectives that already, by 1937, he had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. Clearly, there was no prospect of the Germans fulfilling their racial destiny while they were cancerous still with compassion. Hitler’s own preference — one that he was quick to put into practice the moment Germany went to war — was for a mass programme of euthanasia. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example and by the most cutting-edge scientific thinking, could never satisfactorily be carried out by a people who persisted in seeing it as evil.

Yet it was their own folly, their own blindness, that constituted the authentic evil. The Christian morality they clung to had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mentally ill patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity. The churches had had their day. “Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.” The strong — as science had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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They also had a duty to trample down the second doctrine with which Christianity had poisoned the world. In 1942, an SS pamphlet quoted a line from Paul’s letter to the Galatians to illustrate just what it was that they had been summoned to fight against. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Here, the pamphlet warned, was a universalism that had dimmed the claims of blood, that had privileged the inferior races over the superior, and that over the course of the centuries had served to geld the Nordic race. A doctrine as pernicious in its effects as this could only have come from one source.

Of course Jews were not Greeks, and of course they could not be permitted to live alongside other, healthier races — of whom the healthiest was the Nordic. “Apes massacre all fringe elements as alien to their community. What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans.” Hitler knew that there was nothing particular about man. He was as subject to the struggle for life, and to the need to preserve the purity of his race, as any other species. To put this into practice was not evil. The truest evil was to do as Christians did: to oppose the ways of the world.

The Nazis, of course, did not succeed in their attempt to redefine for Europeans the parameters of morality. Their Reich did not last a thousand years. Their programmes of euthanasia and genocide are not commemorated today as models of enlightened statecraft, crafted in accordance with ancient wisdom and modern science. Quite the opposite. Today, across the Western world, the Nazis serve as the very archetypes of evil. The old supernatural cosmography that for centuries structured how people in Christendom understood the dimensions of hell may no longer possess the currency it once did; but the concept of hell itself still endures. It has become difficult, since the liberation of the death camps, to imagine it as anything other than a muddy cesspool, surrounded by barbed wire, crematoria silhouetted against a wintry sky. A belief in the satanic as Christians had long construed it, as a literal demonic force, may have faded in the West; but not the conviction that evil is to be identified with a single, sulphurously charismatic figure. Who needs the Devil when there is Adolf Hitler?

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Who indeed needs Jesus? It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the more Nazism has come to shadow the imaginings of people in the West, the less they have gone to church. Other regimes in European history have aspired, as Hitler did, to eradicate the hold of Christianity; but only Hitler aimed to eradicate, not just the institutional forms of the religion, but the doctrines of charity for the weak and sick, and the universalism, that lay at the heart of its traditional teachings.

This is why, 80 years on from the Second World War, the Führer retains his starring role in contemporary demonology. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical. Today, when we ask ourselves “what would Hitler have done?”, and do the opposite, we are as obedient to the weathering effects of Christian morality as our forebears were when they wondered “what would Jesus have done,” and sought to do the same.

Nietzsche, declaring in a famous parable that God was dead, declared as well that in the great cave that had once been Christendom His shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. It is there in our readiness to use “fascist” as the ultimate insult; to sanctify those who suffer oppression; to regard racism as a sin beyond compare: a shadow that continues to define for us, even in this godless age, the meaning of evil.

Brezhnev gave up the ghost in 1982, although he had been rehearsing for death for at least half a decade prior; not even the Soviet propaganda machine could cover up his obvious physical and mental decrepitude as he slurred his way through speeches on state TV. His successor, Yuri Andropov, had once been a vigorous crusher of dissent both at home and abroad, but by the time he got the top job he was already dying from kidney disease and kicked the collective farm-bucket a mere 15 months later.

Next came Konstantin Chernenko, a man so unwell he had to dress up his hospital room to make it look like an office. He barely lasted a year before leaving for the great Communist Party Congress in the sky. By this point the increasingly rickety Politburo finally accepted it was time to hand power to someone who was not teetering on the brink of death. And so it was that Mikhail Gorbachev, who at a sprightly 54 years old was their youngest member, took over.

