How 3 Infamous Dictators Gained Their Absolute Power
With the storming of the United States Capitol in Washington DC in an attempted coup d’etat, the assumption that democracy as an American principle will never be challenged had to be rethought by many.
Now, more than ever, it’s important to look to history for context and lessons around how complex democracies devolve into one-man dictatorships.
In this article, I briefly cover three men who seized on times of political upheaval to consolidate the range of political opinions to just one — their own. In each example, the brief glory that was brought on through decisive authoritarian action would eventually be replaced by fear and dread caused by the death and enslavement of millions of people.
Here are the stories of Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler — how they rose to power and how they turned their respective representative governments into dictatorships.
Napoleon I
Napoleon Bonaparte was serving as an artillery officer when the French Revolution broke out in 1789.
During this period, France was engaged in a number of military engagements against England, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and various German and Italian states, which made the military an important source of pride and power.
After Napoleon successfully defended against a royalist (those siding with the monarchy) insurrection against the current republic, Napoleon’s prominence within revolutionary politics started to take off. Quickly becoming a commander within the French military, Bonaparte leveraged his military successes to gain influence within French politics.
However, it was lack of success on the battlefield that brought Napoleon officially onto to the political scene. When Napoleon saw that the tide was turning in his Egyptian campaign and starting to feel like the French offensive in Africa was running out of steam, he decided to return to Paris, where he could better cash in the political capital he accumulate.
Napoleon returned to Paris a celebrity. His popularity combined with the political instability within France created a ripe situation for seizing power.
During the revolutionary period, France’s government was organized into three bodies: The Council of Five Hundred, The Council of Ancients, and The Directory. The Council of Five Hundred was the legislative body responsible for drafting laws.
The Council of Ancients was a body of 250 elders responsible for reviewing and accepting or rejecting laws drafted by the lower house. Lastly, The Directory was a five member council that acted as the governing body.
Upon his return to the France, Napoleon set his ambitions on being appointed to The Directory, but by law he was not eligible because he was not yet 40 years old.
Nevertheless Napoleon would get his opportunity when Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès — one of the five directors in The Directory — started shopping around for a potential coup d’ètat. Unhappy with the current constitution, Sieyès approached several popular generals about a potential coup before coming across Napoleon who agreed to go along with the plan.
The idea was to coerce the current members of The Directory to resign and to convince The Council of Five Hundred and The Council of Ancients to appoint a new Directory, which would include Sieyès and Napoleon.
Under the guise of uncovering a secret plot against the government, Napoleon’s brother Lucien — then President of the Council of Five Hundred — persuaded the governing bodies to vacate to a safe-house away from the public. Napoleon was then made responsible for the safety of the two Councils and given command of all local soldiers.
Through conspiracy and coercion, three of the five members of The Directory resigned that day, which prevented The Directory from reaching quorum and thus governing.
When the other two councils realized that a coup was taking place, they convened to establish their authority and denounce Napoleon’s actions. As the debates on what to do started to go against Napoleon, potentially becoming violent, his broth Lucien called in the military to break up the convening members and expel dissenting voices. Through intimidation, the Ancients voted to adjourn and appoint Napoleon, Sieyès, and a third ally as provisional consuls.
Now, the only major obstacle left in Napoleon’s bid for absolute power was his own co-conspirators. Napoleon once again leveraged his popularity to make sure that the new constitution written by the provisional consul consolidated power with him rather than with the council itself. Thus, Napoleon revised Sieyès’ version of the constitution to give most of the power to the First Consul, which he was subsequently made.
The new Napoleonic constitution brought about the start of the Napoleonic Empire and is largely considered as the end of the French Revolution.
The lesson
France’s three legislative bodies made it seem like France had sufficient checks and balances to prevent absolute rule, but having a group of allies in the military helped Napoleon silence enough dissenting voices to pass through a democracy-ending resolution. Napoleon’s conquest illustrates how safety scares and economic uncertainty can be taken advantage by relatively small groups to wrestle power from large groups.
You can read more about the events of the Coup of 18 Brumaire here.
Joseph Stalin
Stalin rose to prominence by earning the trust and confidence of Vladimir Lenin — Russia’s most well-known revolutionary and political thinker.
