Titans of History

Though he admired Hitler, Trujillo remained neutral in the Second World War and accepted Jewish refugees, yet he continued to murder his enemies, awarding himself the titles Great Benefactor of the Nation and Father of the New Dominion. But by the 1950s, Dominicans—and the US—were sickened by his excesses. After a plot against him was uncovered, Trujillo tortured and murdered the implicated Mirabal sisters; their fate—dramatized in the film In the Time of the Butterflies (2001)—horrified everyone.

CIA-backed plotters finally assassinated Trujillo in his car in 1961, a story retold by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in his book The Feast of the Goat (2000). But the dictator’s playboy son Ramfis Trujillo seized power and tortured suspected plotters to death before his uncles, Hector and José Trujillo, returned to take over. Finally, the USA ended the monstrous reign of the Trujillo dynasty, whose members fled into exile in November 1961.

LENIN

1870–1924

One out of ten of those guilty of parasitism will be shot on the spot … We must spur on the energy of the terror … shoot and deport … launch merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and white guards …

Lenin in 1918

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the gifted, ruthless, fanatical, yet pragmatic Marxist politician who created the blood-soaked Soviet experiment that was based from the very start on random killing and flint-hearted repression, and which led to the murders of many millions of innocent people. Lenin was long revered in communist propaganda and in naïve Western liberal circles as the kind-hearted and decent father of the Soviet peoples, but the newly opened Soviet archives reveal that he relished the use of terror and bloodletting and was as frenziedly brutal as he was intelligent and cultured. He was, however, one of the political titans of the 20th century, and without his personal will there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Unimpressive in appearance but exceptional in personality, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, known as Lenin, was small and stocky, prematurely bald, and had a bulging, intense forehead and piercing, slanted eyes. He was a genial man—his laughter was infectious—but his life was ruled by his fanatical dedication to Marxist revolution, to which he devoted his intelligence, pitiless pragmatism and aggressive political will.

Lenin was raised in a loving family, and was descended from nobility on both sides. His father was the inspector of schools in Simbirsk, while his mother was the daughter of a wealthy doctor and landowner; further back his antecedents included Jews, Swedes and Tartar Kalmyks (to whom he owed his slanting eyes). Lenin possessed the domineering confidence of a nobleman, and as a young man he had even sued peasants for damaging his estates. This helps to explain Lenin’s contempt for old Russia: “Russian idiots” was a favorite curse. When criticized for his noble birth, he replied: “What about me? I am the scion of landed gentry … I still haven’t forgotten the pleasant aspects of life on our estate … So go on, put me to death! Am I unworthy to be a revolutionary?” He was certainly never embarrassed about living off the income from his estates.

The rustic idyll on the family estate ended in 1887 when his elder brother Alexander was executed for conspiring against the tsar. This changed everything. Lenin qualified as a lawyer at Kazan University, where he read Chernychevsky and Nechaev, imbibing the discipline of Russian revolutionary terrorists even before he embraced Marx and became active in the Russian Socialist Workers’ Party. After arrests and Siberian exile, Lenin moved to western Europe, living at various times in London, Cracow and Zurich. In 1902 he wrote What Is to Be Done? which defined a new vanguard of professional and ruthless revolutionaries and led to the break-up of the party into the so-called majority faction—the Bolsheviks under Lenin—and the more moderate Menshevik minority.

“Trash,” “bastards,” “filth,” “prostitutes,” “Russian fools,” “cretins” and “silly old maids” were just some of the insults Lenin heaped on his enemies. He had enormous contempt for his own liberal sympathizers, whom he called “useful idiots,” and mocked his own gentler comrades as “tea-drinkers.” Reveling in the fight, he existed in an obsessional frenzy of political vibration, driven by an intense rage and a compulsion to dominate allies—and to smash opposition.