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Yet as much as people still like to crack wise about Soviet gerontocrats, it is a little-recognised fact that most of those seemingly ancient communists were actually younger than America’s political leadership is now. Brezhnev was in his late 50s when he became leader and 75 when he died; Andropov was 69 when he died, and Chernenko was 73 when he shuffled off this mortal coil. At 74, Trump has already outlived them all bar Brezhnev, while Biden, who will turn 78 in November, is almost a decade older than Andropov was when he breathed his last.

And that’s just the presidential candidates. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the house and third in line to the presidency, is 80 years old; she graduated from college the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is 78; he got his first job in politics while LBJ was still in office. Meanwhile, Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the senate judiciary committee, is 87; she was already two years into her university studies when Stalin died, and is a mere two years younger than Gorbachev is now.

And it’s not as if this is a new phenomenon; in the past, there were politicians who were still in office at even greater ages. When I moved to the states in 2006 there was a hearty old fellow in the senate by the name of Robert Byrd; he was so old he could remember when it was cool for Democrats to run around in white hoods. This jolly ex-Klansman died in office in 2010 at the age of 92. Strom Thurmond, another long-serving Democrat with a youthful enthusiasm for racism, made it to the age of 100 before expiring in office in 2003, at which point his corpse was eulogised by none other than Joe Biden (back then a mere stripling of 61).

And this is to say nothing of the Supreme Court, where the justices are appointed for life and enjoy the kind of job security granted only to the likes of Xi Jinping — although even he had to organise a vote to have his term limits removed.

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No doubt the high-functioning state of America’s elderly politicians is a testament to the invigorating effects of sustained exposure to money and power and E-Z access to super-expensive, high quality healthcare (there’s your fountain of youth right here). But then again, given that America is often pilloried for its obsession with youth and beauty, is it not reassuring — a sign of maturity, even — that the people elect only the most experienced politicians to govern? Many cultures revere the wisdom that comes with age; in The Republic, Plato states that “it is obvious” that “the elder must govern, and the younger be governed.” The very word “senate” has the same root as “senex” and refers to a council of elders. Thus, the US version (average age 62.9) embodies the vision of the Roman original that was established some 2,500 or so years ago.

Meanwhile, I am suspicious of the weasel wording of “cognitive decline” that was sometimes tossed around by commentators during the primaries, especially when they wished that the likes of Biden or Bernie Sanders (also 78) would make way for their preferred candidate, such as the 71-years-young Elizabeth Warren. These same people would no doubt have been outraged had the same argument been applied to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg (still getting her law on right up until she died at the age of 87).

And consider Nelson Mandela: he was 75 when he entered office and 81 when he retired. Did the fact that Jacob Zuma was a bit younger make him “cognitively more awesome” (I believe that’s the scientific term)? Or, to take an example from outside politics: Clint Eastwood is 90 and Michael Bay is 55. But even the most tedious late period Clint Eastwood movie is cognitively superior to Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Age may not be just a number, but it’s certainly not a disqualifier either.

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Yes, I would happily be governed by a council of wise elders if I could be certain that they really were the wisest folk going — which brings us back to Plato. He was not in favour of rule by any old greybeard; he did not assume that merely by growing old, you become wise. In The Republic he adds that “those who govern must be the best of them.” And therein lies the rub. All too often, age does not bring wisdom, and perhaps those who actively seek power over others are among those least likely to develop wisdom.

In the USSR, the leadership instead grew sclerotic and decrepit and fearful of change, condemning the state (and its people) to a long stagnation that ultimately ended with the collapse of the whole shebang. As for America’s political elites, with Congress’ approval rating sitting at a lowly 17% the consensus appears to be that this council of elders is not only not wise, they’re not even all that competent.

The Trump-Biden debate was reminiscent of the old “that’s you, that is” Newman and Baddiel skit in which two cranky historians would lob a series of increasingly childish insults at each other, only not as funny. The sight of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union address behind Trump’s back was petulant and juvenile, cool only in the eyes of those deranged by Orange Man Bad syndrome or seeking to profit from the US media’s fear-and-hatred-for-clicks business model.