Helping Lenin evade authorities and even robbing banks in the pre-revolutionary times, put Stalin squarely in Lenin’s inner circle.
When the Russian Monarchy was toppled in 1917, Russia entered a period of internal conflict with a mosaic of interests and political beliefs jostling for power. The main group to emerge from this revolutionary soup were the Bolsheviks after seizing the seat of the Provisional government in the coup of the October Revolution.
Following the coup, a Congress of Soviets consisting of 670 elected delegates was called in which the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) — an elite group of ministers representing the executive authority of the new government — was established.
Lenin was elected Chairman, while Stalin was elected as the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities — a position that was responsible for determining policies on how to deal with non-Russian nationalities.
However, Stalin’s influence would start to grow in 1922, when the expansion of the Central Committee required a secretariat. The position of General Secretary was meant to be a drab, administrative position that required doing mundane things like maintaining correspondence with provincial party cells, assigning work, keeping financial records, distributing Party funds, and appointing new personnel.
However, after being appointed to this position in 1922, Stalin learned how to leverage the position to increase his influence within the Communist Party. Through this position, Stalin would assume the power of appointing local party leaders, thereby installing a network of people loyal to him.
Another perk of this position was getting to know the interpersonal relationships of the Soviet Union’s top leadership — who didn’t like who and why. Stalin would use this knowledge to his advantage during the power struggles following Lenin’s death.
Lenin’s declining health created a fracturing of the Communist Party with an ideological power struggle between a “left opposition” and a “right opposition”. The left argued that the New Economic Policy (NEP) of Communist Russia created too much wealth inequality and that the country needed to more aggressively adopt socialist means of production. The “right opposition” generally had more tolerance for free-market principles through their support for the NEP but were also less aligned on their broader interests than the left wing.
To gain absolute power, Stalin would have to navigate these factions and alliances within the Communist Party and sideline any opposition to his rule — which he did.
At first, Stalin allied with the Left Opposition, naming two Left Wing members to serve on a provisional leadership triumvirate acting as the main governing body after Lenin’s death.
This coalition suppressed Lenin’s testament from getting out to party members, which could have resulted in Stalin losing his position as General Secretary. The triumvirate also conspired against Leon Trotsky who was the most popular figure in Soviet and revolutionary politics at the time.
While effectively sidelining Trotsky through his alliance with the other two members of the triumvirate, Stalin also conspired against them by creating alliances with members from the Right Wing.
The struggle for power between Stalin on one side and Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev on the other side came to a head at the the XIVth Party Congress, in which Kamenev and Zinoviev let their stance on Stalin known to the rest of the party.
Kamenev in particular made the following statement:
“We are against creating the theory of a ‘leader’; we are against making a leader. We are against having the [Stalin-led] secretariat combine in practice both politics and organization and place itself above the political organ…. We cannot regard it as normal, and we think it harmful to the party, to prolong a situation in which the secretariat…in fact decides policy in advance…. I repeat…to the congress: I have reached the conviction that Comrade Stalin cannot perform the function of uniting the Bolshevik general staff.”
This move ultimately backfired as it painted Kamenev and Zinoviev’s position as being personal in nature and based on jealousy.
The final nail in the coffin for Stalinist opposition from the left came at the XVth Party Congress where Kamenev and Zinoviev were ultimately expelled from the party.
Having allied with Right Wing members to get rid of any Left Wing opposition, Stalin then turned on the Right Wing, using his tight grip on the left and executive privileges from his General Secretary position to destroy any dissenting voices on the right.
From Wikipedia, regarding his main political opponent Nikolai Bukharin:
Having helped Stalin achieve unchecked power against the Left Opposition, Bukharin found himself easily outmaneuvered by Stalin. Yet Bukharin played to Stalin’s strength by maintaining the appearance of unity within the Party leadership. Meanwhile, Stalin used his control of the Party machine to replace Bukharin’s supporters in the Rightist power base in Moscow, trade unions, and the Comintern.
By 1929, Bukharin lost his seat on the Politburo and was replaced by a Stalin ally.
Stalin’s consolidation over the Communist Party was complete. By 1930, dissenting voices against Stalin were non-existent.
