Dictators, Death, and Denial

By comparison, North Korea is far more secretive; foreign correspondents are scarce and have little chance of penetrating that society, and no one is likely to get the real story from anyone close to his medical team. So everyone is left guessing. And not just about the leader's health. In any dictatorship, everything about his country feels like it is in suspended animation when the dictator appears to be incapacitated or dying.

That was certainly true when the comparatively mild dictator Josip Broz Tito was dying. His vigil lasted for months before his death in May 1980, with foreign correspondents writing endless stories speculating whether Yugoslavia could survive longer than its leader. It did so for just over a decade, but in the end, without him, the breakup proved unstoppable. For North Korea watchers, there's the opposite question: will the death of Kim lead at some point to the reunification of the Korean Peninsula? In very different ways, powerful dictators determine their country's course—but only as long as they remain alive and in control.

Even the seemingly most powerful dictators can suffer a reversal of fortunes. If the constellation of political forces suddenly shifts, neither their power nor their lives are safe. Think back to the fate of Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu. When I attended the Communist Party Congress in Bucharest in December 1987, the obligatory adulation of the "genius of the Carpathians" looked like something straight out of a particularly bad movie script. During Ceausescu's turgid speech exhorting Romanians to work harder, the 4,000 delegates would jump up repeatedly on cue, clap, and rhythmically chant "Ceausescu, Romania, our pride and esteem." On Dec. 25, 1989, the dictator and his equally detested wife, Elena, who had been elevated to first deputy prime minister and hailed as a brilliant scientist, were executed—the only such violent reprisals against communist leaders during the largely peaceful upheavals of 1989. Many of the same people who had loudly cheered him earlier were ecstatic about this bloodletting.

The lesson seems pretty clear: the more draconian the dictatorship, the more likely is a violent end. But nothing is ever predictable about the transfer of power in a dictatorship. As Mikhail Gorbachev learned in the Soviet Union, and as the Wojciech Jaruzelski's government learned in Poland, loosening the reins of power in the hopes of maintaining control is also risky.

Shortly before the elections in Poland in June 1989, I met with Ireneusz Sekula, the deputy prime minister in charge of economic affairs, in his spacious office at the Council of Ministers. He claimed that the government was already undertaking "revolutionary" changes. Those changes, he noted at one point, would continue "even if a new team entered this building after the elections." When an aide interrupted to say that such an outcome was unlikely, Sekula replied with a grin: "Everything is possible in a democracy." The joke was supposed to be that everyone knew Poland was still far from a democracy: in those first partly free elections, the Communist Party had rigged things by awarding itself and its allies enough uncontested seats in Parliament to guarantee its continuation in power. Or so it seemed. What Sekula and others hadn't counted on was that the momentum from Solidarity's crushing victory in all but one of the contested seats would force a change in government.

Usually in dictatorships, whatever happens comes as a surprise, even to those who were hoping and pushing for change. And in societies like North Korea, where no one dares to suggest openly that change is needed, whatever happens is likely to be even more unpredictable. It's a country where the fiction that the "Beloved Leader" is all powerful, immortal, and the center of the universe must be maintained at all times—that is, until the fiction evaporates, the emperor is dead, and he is revealed to have been naked all along.

Nagorski is Vice President and Director of Public Policy at the Eastwest Institute and the author of "The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, And The Desperate Struggle For Moscow That Changed The Course Of World War II." He wrote this essay for Newsweek’s Polish edition, Newsweek Polska.

© 2009