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I also suspect that having the same people stick around for decades, pickled in their contempt for each other, may have something to do with the endless deadlock we see in American politics. Let us not underestimate the sheer, soul-crushing awfulness of turning up for work, day after day, year after year, only to squabble with the same people over and over and over again. There are no surprise maneuvers, no hitherto unknown tricks to be learned. Just the same opponent, making the same irritating moves endlessly until — quite literally — death.

In every other field of endeavour, whether it be business or the arts, it is held as a truism that it’s good to bring in new eyes, new perspectives, lest stagnation kicks in. Even if it doesn’t work out, a new generation could at least start again in the naïve hope that they might be able to work together and strike a few compromises and become gradually disillusioned over time. America’s elite politicians were disillusioned with each other decades ago; some have been hating each other since Nixon was in power.

Alas, power, and the mysterious habit American politicians have of getting really rich (or richer still) once in office makes it hard for them to let go. And in the absence of term limits for everyone but the president, they don’t even have to do a Putin and organise a weird referendum to justify their continued presence in our lives. They can just stick around for as long as their constituents keep reelecting them. And they do: again and again and again.

When not currying favor with Xi, Erdoğan has also been busy consulting with Vladimir Putin — despite the fact that their two nations backed different sides in the Syrian Civil War. After a face-to-face meeting with Putin in March just before the global shutdown, the Turkish and Russian presidents were coordinating policy on everything from Syria to Libya to a new border war between two of their shared neighbours.

Welcome to the Dictators’ Club. Erdoğan’s antics are just a few indicators of a growing network of personal connections and cooperation between the world’s most notorious autocrats. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are clearly the ring leaders: the two have built a high-profile relationship, having met several times a year since the Chinese President took power. Xi refers to the Russian leader as his “best friend“; Putin has marked Xi’s birthday by buying him ice cream. Each was among the first to congratulate the other for their respective “re-elections” in 2018, and they have publicly supported each other’s altering of their constitutions to extend their power for years to come.

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And together they have their hearts set on expanding the club. Xi has had multiple summits with Kim Jong Un, continuing China’s support for the North Korean dictator’s family; Putin met Kim for the first time last year, strengthening what had been a tangential relationship between Russia and its most secretive neighbour. Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Salman has been shaking hands with Xi and high-fiving Putin. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Syria’s Bashir al-Assad have each grown publicly closer to the Chinese and Russian Presidents — and have established a relationship with one another as well. Both Xi and Putin have even met directly with the reclusive Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Dictators’ Club is more than just high fives and ice creams: it’s a source of significant material support as well. The Wall Street Journal warns of a “China-Russia-Iran arms alliance” as China and Russia oppose extending US-backed arms sanctions against the Islamic Republic; Iran will likely make arms deals with both nations if the sanctions are lifted. Similarly, both China and Russia have emerged as conduits through which Venezuela has been evading US oil sanctions, and Xi and Putin have both made oil deals with MBS. Individually and jointly through the UN Security Council, the ringleaders have been working to prop up beleaguered dictators, gaining customers for Russian weapons and partners for China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative in return.

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The Dictators’ Club is alarming, but not unprecedented. On the contrary, the current moment in international relations is reminiscent of the century that followed the defeat of Napoleon, when the hereditary monarchs and nobility of Europe fought to suppress a wave of nationalism, republicanism and liberalism fanning out from France.

When the French Revolution beheaded King Louis XVI, France’s neighbours responded by launching war against the country. The monarchs of Europe wanted not only to strike their rival while it was internally divided, but also to contain the revolutionary ideology. To the surprise of Europe, France won these wars, and then went on the offensive under Napoleon’s leadership. It wasn’t just Mr. Bonaparte’s tactical brilliance that had given France an edge. The French armies, mobilised by a new spirit of nationalism, proved to be more motivated and effective than the forces of other European powers fighting at the command of distant monarchs. Liberty, equality and fraternity were inspiring forces — and dangerous to the status quo.

And so the monarchs of Europe dedicated themselves to cooperating in suppression of these forces. The resultant international order, the Concert of Europe, brought together Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox autocrats; united Germans and Slavs; and superseded national rivalries in the name of propping up the existing political order.

