NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA
US President Donald Trump has swiped another page from the authoritarian playbook. His verbal assault on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before camera-wielding media in the Oval Office amounted to precisely the kind of ritual humiliation autocrats have long used to elevate and amuse themselves – and intimidate everyone else.
One of history’s most notorious dictators, Joseph Stalin, regularly demeaned my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, and his politburo colleagues. As Khrushchev recounted much later, Stalin once made him dance the gopak, a Ukrainian folk dance, before some top party officials. “I had to squat down on my haunches and kick out my heels, which frankly wasn’t very easy for me,” he recalled. “But when Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.”
In orchestrating such spectacles, Stalin was surely motivated by the desire to keep his subordinates subordinated. But it was not all politically motivated: as Khrushchev noted, Stalin found others’ humiliation “amusing.” How could a megalomaniacal dictator not relish the sight of his empire’s most powerful men voluntarily debasing themselves to please him – the one figure who towered above them all?
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