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Episode: BONUS: Dictators’ Books

Author: NOISER
Duration: 00:29:31

Episode Shownotes

Almost every dictator, at one time or another, has put pen to paper. Some have wrestled with ideas, with philosophy. Many have merely vented - spewing their diatribes onto the page. Others have made forays into fiction, poetry and drama… with varying degrees of success. Noiser writer Duncan Barrett spoke

to a man who’s made it his mission to wade through all kinds of dictators’ writings. Daniel Kalder is author of The Infernal Library, also published as Dictator Literature: A History of Bad Books by Terrible People.  Scroll down the Real Dictators feed for episodes on the dictators mentioned in this conversation. The stories of Jorge Rafael Videla and Benito Mussolini will be coming later this year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Summary

In this bonus episode of Real Dictators, Duncan Barrett and Daniel Kalder explore the literary outputs of dictators, from Lenin to Saddam Hussein. They discuss how these writings reflect the dictators' ideologies and styles, with varying levels of emotional depth and coherence. The conversation touches on notable works such as Mussolini's war diary and Saddam Hussein's romantic novel 'Zabiba and the King,' which reveal insights into dictatorship and personal vulnerabilities. The episode highlights the intricate relationship between dictatorial power and literature, as well as the enduring legacies of these controversial figures.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (BONUS: Dictators’ Books) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

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00:00:33 Speaker_07
Almost every dictator, at one time or another, has put pen to paper. Some have wrestled with ideas, with philosophy. Many have merely vented, spewing their diatribes onto the page.

00:00:47 Speaker_07
Others have made forays into fiction, poetry and drama, with varying degrees of success. Neuser writer Duncan Barrett spoke to a man who's made it his mission to wade through all kinds of dictator's writings,

00:01:02 Speaker_07
Daniel Calder is author of The Infernal Library, also published as Dictator Literature, a history of bad books by terrible people.

00:01:15 Speaker_08
I enjoyed reading your book enormously, but I'm curious as to whether you enjoyed writing it. There's a kind of bitterness that comes through now and then about the research that you had to do for this one.

00:01:26 Speaker_09
I would say I enjoyed it more looking back over it than in the process. It was a kind of great literary endurance test to see how much of this can I read when it was just really atrocious, most of it.

00:01:39 Speaker_09
I mean, I had the idea when I was a younger man, you know, and I had more of my life in front of me than I do now. So it was like, if I spend like eight, nine, 10 years reading dictator books, it'll be fine.

00:01:50 Speaker_09
In the heady days of youth, it seemed like a worthwhile challenge.

00:01:53 Speaker_08
Obviously, there are other kind of dictator books that we're all familiar with, Mein Kampf, The Little Red Book, et cetera. But it was actually quite an obscure one that got you started on this road to begin with, right? Yeah.

00:02:05 Speaker_09
I moved to Russia in 1997, and I'd kind of grown up during the Cold War. And so I was kind of vaguely aware that dictators had books. When you got to Moscow in the 90s, there was still a lot of communist detritus lying around.

00:02:19 Speaker_09
And I remember the first flat that I rented had the complete works of Lenin or something on the shelves. It felt like a dead tradition to me that dictator books was a thing from the past.

00:02:32 Speaker_09
And then a couple of years later, probably early 2000s, I was in my flat and there was nothing going on. I switched on the TV. And there was this report from, I didn't know where.

00:02:45 Speaker_09
It was just really, really bizarre imagery of gold statues of this slightly portly gentleman in a business suit. And it looked like somewhere in Asia, in this postmodern desert landscape with tilers in it. And at the end, it was Turkmenistan.

00:03:03 Speaker_09
And there was a book there called the Rukh Namah.

00:03:07 Speaker_09
everybody was kind of compelled to read this Ruch Namath and it was the work of the dictator and it was like he was a genius and the book itself was quite strange looking it's kind of pink and green with this like gold head on the cover and so that did make me really quite obsessed.