Likewise, the members of the current Dictators’ Club have largely put aside religion, culture and ideology in lieu of naked power — hence why Erdoğan, MBS and Khamenei (all self-proclaimed defenders of Islam) have been silent or supportive of China’s oppression of its Muslim Uighurs. As the club expands, it has courted dictators from across the political spectrum, ranging from socialist Maduro to Right-wing dictators-in-the-making like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After the end of the Cold War, a number of scholars made bold predictions of what the new international order would look like, but none of them quite match what we see today. Francis Fukuyama boldly proclaimed that we’d reached the “end of history”: the moment when liberal democracy had triumphed over all its alternatives — from monarchy to fascism to communism — as the only legitimate form of government. Even dictators, he claimed, would pretend to be democracies and attempt to legitimise their rule, and in the long run, real elections and respect for human and civil rights would proliferate.

In contrast, Fukuyama’s former teacher, famed political scientist Samuel Huntington, predicted that the world would again divide into opposing camps, not based on nationality or economic systems but along more fundamental lines of religion, culture and worldview.  The resultant “clash of civilizations” would carve up the world into a handful of mutually antagonist blocs — Western, Islamic, Confucian, Latin American and so on — with a high degree of tension and war between the civilizations to be expected.

Still others, such as John Mearsheimer, assumed a return to “great power politics” — the international system that characterised Europe for centuries before the Concert, and during the early twentieth century. In the two World Wars, for instance, multiple powerful countries competed for power and position — fighting wars, making and breaking alliances, racing each other for colonial possessions, and so on.

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By 2020, however, all these predictions seem faulty. Political liberty has entered a period of decline: the number of democracies in the world has dropped, and the remaining democracies are becoming less democratic. Meanwhile, after a period in which terrorism and religious fundamentalism appeared to back up the idea of incompatible civilisations, authoritarian-led countries are making alliances that cut across worldview. Just as Muslim autocrats are supporting Xi’s repression of Islam, Putin — who has taken a page from past Russian czars by presenting himself as a defender of Orthodox Christianity — has brushed aside Russian Christian’s outrage over Erdoğan’s decision to turn the disputed cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum that is the Hagia Sophia back to a mosque.

And even though states like China, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been interfering with their neighbours, annexing territory and generally expanding their regional or world influence, there have not emerged the sort of great power conflicts that some have been worried would return. Today, these various expansionary and interventionist states have largely been content to stay out of one another’s way — allowing each to develop its own sphere of influence (the mutually hostile Iran and Saudi Arabia being the notable exception). Even before Covid-19, neither the predictions based on democracy nor culture nor political realism seemed to match the present reality.

The modern Dictators’ Club, much like the old Concert of Europe, is laser-focused on suppressing democracy and liberty. After Napoleon’s defeat, the European powers managed to last a whole century with few major wars between them, in which time they largely suppressed liberal revolutions within their territories and abroad. The monarchs intervened, for instance, to squash revolutions in Italy and Spain during the 1820s. Today, Russia and China are selling spying technology and techniques to authoritarians around the world. Yet the Concert of Europe broke down — temporarily, as nationalist and liberal revolts swept across Europe in 1848, and then permanently, as simmering tensions between the major powers boiled over into the First World War, a conflict that swept aside the last conservative monarchs of Europe.

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Today’s Dictators’ Club is similarly powerful but fragile. Its strength is in many ways an effect of the unique foreign policy of Donald Trump — a confusing and incoherent mix of tough talk, admiration for autocrats, and most important, indifference to much of the world. Should Trump lose in November — or be convinced to take a different approach to the world in a second term — it might not be hard to widen the pre-existing cracks that exist between the world’s dictatorial regimes.

Significant, sometimes violent, tensions exist between Xi and Putin’s allies. Take the Middle Eastern triumvirate of MBS, Khamenei and Erdoğan: Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaged in a Cold War; Iran and Turkey have have supported opposing sides in Syria; and Erdoğan has personally embarrassed MBS over the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Friendship with Xi and Putin also comes with costs that their autocratic buddies may not always be willing to pay. Duterte and Xi have still not come to terms over their disputed claims in the South China Sea; Russia and Saudi Arabia are fierce rivals in the international oil market and engaged in a brief price war just a few months ago. And some dictators, like Kim Jong Un, simply remain wild cards, who won’t be tamed. The friendship between the two ringleaders themselves may not be sustainable: the Brookings Institute recently issued a report concluding that strategic, economic and cultural differences between Russia and China will likely outweigh Xi and Putin’s personal relationship in the long run.

