At his arraignment last week, Saddam Hussein displayed all the swaggering truculence that served him so well on his astonishing rise to become the strongman of the Arab world. Still very much the big beast of the jungle, lame, captive but still ferocious: “I am Saddam Hussein,” he twice declared. “President of Iraq.” But his real audience was never the judge, the media or the West. Saddam has always felt that he will be judged only by history and compared only to his ultimate hero.
As he told a courtier in the late 1970s, he did not care what people thought at the time but “what people will say about us 500 years hence”. Moreover, as he continually told his entourage, he measured himself only against the life of the paragon of modern dictators, whom he studied, copied and admired.
I discovered this in a strange way: researching my biography of Joseph Stalin, I discovered that the Soviet dictator spent his time not at the Kremlin but in his secret collection of villas on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. Flying in by United Nations chopper (the only way to get there) I visited about 10 of these residences, many of which had been forgotten for decades. As I was leaving, I worried that some other historian had got there first so I asked the old caretaker if anyone else had visited. “No,” she replied, “but there was this Arab gentleman in the 1970s who insisted on visiting each one.” His name? “Saddam Hussein.”
KGB sources later confirmed this. Indeed, Saddam’s henchmen in American captivity reveal that they had to listen to tedious hours of dictatorial chatter about Stalin. A Kurdish politician, Dr Mahmoud Othman, once negotiated with Saddam in his private apartments where he was amazed to see not only boxes of Johnnie Walker whisky but a huge library of books devoted to Stalin, specially translated into Arabic. Despite his sumptuous palaces, Saddam moved around all the time, living and working in a tiny apartment-cum-office where he slept on a metal military cot — exactly like Stalin who used almost 20 villas and palaces but always slept on a cot or sofa.
Saddam weirdly believes that Stalin was almost his alter ego, his teacher: twin tyrants. Their similarities — some deliberate, some coincidental — are eerie. Their childhoods were miserable, alienating — violent fathers, devoted mothers, inspiring patrons, making them angry self-reliant street ruffians with absolute self-belief. Stalin embraced Marxism with “semi-Islamic fanaticism”, Saddam embraced Ba’athism.
Their radical political visions combined with overweening self-confidence, a thug’s ruthlessness and an outsider’s inferiority complex to create the unbeatable political operators who believed they were on a mission. Both became political brigands: Saddam an assassin, Stalin a bankrobber. Both worshipped political hero patrons: Lenin “my mountain eagle” for Stalin; General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a Ba’athist leader, for Saddam.
Neither seized power in a coup but instead built power slowly within the tiny oligarchies of their parties: after the revolution, Stalin was in Lenin’s first politburo and was soon general secretary of the party; Saddam became deputy to President al-Bakr. Both men made themselves masters of ideology and the secret police; both won the devotion of their fellow Ba’athists by charm and friendship while brutally crushing enemies. Each turned against his patron — Lenin dying in 1924 before he could destroy Stalin; al-Bakr eased out of power to make Saddam president in 1979.
Stalin embarked on a terror campaign to consolidate his power: in February 1937 he made his erstwhile comrades accuse each other at a central committee plenum and then supervise each other’s liquidation. Saddam studied this carefully. In July 1979 he held a filmed Ba’athist conference in which “traitors” were named, arrested and executed downstairs by their own comrades.
Both men were sadistic mass-murdering adherents of Stalin’s dictum: “One man, one problem; no man, no problem”. Both were avid avengers: “My greatest delight,” mused Stalin, “is to mark one’s enemy, avenge oneself thoroughly, then go to sleep.”
Their missions were parallel: to transform poor countries into military superpowers to confront the West. Both Saddam and his alter ego made appalling misjudgments in foreign policy: Stalin believed Hitler would never attack Russia; Saddam insisted that George Bush Sr would not challenge his Kuwaiti adventure and that George Bush Jr would not punish his brinkmanship. These failures caused short bouts of self-doubt for Stalin in July 1941 and Saddam in 1991.
Tyrants like these believe they can overcome reality: their will was so supreme, their methods so extreme, that their wishes were sometimes self-fulfilling. Using their self-belief, terror and propaganda, they did achieve the impossible: Stalin collectivised at the cost of 10m lives; 1m died in Saddam’s stalemated Iran-Iraq war, although he claimed victory.
Such men take politics to a different, more ruthless level than any of their comrades because they view themselves as agents of history itself, as personifications of rightness: the holy mission is everything. Even their own families are sacrificed: Stalin arrested (sometimes killing) the families of his first and second wives, even threatening to arrest Svetlana, his own daughter. When a comrade interceded for his family, Stalin boasted: “What can I do? My own family are in prison.
”When Saddam’s daughters and their husbands defected, then returned, he ordered his sons to slaughter the sons-in-law.
But ultimately Saddam is no Stalin, just a caricature lacking the Soviet tyrant’s subtle statesmanship. Saddam said he admired Stalin for keeping power for so long — and dying in his bed. He probably will not achieve either but such is the delusion of Arab opinion, such the hatred for western power, that his failures are irrelevant: it is enough that he fought the Americans (40% of Iraqis still support Saddam). And 26% of Russians today say they would vote for Stalin.
Saddam surely fears his possible execution. Stalin feared death and soiled his pants when he visited the front. Nonetheless, these twin tyrants share political courage and total belief in their historical destiny.
Once Vasily Stalin dropped his father’s name. “I’m called Stalin, too,” insisted Vasily. “No,” replied Stalin, “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power.” Saddam might have said the same thing: “Saddam is Iraq, Saddam is Arab power.”
At his trial, Saddam will play out the role he was born to play and even face his fate as a hero: the modern Saladin who fought the American crusaders and never lost his swagger.
Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore is published in paperback, Phoenix, £9.99
