to the will of the leader, until the ideology became whatever the
leader said it was.
But to achieve both of these the leader had to appeal over the
heads of the party and the state to the people directly. For this he
needed to generate a charismatic authority built on the power of his
own personality. In an age of mass communication this offered a
source of authority that far exceeded the more usual sources that lay
in tradition or in the institutions of government. But it needed a vast
propaganda machine that would project the leader not only as the
benevolent father of his people, but as an infallible leader whose
judgement could not be challenged, what Koestler describes in Dark-
ness at Noonas the ‘infallible pointsman’.^2
What’s more, the leader had to demonstrate to his people that
he was virtually omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent – all-
powerful, all-knowing and ever-present, respectively. In the Soviet
Union the economic and industrial progress achieved in each suc-
cessive five-year plan suggested that anything was possible under
his leadership. He seemed to be not only benevolent, but infinitely
wise and knowledgeable on just about any subject – history, art, lit-
erature, architecture, philosophy, military theory, any subject on
which people could have an opinion. He also appeared to be ever-
present, using air travel to be in two or three places on the same day.
His picture was always there on massive hoardings and in every
government office.
Yet perhaps the most important source of his charismatic author-
ity and the most convincing evidence of his infallibility lay in the fact
that he had survived the internecine struggles for power within his
own party, outmanoeuvring his opponents, who could also lay claim
to being the rightful guardians of the ideology. Indeed, at times the
ruthlessness with which he dispatched his opponents seemed to be
evidence in itself of his charismatic infallibility. In one night on 30
June 1934 Hitler removed Ernst Röhm, his most dangerous rival, and
his followers in the SA, and with it earned the respect not just of big
business and the army, but, one suspects, of the people too. In the
same ruthless manner Stalin removed the threats of Trotsky,
Kamenev, Zinoviev and finally Bukharin.
Nevertheless, for the leader to maintain his monopoly of power
in the long term, more was needed than just respect for his
personality. Control had to be exerted not just over people’s poli-
tical convictions, but over their private moral beliefs and opinions
too. Intolerant of all dissent, a moral consensus was created andProcessing the Ideas 87HTW12 7/26/01 9:04 PM Page 87