But even if these mutually supportive dictators are willing to ignore one another’s offences, the public may not be so forgiving. There has been outrage among Saudis and Iranians over the plight of the Uighurs; the Russian Orthodox church has condemned Erdoğan’s reverting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Sometimes even dictators have to listen to their citizens, when they shout loud enough. Neither Xi nor Putin is invincible: both are currently facing significant public protests, in Hong Kong and eastern Russia respectively. And China and Russia (not to mention Iran) have been among the countries hardest hit by Covid-19 (of course, so too have the US and UK), which has had destabilising effects in both countries.

Two hundred years ago, the choice by the kings, emperors, and tsars of Europe to cooperate came from a place of weakness, not of strength. Napoleon’s victories and the growing sentiments of liberalism and nationalism had exposed the fragility of monarchy. And yet the Concert system lasted, partly because liberal states like the UK supported them for the sake of stability, while the US focused on its own hemisphere. Now, as long as the democratic powers remain divided, indifferent and ambivalent towards democracy (at home and abroad) the Dictators’ Club can continue to thrive — to the detriment of Hong Kongers, Uighurs, opposition leaders and others looking for liberty and freedom around the world.

Still, despite the fact that Stalin was a) obviously clever and b) highly successful as far as evil despots go, the idea that he was some kind of grey nonentity persisted for decades. And I think that we still have a habit of belittling tyrants and authoritarians. It makes us feel better whenever they run circles around us at some geopolitical game or other, which is quite often these days.

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Take Putin, for instance. When he was first elected, a lot of coverage focused on this bland, faceless nonentity, an ex-KGB officer of middling rank leading a decrepit ex-superpower. They kept that up for a while, then switched to mocking him for posing shirtless. Next thing you know, he’s annexed the Crimea. Similarly, Gaddafi was barely coherent, yet he was pretty good at charming Blair and Mandelson — and might still be up waving his golden gun about if we hadn’t gone and dropped a pile of bombs on Libya.

Being a dictator is a difficult job, then, and those who succeed at it should not be underestimated. There is more going on behind those dead eyes than we think, even when they seem unhinged, weird or boring. Yet there is perhaps one exception, a dictator so profoundly mediocre that it would be difficult to underestimate him: Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the leader of the ex-Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. Recently turned 63, he is a man without qualities, and even, it seems, a bit dim. However, 13 years into his reign he remains firmly in power. So how has he achieved this feat, and what can we learn from it?

Berdymukhamedov came to power in 2007, after his corpulent, megalomaniacal predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, dropped dead of a heart attack. Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi (“father of all Turkmen”) had become famous due to his extravagant personality cult. He literally renamed the month of January after himself, and renamed bread after his mother, while also authoring a truly atrocious “holy book” that he called The Ruhnama, or “book of the soul”.

That level of totalitarian excess is quite rare, and so it seemed that the Turkmen were due a break. Surely it was time for a normal dictator, less given to erecting gold statues of himself that rotated to face the sun?

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At first Berdymukhamedov was very dull. A former dentist who had risen to the position of deputy prime minister, he was made interim president when Niyazov went to his eternal reward. This was in defiance of the constitution — the job should have gone to the speaker of parliament — so perhaps some powerful forces thought he would prove to be malleable. And Berdymukhamedov was cautious at first, making only vague statements about change, while adding that the country would walk rather than run.

Definitely a bit dull, then, and perhaps in more ways than one. Months later, I interviewed some Turkmen emigres in Moscow, and one of them said this to me:

“The new president? I know someone who studied at the medical school where he was the principal. They said he was an idiot. And that the teachers said it openly, about him, and to his face — you’re an idiot, an idiot. What can we hope for from him?”

