The first reason, however, why a modern despot enjoys relative security is the character of totalitarian terror. In a normal democratic country an assassin has to fear only the loss of his own life, and the lives of his immediate conspirators, if any. In Russia, after Kirov’s death, Stalin executed in this wise:
First, 103 persons who were not even accused of having had anything to do with the assassination but had been held in jail for various political offenses. This was simply the first gesture of the Terror, intended to shock the country. Then as the police rounded up Nikolaev’s family, friends, and acquaintances, and read his diary, they came to know virtually every human being Nikolaev had known during his whole life. Every one of these persons was arrested and after being squeezed dry of information was executed; at any rate they all disappeared.
But that was only the beginning. The purges which were occasioned, not caused, by the Kirov killing lasted about four years, from 1935 to 1938 inclusive. The Purge became so huge that Nikolaev was forgotten, but before the G.P.U. finished with the Nikolaev complex, they had liquidated in this wise: Every relative of Nikolaev to the third cousins; every acquaintance of Nikolaev and every acquaintance of an acquaintance of Nikolaev, and every acquaintance of every acquaintance of every acquaintance of Nikolaev. You think this is an exaggeration? Not at all. The number of executions ran into thousands.
Now what would be the effect upon a would-be assassin, if, as he contemplated his deed, he reflected that as a consequence of his killing Stalin, not merely would he himself be executed, but every human being in the world with whom he had ever come in contact? Man experiences the world largely as a series of contacts with other men. Suppose the assassin knew by just such an experience as the Russian people had in the case of the killing of Kirov, that his entire world would be blotted out if he went on with his plans. Would not this deter almost any man?
He might be motivated by the highest idealism, and would plan to give his own life in order to rid his country of a cruel despot, but if he were thinking of helping the people in his own world he would be bound to admit that far from helping them, he was about to condemn to death everybody on earth he had ever known. This surely is the most important deterrent to assassination in despotic states and it is corroborated by the experience of Italy.
Mussolini’s Fascist state is the least terroristic of the three totalitarian states. The terror is so mild in comparison with the Soviet or Nazi varieties, that it almost fails to qualify as terroristic at all. The best proof I know of this is the experience of an Italian friend of mine who before Fascism came to Italy was chief correspondent of one of Italy’s greatest newspapers.
He occupied a position which might be compared with that of chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times. When Mussolini took power this friend, whom I may call Luigi, was dismissed from his newspaper because he refused to become a Fascist. If he had wished to serve Mussolini, he would have been made a Senator, and would have become a rich man. But no, he was a courageous, passionately sincere liberal. He used to declare, “I would approve of nearly all Mussolini’s program (he doubtless would not say that now), but as long as he wants to compel me to approve, I disapprove. I shall only approve when I am at liberty to disapprove.”
Now what would have happened to this sort of man in Soviet Russia? A leading journalist under the Czar defies Bolshevik power! You know as well as I what would happen to him. He would be shot at once. They would not even waste on him food for a day’s extra meals. He would have been shot the moment the Cheka noticed him. And what would have happened to Luigi in Germany? He would have been sent to a concentration camp and there he would have been tortured and either gradually killed or turned out a broken emasculated creature, not a man any more.
But what happened to him in Italy? First, his newspaper, with which he had a contract, bought off the contract for a sum sufficient for him to live on in a modest way the rest of his life. At the same time the police established a twenty-four hour surveillance of him. Three detectives working in eight-hour shifts were assigned to watch him. Mind you, he wasn’t arrested, and was even allowed to become the correspondent of a foreign newspaper.
The detectives were there all the time. Luigi came to know them well. If they behaved decently and he liked them, he never gave them any trouble. But if one of them was rude, this is the way Luigi would do. He would get all his newspapers, a dozen or more to read in the morning, and though ordinarily he would take a taxi or walk to his office, now to discipline the detective, Luigi would get on one of the streetcars which circle Rome and he would sit there, going around and around the city for a couple of hours, reading his papers. The detective had to follow him. The detective rode a bicycle. Two hours of hard road work usually corrected the manners of the worst of them. Think of that kind of police “Terror,” and you have a fair idea of the comparative mildness of the Italian kind of totalitarianism. We used to take delight in counting up how many hundreds of thousands of lire it had cost the Italian government to keep three detectives employed for fifteen years.