00:03:25 Speaker_09
I had to know more. And so I think I managed to find it online. And this was in the days of dial-up. And I remember downloading it page by page so I could read it. And it was quite weird and terrible, but in an equal measure.

00:03:43 Speaker_09
And the weirdness made it possible to overlook the terribleness. Or the terribleness was a feature of the weirdness. And I thought, oh, this is really interesting.

00:03:53 Speaker_09
And so in the end, I actually went to Turkmenistan, early 2006, while the dictator Turkmen Bashi was in his full glory. It was like peak of Central Asian Disneyland Stalinism.

00:04:07 Speaker_09
And I mean, I went all over the country and the book was absolutely central. And there was like a mosque. in his birthplace which had text from the Rukh Namah on the minarets of the mosque. I thought, I'm pretty sure this is kind of blasphemous.

00:04:23 Speaker_09
I went into a Russian Orthodox cathedral and they had copies of the Rukh Namah at the entrance. I think there was a mountain and they'd put bits of the Rukh Namah on it. There was TV shows where they were reading from the Rukh Namah.

00:04:35 Speaker_09
And so for me, it was like a revelation because it was suddenly, instead of this like dead tradition of dictator books, I thought like it was a living tradition. And it was really bizarre.

00:04:46 Speaker_09
It made to me very real an experience of the 20th century that maybe lots of people had suffered through. And so I think that really kicked off this obsession that lasted for about a decade.

00:05:02 Speaker_08
That book, it sounds like, was pretty easy to get hold of. Were some of the books that you needed to read harder to track down? In some cases, they had kind of been disappeared, in a sense, after their dictator had fallen out of favor.

00:05:18 Speaker_08
Was it hard getting hold of these books?

00:05:20 Speaker_09
Some of them, yeah, I mean, the Rukn-e-Mah is not as easy to get hold of now and Rukn-e-Mah volume two is very difficult. But yeah, that's one of the interesting things is how quickly these books disappeared.

00:05:29 Speaker_09
And that was something else that fascinated me about them was, you know, when these dictators are in power, you know, they have literally a captive audience and they can force their witterings upon millions. And they had massive print runs.

00:05:44 Speaker_09
I mean, millions and millions of copies. And some of these dictators are in power for decades.

00:05:49 Speaker_09
And so you would think that if you're in power for decades, and you kind of are able to force your writings on people, they might last at least a little while. But they melt away almost completely once these guys are out of power.

00:06:03 Speaker_09
And so it sort of depended on the dictatorship Lenin, for example, very easy to get a hold of, those massive print runs. And there was a massive institute in the Soviet Union dedicated to the promulgation of Lenin's works.

00:06:16 Speaker_09
So loads of that stuff's translated. Stalin you can also get your hands on relatively easily.

00:06:24 Speaker_09
There was a messianic drive to 20th century communism and so they translated the books to millions of languages and so many copies they still circulate online. But there's others that were like quite difficult. Clement Gottwald, the Czech dictator.

00:06:40 Speaker_09
I lived in the Czech Republic for about a year and there was no trace of Clement Gottwald's stuff. It was long gone. So yeah, that was part of the fun of writing the book, was tracking some of the books down.

00:06:55 Speaker_08
Do you feel when you were reading these books in touch with that kind of evil of the person who was writing them? I mean, was there a kind of discomfort there?

00:07:04 Speaker_09
Sometimes, yeah. And I mean, that's a good question. So it sort of depended on the regime. If you read Stalin, for example, a super evil guy, but his writings are extremely dry. You don't get this sense of a kind of mass-murdering sadist.

00:07:22 Speaker_09
If anything, it's extremely cold and very controlled, monolithic, like the statues in the propaganda. Hitler for sure, that is like just ranting, unstructured, page after page of hate and bile. That book is like really onerous to read.

00:07:43 Speaker_09
And then I think if you read Lenin too, you know, you read Lenin, there's this like, unlike Stalin, there's a real like passion in Lenin and a rage.

