ALL ABOUT HISTORY ISSUE 38 PART 2 – DICTATORS

The second part of the tribute to the dictators of the 20th century includes almost entirely the persons who sought to give flesh and bones to the social model formulated at the end of the 19th century by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with the Communist Manifesto. Based on these theories, in the mid-1910s Lenin took power in Russia after a revolution.
Stalin, his successor and the first person chronologically to appear on the magazine's pages, imposed the "dictatorship of the proletariat". The term succinctly describes the post-revolutionary seizure of state power by the working class for the benefit of society as a whole in order to form a classless society. To achieve it, Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in China resorted to violent repression and policing of the entire citizenry. Their goal has been to "educate" them to live in a society where any concept of individual property is perceived as a state threat and undermining. These are regimes that are not just illiberal but that systematically seek to manipulate citizens. Anyone who disagrees is either marginalized as a prisoner in Soviet gulags or publicly paraded, as during the Cultural Revolution in China – and of course executed. Often his bones are idiosyncratic trophies, as in the case of Pol Pot.
A second important characteristic of the "dictators of the proletariat" is the formation of a personal regime, where the leader has infallibility. Stalin is the "Father of the Soviets", Mao respectively the "Great Helmsman". Leader worship leads to situations of mass paranoia, such as the youth waving Mao's red book or the excesses that preceded and followed Stalin's death. Their size even inspired a comic that was successfully transferred to the big screen.
However, the pages of this issue also parade post-war dictators whose power, although ideologically opposed to the communist regimes, adopted similar forms of personal worship. The cases of Saddam Hussein and Ferdinand Marcos confirm this.
Readers will find the volume timely considering the excesses of the Kim regime in North Korea or the backdrop of the Sino-Taiwan conflict through the themes of Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, and will realize the reverberations of Stalinist influence in modern Russia's imperial pursuits .
Good reading

Other Topics
Josip Broz Tito
The genius leader created a state by silencing national confrontations and balancing on Cold War antagonisms. Fatal for Greece, as it contributed to the outcome of the Civil War and encouraged redemptive policies that plague us to this day. His life's work collapsed a few years after his death.
Fidel Castro
The bourgeois lawyer who embraced communist ideas. A revolutionary, he seized power in Cuba by overthrowing the corrupt Batista regime. The power was a thorn in the soft underbelly of the US and almost caused World War III in the Bay of Pigs crisis.