What came next was one of the darkest periods for the Soviet Union under Stalin. The 1930s began with forced collectivization of farmland and culminated in the Great Purge, which saw more than a million other people sent to forced labor camps or killed.
Stalin would continue to rule until his death in 1953.
The Lesson
Stalin’s personality made him constantly on the hunt for power. His conversion of a secretariat role into the main executive body of the government and ability to shift alliances to isolate and villainize his opposition show how inter-personal rivalries can create power-vacuums that are taken advantage of by opportunistic autocrats.
Adolph Hitler
Hitler joined the Nazi Party in 1919 and rose to its leadership position in 1921 due to his effective public speaking abilities.
Throughout the 1920s, Germany government was structured as a federal constitutional republic in a period of time known as the Weimar Republic. Following he end of World-War-I in 1918 and ending with Nazi rule in 1933, the Weimar Republic was a highly volatile time. 40 parties struggled for influence within a parliamentary system, resulting in a fragmented government that was slow to pass measures.
In 1928, 10 years after formation, the Nazi party was still a somewhat fringe party garnering only 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 federal election.
This would start to change with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.
Following a sharp decline in the German economy and increased unemployment, disenfranchised workers were increasingly drawn to the Nazi Party’s claims of restoring the greatness of Germany from the clutches of Jews and Bolsheviks.
Two years after the last election, another snap election was called when parliament was unable to reach consensus over whether to continue paying World-War-I reparations. Stealing much of the voter base from the mainstream conservative party of the time, the Nazi Party took in 14.2% of the vote in the 1930 election, and became the de-facto opposition to The Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Two years later, with unemployment at 8.5%, the Nazi party took first place with 37% of the vote in the 1932 election. However, the Nazi Party still did not have a strong enough coalition to govern unilaterally and Hitler did not get his wish to be made Chancellor. Hitler also failed at his bid to become President, losing to the popular former general Paul von Hindenburg.
Upon winning another seven year presidential term in office, Hindenburg named Franz von Papen as Chancellor. Hindenburg considered von Papen a more moderate and aristocratic choice for Chancellorship than Hitler. However, given that Papen was not allied with any single party, he could not secure enough support to govern effectively.
After several failed attempts and being ultimately being replaced as Chancellor by Hindenburg, Papen felt the best way to return to power was by allying with Hitler — the leader of the leading political party. Through his close relationship with Hindenburg, Papen convinced the aging President to appoint Hitler as Chancellor and himself as Vice-Chancellor.
Papen believed he could control Hitler behind the scenes, but this quickly proved to not be the case.
Four weeks after Hitler became chancellor, the Reichstag fire was instigated. Hitler and the Nazi Party saw the burning of the German parliament as an opportunity to pin the incident on rival communists and to force a vote on the Enablement Act, which gave the Chancellor the same emergency decree powers as the President. With the passage of the act, Hitler, as Chancellor, would not need parliament’s consent to issue orders.
However, the Nazi party, even with the suppression of the communist voting block, still did not have the two-thirds majority needed to pass the act.
And so…violence.
Describing the vote on the Enablement Act, Wikipedia states:
…some deputies of the Social Democratic Party (the only party that would vote against the Enabling Act) were prevented from taking their seats in the Reichstag, due to arrests and intimidation by the Nazi SA (paramilitary). As a result, the Social Democratic Party would be under-represented in the final vote tally. The Enabling Act passed easily on 23 March 1933, with the support of the right-wing German National People’s Party, the Centre Party, and several fragmented middle-class parties. The measure went into force on 27 March, effectively making Hitler dictator of Germany.
After this event, the only person in the country who could remove Hitler was an aging Hindenburg. However, at this point Hindenburg was a shadow of his former self and would die within a year.
Once Hindenburg died, Hitler declared himself as President and Chancellor. Now only Hitler, as head of state, could dismiss Hitler as head of the government.
The Lesson
Hitler accomplished his consolidation of power through — what appeared on the surface — legal means.
However, events like the Reichstag fire and the paramilitary thuggery during the Enablement Act showed the dangers posed by paramilitary groups and leaders that egged on violent acts. It also shows how deteriorating economic conditions increase the appeal of extreme ideologies who pin the blame on external groups of people.
