The personalities of two tyrants, Josef Stalin and Czech president Gustav Husak, as portrayed by writers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Ivan Klima:

“Yet it is clear that the portraits of Solzhenitsyn’s and Klima’s respective oppressors have a great deal in common. They identify accurately the overriding character trait of the dictator, namely narcissism. One can do worse than quote from Alan Bullock’s monumental study Hitler and Stalin – Parallel Lives:

“Narcissism” is a concept originally formulated by Freud in relation to early infancy, but one which is now accepted more broadly to describe a personality disorder in which the natural development of relationships to the external world has failed to take place. In such a state only the person himself, his needs, feelings, thoughts, everything and everybody as they relate to him are experienced as fully real, while everything and everybody otherwise lacks reality or interest.

Fromm argues that some degree of narcissism can be considered an occupational illness among political leaders in proportion to their conviction of a providential mission and their claim to infallibility of judgment and a monopoly of power. When such claims are raised to a level demanded by a Hitler or a Stalin at the height of their power, any challenge will be perceived as a threat to their private image of themselves as much as to their public image, and they will react by going to any lengths to suppress it. (p. 11)

Bullock distinguishes between this personality disorder and any other (paranoia, schizophrenia, psychopathic condition) since these would normally affect the sufferer’s ability to function on a day to day basis, let alone allow him to achieve what Hitler and Stalin did. From the examples we have in Solzhenitsyn and Klima it would seem that the creative writer can tell us as much about mind of the tyrant as can the psychiatrist or the historian.

One final question: both our tyrants seem to have started out with some degree of idealism and sense of destiny. In the case of Stalin, as perceived by Solzhenitsyn, these qualities become perverted into a God-like notion of immortality and infallibility. In the case of Husak, as seen by Klima, there is hardly a trace of such early idealism – the resignation speech is shallow and trite in the extreme. The president comes across as a cynic and opportunist, exhibiting a combination of racism, boorishness, callous indifference and sentimentality. In terms of morality the results are the same: the debasement of a society. Thus both writers – inadvertently? – raise as a moral lodestar the standard of if not healthy skepticism then at least an uncertainty factor, as displayed in their most successful works. The real heroes of The First Circle are the questioners (Rubin, Nerzhin, Sologdin); the real heroes of Waiting for the dark, Waiting for the Light are the film-maker, forever compromising in order to survive but with some sense of decency and integrity. It is ironic that tyrants, so convinced of their own immortality, are so frequently, paranoically afraid of death; similarly, it is ironic that Solzhenitsyn and Klima, both increasingly preoccupied with conscience and clear -cut moral divisions, are at their most engaging when presenting us with seekers rather than finders.