In the following months, the strain started to show as ethnic turmoil and bloodshed intensified in the Caucusus and Soviet security forces seemed to be out of control, killing protesters in Lithuania. The Politburo and security service, the KGB, plotted to overthrow Gorbachev: in August 1991, a committee of incompetent drunken communist leaders and Chekists arrested Gorbachev on his Black Sea holiday and sent tanks into Moscow, but crowds defended the White House offices of Yeltsin. Yeltsin bravely climbed onto a tank outside to defiantly address the crowds. The coup fell apart but its real victim was Gorbachev, who had lost his prestige.
When Gorbachev tried to regain the momentum, Yeltsin ended the monopoly of the Communist Party and then conspired with the elected presidents of the other Soviet republics to end the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991, thus ending the Soviet Union, which broke up into its independent republics. Gorbachev realized that communist oligarchy was wrong and after his fall he sincerely embraced liberal democracy but it was too late.
Yeltsin dominated Russia in the 1990s and, initially, his enthusiasm and openness were refreshing. Almost for the first time in its history, Russia enjoyed totally free elections, a totally free press, a free economy, a free investigation of history and of state crimes—and all these were Yeltsin’s achievements. But he was fatally flawed: alcoholic, inconsistent and capricious, he ruled like a tsar through cronies and henchmen such as his sinister bodyguard General Korzhakov and his billionaire financial adviser Boris Berezovsky. Yeltsin’s privatization of the Russian economy was hopelessly mismanaged, making billionaires of the so-called Oligarchs, over-powerful businessmen like Berezovsky.
In 1993, communist hardliners in Parliament threatened the entire democratic project with an armed revolt which Yeltisn defeated by ordering the storming by special forces of the White House in Moscow. The following year, faced with rebellion and the assertion of independence by Chechnya, Yeltsin invaded the little republic. As they committed atrocities on a vast scale, killing thousands of innocent civilians and utterly destroying cities such as Grozny, Russian forces were humiliated by dynamic Chechen fighters. Yeltsin was forced to retreat, withdraw Russian forces from Chechnya and infamously recognize Chechen independence—an unprecedented Russian humiliation. The decay of financial corruption, Kremlin intrigue, economic chaos, mafia disorder and resurgent repression unleashed by the Chechen war discredited his real achievements.
By 1996, Yeltsin, ill and isolated, faced a new election which he seemed likely to lose: his billionaire cronies, the Oligarchs, mobilized their fortunes to help him win re-election but now even democracy was tainted. The next three years saw economic meltdown and Yeltsin’s personal decline as he sacked prime ministers with imperial whimsy and embarrassed his country with acts of drunken buffoonery.
In 1999 he chose a young, ambitious and severe ex-KGB officer and cabinet minister named Vladimir Putin to be his successor and dramatically resigned the presidency. Putin proved more than equal to the task: he restored the power of the state and the prestige of Russia as a great power, crushed mafia corruption and broke the influence of the Oligarchs. At the same time he demonstrated his discipline and vigor by again attacking Chechnya with brutal and bloody competence, crushing the rebellion at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Putin promoted his colleagues from the security services who now dominated Russian government and business, diminished democracy and press freedom, ended the election of local governors and personified a new Russian form of authoritarian government that he called sovereign democracy. During two terms in the Kremlin, Putin utterly dominated Russia in a way Gorbachev and Yeltsin had never done: he was able to hand over the presidency to an aide, Dmitri Medvedev, while remaining the country’s ruler as prime minister. In 2012, he was able to return to the presidency, despite popular protests at widespread corruption and the regime’s authoritarianism. Putin may turn out to be the dominant Russian leader of the early 21st century.
ELVIS
1935–1977
The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know … They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goosed it up.
Elvis Presley, in an early interview
Elvis, the King. Thus the United States, that most republican of nations, dubbed its favorite musical son, ensuring that his preeminence would remain inviolate. He didn’t invent rock ’n’ roll, he didn’t write many songs, he never toured abroad, and he has since been eclipsed in almost every bald statistic of popular-music success. But all that is irrelevant. His sublimity of voice—startling in its reach from raunch and rebellion to the angelically tender—his devastating good looks, and the pulsating charisma of the performer entranced millions. He was a global star, and, by carrying the black music of blues and gospel to a white audience in a way that was unthinkable before, he enabled the musical synthesis that remains the bedrock of popular music today.
Elvis Aaron Presley had a poor Southern upbringing and was much closer to his lively and impressive mother than his shirking, petty-criminal father. He was a shy teenager, often bullied for being a mother’s boy. When he left school, he started driving trucks, just as his father did. But it was not long before his remarkable voice came to the attention of the record producer Sam Philips. Philips was looking for a white man to sing “Negro” songs, and when he heard Presley’s self-funded singles, recorded in 1953 as a birthday present for his mother, Philips felt he had found his man.