00:07:53 Speaker_09
And if you read through the lines, you can see this barely restrained impulse towards violence, although he preferred it if other people did the violence for him.

00:08:03 Speaker_08
And these books obviously are not just political tracts. I mean, there's poetry, there are plays, there are novels. Were any of them enjoyable to read?

00:08:13 Speaker_09
It's sort of like when you read a lot of it, the scale becomes relative, you know, I would say Mussolini probably was an actual writer, you know, so I think it's quite well known.

00:08:24 Speaker_09
Mussolini was a journalist by profession and very successful journalist and very successful editor. So when you read his stuff, you could say, oh no, this guy actually knows how to write. His novel, The Cardinal's Mistress, it's a potboiler.

00:08:39 Speaker_09
He just tossed it off. But it works. It's got cliffhangers, and each chapter leads to the next chapter, and it's got strong emotions.

00:08:48 Speaker_09
But the book by Mussolini, if I say it came closest to enjoying in a kind of non-ironic sense, it was probably his war diary and World War I kicks off.

00:09:00 Speaker_09
Mussolini had been this big socialist and then he sort of converts to nationalism and I'm going to fight for Italy. And that book is really interesting because it starts off very, very jingoistic.

00:09:13 Speaker_09
And then as it goes on, the kind of horror and the bleakness of war sort of overwhelms him. And so his persona kind of breaks down. And I remember there's a sequence where he's just staring at this corpse out in no man's land.

00:09:32 Speaker_09
And then other bits where you can barely bring yourself to write full sentences. They're just like fragments of things that you see.

00:09:39 Speaker_09
And in that sense, you can really feel quite like in the trenches with Mussolini and see all these things you've heard about World War I become quite real. I mean, I'm sure there's better books about World War I you can read, but it's not bad.

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00:11:12 Speaker_08
And in terms of the books that are published after the dictators come to power, I mean, obviously they sell very well. You know, Mao's Little Red Book is the second bestselling book of all time, I think. Are people actually reading them?

00:11:25 Speaker_08
I mean, are these books to be read or are they kind of props in the personality cult?

00:11:32 Speaker_09
I think it varies. There were means of compulsion. You know, in Turkmenistan, in order to pass your driver's test, you had to pass the test in the ruhnamah. And in the Soviet Union, you know, there were compulsory classes in Leninism.

00:11:47 Speaker_09
After Lenin died, one of the ways to establish authority and control was to become an expert on Lenin's texts. Even into the late Soviet Union, there was a whole institute for the study of Lenin. And I met people who could quote Lenin at you.

00:12:02 Speaker_09
I mean, I think Chairman Mao definitely had his fans. Jean-Paul Sartre was a fan of Chairman Mao. And Lenin had his fans. But I think some of the others, it was definitely compulsion rather than enthusiasm.

00:12:18 Speaker_08
any of them show any sign of a sense of humor in their work? Or are these books, you know, to the last one kind of devoid of that? Because I suppose you need a degree of self-awareness to have that kind of humor maybe.

00:12:33 Speaker_09
Yeah, not really. I'm trying to think. I mean, humor is one of the most dangerous things and a kind of totalitarian regime is not allowed. I mean, there was like inadvertent humor through incompetence, but very few jokes or almost no jokes.

00:12:51 Speaker_08
I suppose there is a kind of interesting element, though, with some of these books of these people whose presentation of themselves is very controlled, who want to project a certain personality and so on, that sometimes the books give you an insight into some deeper unconscious recess of their minds that maybe isn't always there on the surface.

00:13:13 Speaker_08
I mean, I'm just thinking, Saddam Hussein, there's these rape orgies in one of the books. There's this very strange digression about having sex with bears. I mean, there's some strange stuff that kind of boils up to the surface there, right?

00:13:29 Speaker_09
I guess Saddam Hussein is another, he's very interesting case. So Saddam, he had I think, a very large bibliography. It was collected speeches, this, that and the other, you know, various statements about revolution and, you know, society.