At the time I thought this was an exaggeration; emigres can be pretty bitter about the countries they have left behind, especially when they are repressive dictatorships. But as the years rolled by, and Berdymukhamedov grew more comfortable in his new job and started to adapt the structures his predecessor had left in place to his own use, well, I started to wonder.

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Berdymukhamedov’s cult was strikingly derivative and pedestrian. Niyazov was “Father of All Turkmen”; Berdymukhamedov was “protector”. Niyazov was leading Turkmenistan into the “golden age”; Berdymukhamedov was spearheading the “renaissance”. Clearly, he did not have too many ideas. And nowhere was that more obvious than in the books that he put his name to.

While Niyazov’s cult was grotesque and obscene, it was, at least, ambitious. Similarly, The Ruhnama was terrible, but its author at least knew what ought to be in such a book — history, myth, moral teachings, God, the people and his own personal story. Berdymukhamedov’s books were a lot less complicated. One of the emigres had predicted to me that since he was a medical professional his book would follow that theme — and sure enough, a series on the Turkmen herbal remedies appeared under his name. With that out of the way, he cast around for other themes, but he didn’t cast far. Turkmen were famous horse riders, so there was a book about horses. Then he produced a book about his dad. Running low on national motifs, he eventually put his name to a tome about drinking tea. The books were strikingly literal, strikingly pointless, oblivious to their own bathos. They were unselfconscious and kinda dumb. Here was a dictator with no depth at all.

Don’t just take my word for it. In 2010, Wikileaks published diplomatic cables from a US diplomat who, after referring to the Turkmen president as a “practiced liar” and “micromanager” made this memorable observation: “Berdymukhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is. Since he’s not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.”

This lack of sophistication gives Berdymukhamedov’s propaganda an impressively transparent quality. Classic cults of personality, like those of Stalin or Mao, usually serve to efface the characteristics of the leader, who is always a universal genius and superlative leader. Even Niyazov, who built his own traumatic childhood into the cult, remained a remote, aloof figure.

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Berdymukhamedov, however, is a simple sort. He enjoys his hobbies and they are reflected in the cult. He likes horses and racing cars and shooting guns and fishing and is often filmed engaged in one of these pastimes. But most of all, it seems, he likes playing music and singing. He isn’t the first musical dictator — Kim Jong-il wrote opera librettos, while Stalin was a decent tenor who liked to sing Georgian folk songs, though only for the inner circle. But Berdymukhamedov is surely the first dictator DJ, the first dictator to bust a rhyme in public, and also the first dictator to serenade his people on New Year’s Eve.

His musical oeuvre is quite broad. In 2015 Berdymukhamedov entered the Guinness Book of Records when over 4,000 of his adoring subjects (no pressure) joined him in singing a Eurodisco number he had written himself. Berdymukhamedov enjoyed the experience and he has since performed in public many times, though without so large an ensemble to share the spotlight.

On International Women’s Day, he serenaded the ladies (and some gents) with a cover version of Karakum, a Soviet rock song about the Turkmen desert. More recently, he laid some beats on the populace during Turkmenistan’s televised 2019 New Year’s Eve celebration. He has also been filmed demonstrating to soldiers how to play guitar, though often the camera mysteriously cuts away from his face whenever it comes to difficult bit.

My favorite performances, however, are his duets with his beloved grandson Kerimguly. The themes are powerful and moving: in one song, the intergenerational duo hymn the praises of his favourite horse, while in another Kerimguly sings in English while his grandpa delivers a rap dedicated to the glory of the nation. Indeed, Kerimguly appears to be getting a mini-cult of his own. Opposition sites report that he appears on TV more often than his father, Berdymukhamedov’s only son; a state news website reports that he recently won the “Golden Age” artistic award and received a gold chain and some cash.

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So clumsy and naïve is Berdymukhamedov’s cult that it serves as a particularly potent reminder of Anthony Daniels’ famous observation that the purpose of propaganda is “not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate”. But while Turkmen citizens, condemned to live in a repressive police state run by a dullard, have little choice but to play along with Berdymukhamedov’s fantasy image of himself, the truly impressive thing is the way in which the president sometimes succeeds in getting foreign diplomats and organisations to abase themselves before him.

