Propaganda

Having attained power, the three leaders were sustained by a continuous propaganda campaign by their party that raised them above normal politics. The term 'Red Tsar', for example, which was applied to Stalin, was particularly appropriate since the position he held was akin to the divine right claimed by the Russian tsars. The tsars had regarded their authority as being sanctioned by a power that went beyond ordinary politics and which, therefore, could not be challenged by ordinary politicians; Stalin claimed something very similar. As leader of the CPSU and heir to Lenin, he was the sole, rightful interpreter of the dialectical laws of revolution, thus putting him beyond challenge or criticism. It is one of the great modern political paradoxes that communism, a theory dependent for its meaning on the concept of the collective will of the people as the only true historical dynamic, has, in every society where it has come to power, resulted in the dictatorship of a single leader.

If Stalin set the pattern of communist dictatorship, it was Mao Zedong who most spectacularly continued it. His control of political ideas in China was such that he came to be regarded by the party theorists as the culmination of communist thought. Mao's ideologues described him in what amounted to religious terms. Communism was defined in China as Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist thought, as if Mao were the last of the great prophets in a line of Marxist revelation.

Hitler also claimed a special affinity with history. He was portrayed in Nazi propaganda not simply as a peerless political leader, but as the incarnation of the spirit of Siegfried, the great hero of Teutonic tradition. Hitler, the representative of all that was best in the aspirations of the Aryan race, was fulfilling his historic role, leading Germany to its destiny as a great nation.