BONUS: Dictators’ Books
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Try it today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. 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 Calder is author of The Infernal Library, also published as Dictator Literature, a history of bad books by terrible people.

I enjoyed reading your book enormously, but I'm curious as to whether you enjoyed writing it. There's this kind of bitterness that comes through now and then about the research that you had to do for this one. 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. 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, yeah, if I spend like eight, nine, ten years reading dictator books, it'll be fine. In the heady days of youth, it seemed like a worthwhile challenge.

Obviously, there are the kind of dictator books that we're all familiar with, Mein Kampf, The Little Red Book, etc. But it was actually quite an obscure one that got you started on this road to begin with, right? Yeah, I moved to Russia in 1997, and I've kind of grown up during the Cold War. And so I was kind of vaguely aware that dictators had books.

You know, when you got to Moscow in the 90s, there was still a lot of communist detritus lying around. And I remember the first flat that I rented had the kind of complete works of Lenin or something on the shelves. It felt like a kind of dead tradition to me that like dictator books was a thing from the past.

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. It was this 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 kind of postmodern desert landscape with tilers in it.

and at the end I realised it's Turkmenistan and there was a book there called the Ruch Namaa and that everybody was kind of compelled to read this Ruch Namaa 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 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 a equal measure and the weirdness made it possible to overlook the terribleness or the terribleness was a feature of the weirdness and I thought this is really interesting.

And so in the end, I actually went to Turkmenistan early 2006, while the dictator Turkmenbashi was in his full glory. It was like peak of Central Asian Disneyland Stalinism. 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 Nama on the minarets of the mosque. I thought,

Pretty sure this is kind of blasphemous. I went into a Russian Orthodox cathedral and they had copies of the Ruch Nema at the entrance. I think it was a mountain and they put bits of the Ruch Nema on it. There was TV shows where they were reading from the Ruch Nema.

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. 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.

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? I mean, in some cases, they had kind of been...

disappeared in a sense after their dictator had fallen out of favor. Was it hard getting hold of these books? Some of them, yeah. I mean, the Rukh-Namaah is not as easy to get hold of now. And Rukh-Namaah volume two is very difficult. But yeah, that's one of the interesting things is how quickly these books disappeared. 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. They can force their witterings upon militants

millions. And they had massive print runs, I mean, millions and millions of copies. And some of these dictators are in power for decades. 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 in power. 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. So like loads of that stuff's translated.

Stalin, you can also get your hands on relatively easily. 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 and secondhand. But there's others that were quite difficult. Clement Gottwald, the Czech dictator. 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. 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? Sometimes, yeah. And I mean, that's a good question. So like it sort of depended on the regime.

If you read Stalin, for example, he's a super evil guy, but his writings are extremely dry. You don't get this sense of a kind of mass murdering sadist. If anything, it's extremely cold and very controlled, monolithic, like the statues and the propaganda.

Hitler for sure, that is like just ranting, unstructured, page after page of hate and bile. That book is really onerous to read.

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. 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. 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?

It's sort of like when you read a lot of it, the scale becomes relative. I would say Mussolini probably was an actual writer. So I think it's quite well known Mussolini was a journalist by profession and very successful journalist and very successful editor. So when you read his stuff, you could go, no, this guy actually knows how to write. His novel, The Cardinal's Mistress, it's like it's a potboiler. You just tossed it off.

But it works, you know, it's got like cliffhangers and each chapter leads to the next chapter and it's got like strong emotions.

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 One kicks off. 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

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.

And then other bits where he can barely bring himself to write full sentences. They're just like fragments of things that he sees. 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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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 best-selling book of all time, I think. Are people actually reading them? I mean, are these books to be read or are they kind of props in the personality cult? 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 a test in the Rukhnama.

And in the Soviet Union, you know, there were compulsory classes in Leninism. 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. Like, I mean, I think Chairman Mao definitely had his fans. Jean-Paul Sartre was a fan of Chairman Mao.

And Lennon had his fans. But I think like some of the others, it was definitely compulsion rather than enthusiasm.

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. Yeah, not really. I'm trying to think. I mean, you know, humor is one of the most dangerous things in a kind of totalitarian regime. It's not allowed.

I mean, there was like inadvertent humor through incompetence, but very few jokes or almost no jokes. 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 mind that maybe isn't always there on the surface. 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? I guess Saddam Hussein is another, he's a very interesting case. So Saddam, he had...

I think, a very large bibliography. It was collected speeches, this, that and the other, various statements about revolution and society. 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.

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. 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. 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. You do feel like you're sort of connecting with the dictator on some level, you know.

I think, you know, when you read the 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. 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. And so I think there's almost a kind of like, so he's in this position of uncertainty and dare I say it, vulnerability, which for the iron dictator is unusual.

And so it's that kind of strange moment. 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, uh,

America, sort of 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. So there is a sort of political subtext as well, for sure, this allegorical quality. But there's this wild stuff too, gratuitous scenes that you don't need to do in a pure allegory.

really surreal outbursts. I mean, I could read it for you. "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?

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? 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, Saddam? What are you talking about? 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. It's also interesting

quite heavily influenced by his own story, isn't it? I mean, he draws on autobiographical elements. Exactly. I mean, he used the material from his own life, but then he changed it as a writer does. And so, 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.

And presumably this book was a smash hit when it came out, even though it supposedly had an anonymous author. Yeah. And I think that's just like, it wasn't that anonymous if it was a smash hit, you know, and any, 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, 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 his second career. According to his editor, I think the very last book that he wrote, he was still working on it when the American tanks were closing in. And he was trying to finish his last novel right up until the last minute.

If it were me and I was writing something and there was like tanks, I would be out the window and running away really quickly. I'll finish the book later. I might never finish it. Clearly, it's something he needed to get off his chest. And that was more important or almost as important as the mere matter of survival. 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...

how that works. 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. 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? And so maybe Saddam starts thinking, you know, I should like really write a Quran in my own blood. You know,

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 an unstable symbol to me, you know.

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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? I'd say if you don't read them, you will be fine.

I think if you're just curious and want to read one that didn't cause too much pain, I say Mussolini's War Diary is quite short and quite readable. And yeah, I probably wouldn't really recommend any others 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.

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. Many thanks to Daniel Calder. For more bonus episodes like this one, subscribe to Noiser Plus.

Head to noisa.com forward slash subscriptions to find out more.

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