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EASTERN EUROPE'S SWINGIN'EST DICTATORS
BY DAVIN SEAY
If, as The Producers has proven, fascism can be funny,
then communism can be downright hilarious. Crimes against humanity
notwithstanding, the inherently comic potential of the once-monolithic
East Bloc--shoe-pounding dictators, steroid-crazed female weight
lifters and Russian jazz--has been a staple of everything from
Get Smart to Steve Martin's Wild And Crazy Guy shtick.
Of course, comedy doesn't necessary equate with cool. But
if your definition of hip extends to the doing of your own thing
come hell or high water, there's a convincing case to be made
that cultivating a cult of personality is the ultimate expression
of stylish individuality. Simply put, the Warsaw Pact's elite
club of monomaniacal tyrants fostered its own brand of skewed
cool, predicated on ideological purity and enforced by secret
police who bear more than a passing resemblance to today's squads
of fashion, political and culture cops.
Think about it. Our own rampant worship of celebrity is the springboard
for prevailing concepts of what's "cool." Music, movie
and media stars dictate what we wear, how we talk and what parts
of our bodies we pierce. Eastern European dictators simply had
the clout, not to mention the truncheons and jumper cables, to
enforce their mandates. They were, by definition, "what's
happening," and if you didn't like what's happening you
ran the risk of becoming "a former person," the last
word in uncoolness.
Say what you will about slavish Slavic submission to big bosses
of every description--it sure makes life a lot simpler when the
ultimate arbiter of taste has his picture plastered everywhere;
when every street corner, steel plant and sibling bears his name
and when every blip on the radar screen of his whimsy provides
helpful clues to the latest trends in style and survival. In
totalitarian cool, everyone's the cognoscenti or else.
Any survey of East Europe's coolest commies has to begin with
the granddaddy of them all: Uncle Joe Stalin (who reigned from
1929 to 1953). The Big Guy began his career with the obligatory
name change, going from the tongue-twisting Iosif Vissarionovich
Djugashvili to the punchy, media-friendly Stalin. He even came
up with the cuddly nickname "Koba" as the mandatory
term of endearment reserved for use by his ever-shrinking circle
of comrades.
Hey Joe! A flair for accessorizing.
But Stalin's real contribution to the cause of state-sanctioned
cool was in sartorial realms. Prior to this Bolshevist Beau Brummel,
de rigueur attire for the shock troops of the proletariat
was a black leather car coat, with newsboy cap and trousers tucked
into riding boots. The avuncular despot brought an insouciant
flair to the Kremlin's grim halls with a variety of customized
tunic-and-jodhpur ensembles, including a stunning all-white number
for state occasions, replete with gold buttons, red collar tabs
and epaulets and a single medal that--in a season when most high-ranking
party members walked around with a veritable sandwich board of
military decorations and Five Year Plan fulfillment awards--simply
screamed good taste. A full head of nicely silvered hair and,
of course, the borscht-straining moustache added to his air of
dapper dignity, while the homey touch of a fragrant pipe demonstrated
the accessorizing flair so lacking among his cowering minions.
 While certainly conspicuous amidst
the drab outerwear of the workers' paradise, even the chic Stalin
couldn't hold a candle to Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu when it
came to celebrating of the wonder of himself. While hardly a
fashion plate--Nicolae had all the panache of a retired dry cleaner
from Skokie while wife Elena was an apparent devotee of the Spiegel's
catalog--the Romanian strongman (1967-89) more than compensated
with a frenzied building program that razed Bucharest's most
historic districts in favor of the gargantuan House Of The Republic,
a bank-busting warren of chandelier-clogged reception chambers,
parqueted banquet halls and conference rooms the size of hockey
rinks. Squatting on a hill overlooking his sullen Balkan capital,
Ceausescu's folly, nearly as large as the Pentagon with none
of its charm, was surrounded by apartment blocks housing his
apparachik in all the architectural splendor of a Miami Beach
retirement home.