For instance, the regime’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is extremely stupid, even by Berdymukhamedov’s standards. The authorities deny that Turkmenistan has any Covid-19 cases but say that there might be a problem with “dust” — and so insist that everybody wear masks and gloves and practice social distancing. Apparently there’s quite a lot of dust about. And also “pneumonia”.

The mendacity, goading in its transparency, is almost impressive. But it isn’t, not really; rather it’s ridiculous, worthy of contempt. Yet Eurasianet reports that the British ambassador, after tweeting a selfie of himself wearing a face mask and urging others to do the same subsequently denied in a Twitter exchange that he was implying that Turkmenistan had the virus. Instead he urged people to “pay attention to the findings of WHO and Turkmen government experts, who are the experts here”. That’ll be the same WHO that recently sent a delegation to the country, praised the government for its high level of preparedness, didn’t say whether Covid-19 was on the loose, but then advised the Turkmen authorities to act “as if” the virus was circulating and adopt the standard protective measures.

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Thus Berdymukhamedov, despite being a “not very bright guy” gets away with it.

Sometimes, when I read about evil regimes and go looking for small consolations, I remind myself that it is not, in the end, all that enjoyable to be a dictator. Yes, you have a lot of power, but the trade-off is isolation, paranoia, a loss of humanity and a life spent looking over your shoulder. As far as punishments go, it never fits the crime, but it’s something. Yet when I look at Berdymukhamedov, I just don’t see a whole lot of angst there. Maybe he’s worried about the economy; maybe, deep down, he’s a bit nervous about Covid-19. But he long ago started to believe in his own luck and looks as though he’s enjoying himself a lot of the time.

The only comparison I can think of for dictatorial ebullience is the footage of Kim Jong-il from years ago, when he managed to get Bill Clinton to come to North Korea and eat a shit sandwich in exchange for the release of some American journalists. Kim was really enjoying himself that day; but that was a very complicated pleasure to arrange. All Berdymukhamedov has to do to feel good about himself is call up Kerimguly and sing a few songs for the cameras and he’s happy as Larry. Not quite stupid enough to mess up the repression machine he inherited from Niyazov and his Soviet predecessors, Berdymukhamedov carries on dictating with a song in his heart, and — as often as not — on his lips too.

Meanwhile, in the US, we have Donald Trump. What is there to say about this would-be Caesar that The Washington Post did not encapsulate in the slogan it adopted in 2017: “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (T-shirts available in S, M and XXL)? A tad histrionic, you might say, but what about the enormous gold statue Trump recently erected to himself on the National Mall? And the new lines added to the pledge of allegiance “At the moment of my betrayal to Donald the America-Father let my breath stop”?

Well okay, there is no statue and the pledge hasn’t changed. Yet Google “Trump dictator” and you’ll get 15,000,000 results. Switch “dictator” for “Hitler” and the total rises to 65,000,000. The facts – that in the US we have a chaotic, disorganised administration that lurches from one crisis to the next, while in Britain the Government can’t get a single act through Parliament – make little difference. Many, many people are highly agitated and prone to making overheated comparisons, completely untethered to any observable reality.

If more people knew about actual dictatorships, would they be less slap-happy about constantly invoking the monsters of the 20th century whenever they got a bit upset by a politician? Probably not, but in his How to be a Dictator: the Cult of Personality in the 20th Century, Dutch historian Frank Dikotter provides a primer that would do the job, if anybody were willing to listen.

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Dikotter has written extensively on Mao’s China and knows a thing or two about totalitarian excess, but here he expands his scope to cover eight appalling regimes across four continents, ranging from Mussolini at the start of the 20th century through to Mengistu at its end. His emphasis is on the phenomenon of the personality cults, the establishment of which is, in his view, “the most efficient” way for a dictator “to claw his way to power and get rid of his rivals”, beating out even purges and the principle of divide and rule – though they certainly have a role to play.