In 1954 Presley recorded “That’s All Right,” a blues song. Radio stations in Tennessee immediately began playing it, and Presley went on a tour of the Southern states. He came up against the ingrained prejudice of many white Americans opposed to seeing blacks and whites mixing together or sharing culture. But even this generations-old legacy of separateness could not compete with the adoration from the young and more color-blind fans that Presley began to attract. By 1956 pressure from white teenagers had forced radio stations nationwide to play Elvis’ singles—hits such as “Heartbreak Hotel” (1956), “Love Me Tender” (1956) and the title song to the film Jailhouse Rock (1957)—and he remained completely frank about his musical influences. In some quarters black critics accused him of stealing their music; in contrast, Little Richard called Elvis “a blessing,” who “opened the door” for black music. What was undeniable was that his momentum was unstoppable.
Elvis signed a management deal with “Colonel” Tom Parker, to whom he turned over all of his business affairs. Parker was a shadowy character, but he was a master merchandiser and turned Elvis into the greatest musical brand the world had ever seen. Under his guidance, Elvis found that he could draw crowds and audiences on a phenomenal scale. He broke records for sales of singles and albums, and he could attract 80 percent of the American television audience for his TV appearances. Young men wanted to be him, young women wanted him, and older generations were scared and shocked. In the city of Liverpool, John Lennon recruited Paul McCartney to the band that had Elvis as its lodestar and that wanted to be “bigger than Elvis.”
Back home, as Elvis’ music and high-energy stage act grew ever more popular, conservative America became more disgusted and worried that its offspring were being irrevocably corrupted. His habits of shaking his legs, rolling his tightly leather-clad hips, thrusting and throwing himself about in front of the microphone were considered the height of obscenity. As a result, there were many who saw Elvis’ draft into the US Army, and subsequent posting to Germany in 1958, as something of a relief. When he returned to America in 1960, he was a more subdued character, and during the 1960s, as the era of the pop groups burgeoned, he chose to concentrate on a lackluster film career rather than return to music. But he reinvented himself for a musical comeback in 1968, adopting some of the influences of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the very stars who had re-interpreted his kind of music and sold it back to America.
Elvis’s populari
ty remained huge throughout the 1970s, and he sold out enormous venues across the United States, particularly in Las Vegas, albeit in a new persona where he was now encased in the outré outfits of the cabaret scene. He still made it into the charts, for example with “Always on My Mind” (1973). But his health and state of mind declined alarmingly. He grew fat, gorging himself on fast food. He also became addicted to prescription drugs. He slept for most of the day and cut a bloated figure on stage—although that voice remained mesmerizing.
Elvis died on August 16, 1977. He suffered heart failure at Graceland, his mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. His funeral was a massive event, watched by millions. He ranks with the American singers Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson, those English bands the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and the French singer Edith Piaf as musical giants who have moved beyond the realm of music into the conscious identity of nations.
SADDAM HUSSEIN
1937–2006
What has befallen us of defeat, shame and humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations and your irresponsible actions.
Shia Iraqi army commander in 1991, inaugurating
the uprising against Saddam’s rule that was subsequently
crushed by the dictator’s forces
Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, aspired to be an Arab hero and conqueror, but his long reign of ruthless oppression, sadistic cruelty, gangsterish corruption, unnecessary wars, mass murder and a ludicrous personality cult led to a series of political miscalculations that brought about the destruction of his regime and his own death on the scaffold.
Saddam was born in a small Sunni village close to the town of Tikrit. His father died before he was born so he was brought up in his stepfather’s house—repeatedly beaten and spending much of his youth as a street kid. In 1947 he went to live with his mother’s brother, from whom, at the age of ten, he received his first schooling.
In the early 1950s Saddam moved with his uncle to Baghdad and tried to get into military college but failed the exams. Meanwhile, he imbibed from his uncle a hatred of British influence in the kingdom of Iraq, became a regular participant in anti-government demonstrations, and formed his own street gang to attack political opponents. In time he became drawn toward the Ba’ath Party, which combined socialism with anti-Western, pan-Arab nationalism, and in 1958 he participated in the army coup led by Brigadier Abdel Karim Kassem that overthrew and murdered King Faisal II. Many, especially the Ba’athists, were disappointed that Kassem failed to lead Iraq into a union with neighboring Arab countries, and in 1959 Saddam was involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Kassem, after which he went into exile in Syria and Egypt.
A Ba’athist-dominated coup in 1963 induced Saddam to return, but the new ruler of Iraq, Abdul Salam Arif, soon fell out with his Ba’athist allies, and Saddam was imprisoned for several years before escaping in 1967. He went on to become the right-hand man of the Ba’ath Party leader, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, and after the party seized power in 1968, he emerged as the strong man of the regime, becoming vice-president, as well as head of Iraq’s security apparatus and general secretary of the Ba’ath Party. He deliberately fashioned his regime on that of Stalin, whom he studied.
From his new position Saddam oversaw the nationalization of the Western-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company, using the funds accrued to develop the country’s welfare state (especially its health system). He also initiated a major drive against illiteracy, made improvements to Iraqi infrastructure and generally sought to encourage modernization and industrialization. At the same time, however, he also worked assiduously to accumulate power to himself, moving loyal lieutenants into key positions, building up a brutal secret police and strengthening his grip on levers of state.