00:13:48 Speaker_09
And I don't think if you were to read that, you would get much out of it. You wouldn't get much insight into who he was. But towards the end of his regime, when things started to go wrong for him, he started writing novels.

00:14:02 Speaker_09
So he wrote this book called Zabiba and the King, and it was a kind of like romance novel. It's a love story. The basic premise is it's set in the past, in the early years of Islam, and there's like a pagan king.

00:14:17 Speaker_09
And I think he goes out riding one day and he sees this beautiful woman, Zabiba. And then, as one would imagine, Saddam Hussein's method of courting wasn't very elegant. I mean, who knows? But like in the book, he just falls in love with this woman.

00:14:33 Speaker_09
And then he starts having long conversations about statecraft and religion. with her, and she starts to kind of change his mind about things. And as soon as you read it, it feels different from a lot of these other books.

00:14:50 Speaker_09
You do feel like you're sort of connecting with the dictator on some level, you know.

00:14:58 Speaker_09
I think, you know, when you read dictator books, very often the ones they wrote before they were in power are more interesting because they're free, they're unconstrained, they're kind of talking about what they really think.

00:15:07 Speaker_09
With Zubiba and the king, and I think he wrote three more, this position he was in, he was in this very embattled position. He was paranoid. He wasn't really enjoying power, but he didn't want to lose it because he knew what was going to happen.

00:15:22 Speaker_09
And so I think there's almost a kind of like, so he was in this position of, of uncertainty and, dare I say it, vulnerability, which for the iron dictator is unusual. And so it's that kind of strange moment.

00:15:35 Speaker_09
And then I guess he felt, for whatever reason, he had to express himself. And so Saddam feels inspired to write a novel. And it's often read as a kind of metaphor about

00:15:47 Speaker_09
America because I think the woman's held captive or she's married off to this evil guy who's often viewed as a kind of symbol of America. And so she's suffering every night. It's horrible, these interactions with her husband.

00:16:03 Speaker_09
So there is this sort of political subtext as well, for sure, this allegorical quality, but there's this wild stuff too, like gratuitous scenes. that you don't need to do in a pure allegory. Really surreal outbursts. I mean, I could read it for you.

00:16:22 Speaker_09
Even an animal respects a man's desire if it wants to copulate with him. Doesn't a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains as it happens in the north of Iraq?

00:16:34 Speaker_09
She drags him into her den so that he, obeying her desire, would copulate with her? Doesn't she bring him nuts, gathering them from the trees or picking them from the bushes?

00:16:43 Speaker_09
Doesn't she climb into the houses of farmers in order to steal some cheese, nuts and even raisins so that she can feed the man and awaken him the desire to have her? And so, like, what's that in Sudan? What are you talking about?

00:17:01 Speaker_09
I never said, oh, that is a reference to Russia. No, it's not. This has nothing to do with Russia. It's just strange. Maybe it's a reference to something else, but there's a lot of strange bits in it.

00:17:11 Speaker_09
So even if you read it as an allegory, the detail about rape is quite out there. And so you get this sense that it's like, yes, this is like, what's going on in Saddam's mind.

00:17:23 Speaker_09
And I guess when I started reading all these books, that was my sort of idea. I'm going to use these as like John Malkovich style portals into the heads of dictators, you know, and I will step inside.

00:17:35 Speaker_09
But often you're getting a portal into the head of the dictator before he was a dictator, or you're getting a portal into the Institute of Studies of boring dictator. But with that one, it feels like you are getting a portal.

00:17:48 Speaker_09
And I think the loneliness of this king, who's like isolated, he's got nobody to talk to. And the only person he can really communicate with is this young woman. And night after night, he goes to talk to her.

00:18:01 Speaker_09
You know, it's not like we have to have sympathy for Saddam Hussein. He was a terrible guy. But I do think that when we think about dictators, it's important to think of them as people.