Mussolini established the template that many dictatorial cult-builders would subsequently follow. Although he was less interested in establishing a coherent ideology than his Marxist-Leninist peers, he shared their desire to concentrate as much power as possible in his own hands, to establish himself as a supreme and unquestioned leader, and duly forced himself into his subjects’ consciousnesses via photographs, posters, slogans, books, radio broadcasts and newsreels, while also turning up in person to dig ditches or inspect things. He was also highly attentive to detail: “In the middle of the war he found time to change the colour of a woman’s magazine from purple to brown,” writes Dikotter. Then it all collapsed, and Mussolini’s cult crumbled overnight.

Dikotter also explores the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il-sung who, despite their ideological and personal differences, all managed to find a lot of common ground with their Italian predecessor, sharing such passions as self-glorification, terror, war, books with their names on the spines, and the act of naming lots of streets, avenues and cities after themselves. (They did, however, have limits: while Stalin was big on erecting statues to himself, Hitler would not permit them; monuments were for the past, and he was a leader of the future. Mao was okay with statues, but he did not want parks or cities to be named in his honour.)

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Then there are the rarely discussed regimes of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. Here, things get weirder. The Voodoo-obsessed Duvalier, who declared himself as the “personification of God” and liked to wear top hat and tails, was clearly operating in a very different cultural context from the despots of Europe and Asia, yet he had enough in common with them that Dikotter proclaims him “a dictator’s dictator, a man who wielded naked power without the pretence of ideology”. Mengistu, meanwhile, moved into Haile Selassie’s Grand Palace, had the emperor’s corpse interred underneath his office, kept the cheetahs on chains, and then caused the famine that inspired Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to write Do They Know It’s Christmas?

And so it happened, again and again. Millions would live and die in the nightmare worlds constructed by evil men, only for it all to disappear as these despots fell or died; the 20th century’s own lunatic, appalling “eternal return“, an epoch of murder, torture and degradation inspired by absurd utopian fantasies.

All of which underscores the radical stupidity of comparing controversial and/or unpopular elected leaders with Hitler and Stalin. Yes, I’ll admit that Trump straws and the unedited Trump rallies I see on Fox when I’m at the gym seem a bit odd, but CNN is running concurrently on another screen and it’s non-stop Trump-bashing. As for Boris Johnson, aside from his books and some swag sold at the last Tory conference, he has nothing at all in terms of personality cult.

Both men will also, whether or not they win their next elections, be gone very soon in the grand scheme of things. Would Stalin or Mao have allowed themselves to be voted out? Obviously not. Dikotter sees this as a sign of weakness – that they were not willing to put their ideas and regimes to the test of a plebiscite – but this is naive. There are many reasons not to hold elections if you can get away with it, and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of leaders throughout history have not bothered to ask the masses what they think.

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In fact, even when you turn your attention to actual, successful contemporary authoritarians, you’ll see little like the horrors of the recent past, aside from a handful of places such as North Korea or Turkmenistan. Today’s tyrants, while unquestionably awful, pale in comparison to their 20th century antecedents. Yes, Putin is sinister and repressive, but he is more liberal than almost every Russian leader before him bar the occasional drunk and naif.

Erdogan is an appalling thug but he was patient enough to wait decades to advance his goals through elections, constitutional reform and a long march through the institutions. And then there is Xi Jinping, a man guilty of many sins, but no Mao. As Dikotter points out: “hardly a month goes by without a new book announcing ‘the Death of Democracy'” yet “even a modicum of perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century”.

So why do so many people feel the need to pretend that we are living on the edge of a new era of totalitarian horror all the time, when they are not only trivialising the sufferings of those who lived under terrible regimes, but also concealing the true nature of the problems we face?

After all, honest language would bring clarity of thought, and with it, a merciless focus on the weakness and confusion of our leaders, the desperation of our elected representatives, and the pitiful sadness of their squabbles. It would also denude excitable journalists and all keyboard warriors of the fantasy that they are engaged in a battle between forces of light and darkness, replacing it with a sense that they are witness only to intractable squabbles over things which are very complicated, which no-one will win, and where everyone will feel disappointed in the end. It would also point to the fact that even second and third tier despots regularly outwit the leaders of the democratic West.

Hmm, I can see why they don’t want to do that. But still.