In mid-1979 Saddam pressured the ailing al-Bakr to resign, and assumed the presidency himself. He immediately summoned the Revolutionary Council, comprising the senior Ba’ath Party leadership, and announced that “Zionism and the forces of darkness” were engaged in a conspiracy against Iraq. Then, to the horror of his audience, he announced that those involved were present in the room. While Saddam sat smoking a huge cigar, a series of names were read out, and, one by one, sixty-six people were led away. Subsequently twenty-two of these men were found guilty, and Saddam personally supervised their killing, requiring senior figures in the Iraqi leadership to carry out the death sentences.
Saddam set about transforming Iraq into what one dissident labeled the “Republic of Fear.” His notorious secret police, the Mukhabarat, together with the state internal security department the Amn, established a fierce grip over the entire country. Regular massacres were carried out of Jews, Freemasons, communists, economic saboteurs or merely people who crossed Saddam or his greedy, pitiless family, all of whom served in his government. Purge followed upon purge, attended by show trials and televised confessions. Over the subsequent two decades Saddam Hussein killed at least 400,000 Iraqis—many of whom endured all manner of torture. His psychopathic sons, particularly the sadistic, demented heir apparent Uday, conducted their own struggles for power and brutal reigns of terror, personally torturing their enemies. At one point, Saddam’s two sons-in-law, fearing murder by Uday, fled to Jordan, but were tricked into returning and then slaughtered by Uday.
Not content with dominating Iraq, Saddam was also determined to assert regional hegemony. He invaded Iran in 1980, using Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 as a pretext to seize Iran’s oilfields, and thus sparked a disastrous eight-year war that ended in stalemate and cost over a million lives. Adept at playing off the great powers against one another, he was significantly aided by the West, which regarded Iran as the greater of two evils.
During the war, Iran had encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to mount an uprising against Ba’athist rule. Saddam responded in merciless fashion, deploying mustard and nerve gas against the civilian population—most notoriously at the town of Halabja, where some 5000 Kurds died in a single attack in March 1988. Four thousand villages were destroyed and 100,000 Kurds slaughtered.
The end of the Iranian war left Iraq exhausted despite huge oil revenues. In August 1990 Saddam invaded and occupied Kuwait. It proved to be a catastrophic miscalculation. The United Nations authorized a massive US-led military coalition to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, which they swiftly achieved in 1991. Iraqi Kurds and Shiites—encouraged by the coalition—rebelled against Saddam, but without Western military support they were brutally put down.
By the terms of the ceasefire agreement, Iraq had agreed to abandon nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Yet Saddam failed to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, barred them entirely from 1998, and engaged in constant military brinkmanship and diplomatic chicanery.
Saddam’s situation was transformed by the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001. President George W. Bush—confident after overthrowing Al-Qaeda’s backers, the Taliban, in Afghanistan—advocated “regime change” in Iraq and the creation of Iraqi democracy to encourage freedom in the Arab world, citing as justification Saddam’s dictatorship, continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorist groups. Ironically, there were no weapons of mass destruction, but fearing that the truth might expose his regime’s weakness to Iran, Saddam miscalculated (for the second time) that America would not dare invade. In March 2003, US-led coalition forces invaded and overthrew Saddam, who was finally captured, tried and sentenced to death. His execution, embarrassingly bungled, symbolized the incompetence and lack of preparation of the well-intentioned US/UK invasion and the subsequent military quagmire. Nonetheless the sentence was richly deserved.
KADAFFI
1942–2011
It is the Libyan people’s responsibility to liquidate such scum who are distorting Libya’s image
Colonel Kadaffi
Colonel Muammar Kadaffi was the long-serving Libyan dictator who combined reckless terror with flamboyant buffoonery, until his pitiless repression of a popular revolution united t
he Western powers, led by Britain and France, against him in an armed intervention that ultimately led to his own lynching and death. Throughout his career, his colorful follies and brutal killings won him a prominence beyond his own meager talents and the power of his small country, Libya. Like Saddam Hussein, it was his downfall as much as his misrule that made him important.
Born in a Bedouin family in Sirte, he trained as an army officer, spending time in Britain, where he recalled playing football in Hyde Park. On his return to Libya, then a kingdom under King Idris, he admired the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdul Nasser in neighboring Egypt and formed his own camarilla of radical free officers who seized power in September 1969. Kadaffi was then only a lieutenant at age twenty-seven, but he became president of Libya, leading a tiny junta of fellow officers such as Major Jalloud. However his deputy Jalloud was soon marginalized as Kadaffi himself assumed autocratic powers.
Promoting himself as a radical Arab socialist-nationalist, he dreamed of assuming leadership of the entire Arab world, particularly after the death in 1970 of his hero, Nasser. Throughout his career, he tried to increase his own importance (and copy Nasser’s short-lived union with Syria) by offering to merge with other countries: in the early 1970s, he tried to merge with Egypt. When President Sadat resisted and then made peace with Israel in 1977, Kadaffi ordered the invasion of Egypt—a brief war that ended in total defeat. In the 1980s, he interfered in Chad, tried to force a merger between the two countries, then sent his troops to fight there and ended up being humiliatingly defeated in the so-called Toyota War.