00:18:14 Speaker_09
At the start of the book, I have this quote from Dostoevsky, while nothing is easier to denounce than the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him. And so, yes, it's easy to denounce, but it's interesting to understand.

00:18:29 Speaker_09
And I think that in Zabiba, if you want to know what it's like to be a dictator with the power of life and death, but who's also terrified of being assassinated and who's looking around and guarding his position at any moment, I think Zabiba and the king gives you a reasonable sense of what was going through Saddam's mind when he felt besieged.

00:18:53 Speaker_08
quite heavily influenced by his own story, isn't it? I mean, he draws on autobiographical elements. Exactly.

00:19:00 Speaker_09
I mean, he used the material from his own life, but then he changed it as a writer does. And so, you know, in that sense, it's like a proper novel, maybe not a great novel, but he created the novel the same way all novelists do.

00:19:17 Speaker_08
And presumably this book was a smash hit when it came out, even though it supposedly had an anonymous author.

00:19:23 Speaker_09
Yeah. And I think that's just like, it wasn't that anonymous if it was a smash hit, you know? And I think he wrote two or three more which haven't been translated into English, but I guess he was sufficiently pleased with the results of that first one.

00:19:37 Speaker_09
But he kept going, you know, Franco wrote one novel and then stopped. Chairman Mao wrote poetry all his life, but it wasn't really published until towards the end. But it was almost like Saddam had discovered a second career.

00:19:49 Speaker_09
According to his editor, I think the very last book that he wrote, he was still working on it when the American tanks were like sort of closing in and he was like trying to finish his last novel right up until the last minute.

00:20:04 Speaker_09
If it were me and I was writing something and it was like tanks, I would be out the window and running away really quickly. So I'll finish the book later. I might never finish it. Clearly he had something he needed to get off his chest.

00:20:17 Speaker_09
And that was more important or almost as important as the mere matter of survival.

00:20:25 Speaker_08
We spoke a little bit earlier, I think, about the texts that become almost like kind of sacred texts. And Saddam does something very interesting, which is that he has this Quran written in his blood. Is that right? Can you talk through how that works?

00:20:42 Speaker_09
Assuming it's true it was his blood, right? I mean, he had access to lots of blood, but I think it was. And so yeah, he did have a Quran produced in his own blood.

00:20:53 Speaker_09
So I think, you know, as dictators get older, they too sometimes look for some kind of historical meaning. You know, I think they have some idea of like, what is my historical legacy? What is my vision? What am I leaving behind?

00:21:03 Speaker_09
And so maybe Saddam starts thinking, you know, I should like really write a Quran in my own blood.

00:21:11 Speaker_09
to express my religiosity but also I mean it's obviously propaganda but also it's kind of grotesque I mean you know it's kind of like really weird and so it feels like feels like an unstable symbol to me you know

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00:23:01 Speaker_08
So I just have one final question. I kind of get the feeling reading your book that you've read these works, so we don't have to. But if our listeners were going to go and sample one work of Dictator Lit themselves, what would it be?

00:23:16 Speaker_08
I'd say if you don't read them,

00:23:19 Speaker_09
you will be fine. I think if you're just curious and wanted to read one that didn't cause too much pain, I'd say Mussolini's War Diary is quite short and quite readable. And yeah, I probably wouldn't really recommend any others.

00:23:41 Speaker_09
Beyond that, although, you know, there's pleasure in, if you enjoy watching bad movies, right, then you can sort of read some of these books and get some of that, although they're much more consequential.

00:23:53 Speaker_09
But to keep going for 200 or 300 or 400 pages is like an ordeal. And even like Saddam's novel, which sort of sounds like, well, it's got bear sex in it. You have to plow through a lot of waffle and just turgid stuff. So yeah, I don't recommend it.

00:24:21 Speaker_07
Many thanks to Daniel Calder, For more bonus episodes like this one, subscribe to Noisa Plus. Head to noisa.com forward slash subscriptions to find out more.

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