As a monument to the dictator's delusions of grandeur, the
House of the Republic was small potatoes when set against Ceausescu's
dogged insistence that actual reality was no more or less than
what he said it was. It's another hallmark of dictatorial cool--keeping
well above the fray of facts to fashion the world in a more pleasing
image, preferably your own. You've got to admire a guy who insists
that Britain's Royal Society Of Chemistry honor his dowdy wife
for her outstanding contributions to science when, by all accounts,
Elena was functionally illiterate (for the record, the laudatory
lunch went off without a hitch.) With chronic food shortages
plaguing his country, Ceausescu initiated the Rational Eating
Program, insisting that the whole problem was simply Romanian
gluttony.
But it was Ceausescu the Bear Hunter who most flagrantly defied
the stultifying limits of credibility by single-handedly bringing
the entire population of Carpathian black bears to the brink
of extinction. Fancying himself a sportsman, Ceausescu proved
the point by choppering in to a predetermined bear blind where
his subordinates had been busy for days corralling all available
ursines. The hapless animals would then be paraded one at a time
past the gun-crazed tyrant, who blazed away to his heart's content,
bagging 86 of the endangered species on one expedition alone.
Living up to any reputation as an all-knowing social engineer,
political go-to guy and all-around embodiment of the People's
hopes and aspirations can be a lonely gig. Just ask Enver Hoxha,
head honcho of the tiny mountain state of Albania (1944-85) and
one of the wackier cases in point of an East Bloc bigwig marching
to a different drummer. Threatened for centuries by Ottoman incursion,
the Albanians fostered both belligerence and a healthy streak
of paranoia that the dictator deftly exploited to turn his tiny
country into an impenetrable bastion of rampant Hoxhaism. The
nation's borders were marked every few feet for their entire
length by bristling pill boxes, and, within his own personal
Fantasyland, Hoxha strictly enforced his bizarre preferences
for, among things, the names of his countrymen. In 1975 he peremptorily
announced, "Citizens who have inappropriate names and offensive
surnames from a political, ideological and moral viewpoint are
obliged to change them." Pretty ballsy for a guy named Hoxha,
but it didn't stop there. Taking an inexplicable disliking to
hirsute gentlemen, he banned all chin whiskers and, while a big
fan of Stalin, had little use for Joe's ideologically impure
successors. At the height of Russian-Chinese tensions in the
mid-'60s, he forged a unilateral alliance with Mao and was rewarded
for his efforts with an aging Chinese submarine.
Honcho Hoxha: Name-games and beard-bans.
Yet, once Hoxha got a notion into his Albanian brain, it was
hard to shake. Determined to follow the Chairman in all things,
he announced that Albania would launch its own Cultural Revolution,
which included mandatory Mandarin Chinese lessons for all citizens.
Who could blame the hard-pressed mountain folk for looking back
nostalgically to the reign of good King Zog? Not that Hoxha didn't
pull out all the stops in winning hearts and minds by awarding
himself divine status. The country's cultural elite was duly
set the task of extolling his Hoxhatude, as in this excerpt from
a 1979 poem published in a Tirana literary journal:
I first heard those five dear letters at the dawn of my life
Ever since your name became as dear to me as my
Paternal home
We shout 'Enver! '
"Shouting Enver" might have been cool in Albania,
but it wouldn't get you far in the Poland of Wladyslaw Gomulka
(no relation to the polka accordion king) or Janos Kadar's Hungary
or the Bulgaria of Todo Zhivkov--although in the later case,
being a shameless toady of Russian chauvinism had its rewards.
Zhivkov was such a sycophantic Stalinist he once proposed that
his country be merged with Russia, the better to be ruled by
the impeccably attired autocrat.
The point is, every Eastern European dictator from Belgrade to
Bratislava brought a special flair to his ruthless rule, a wild
stylistic variation on the tyrannical theme all but unimaginable
in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where individuality
is often a positive political disincentive. Living under their
thumbs was more than slightly surreal, not to mention bad for
your health. But the departed despots had their own crazed concept
of cool. And so did their citizens if they knew what was good
for them.
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