Nigel Cawthorne: Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

Seventies shuttle-diplomat Henry Kissinger explaining his success with women, once said “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

In a letter to a bishop, liberal historian Lord Acton penned the aphorism: “Poker tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Between the two, there is a great deal of scope for your average dictator to indulge himself. Some, of course, don’t bother. General Pinochet of Chile has a man of the highest repute — apart, of course, from the obvious human shortcomings. You may say that he headed a ruthless regime that raised the murder, torture and false imprisonment of political opponents to an artform, but, a married man, he never even looked at another woman.

And Egypt’s rogue president Gamal Abel Nasser? Wonderful family man.

Look at Generalissimo Franco, dictator of Spain from 1939 to his death in 1975. As a Ruth he took a normal interest in girls, favouring slim brunettes mainly from among his sister’s schoolfriends. He wrote them poems and was mortified when they were shown to his sister.

After he joined the army and was posted to Morocco, he assiduously courted Sofia Subirán, the beautiful daughter of the High Commissioner, General Luis Aizpuru. For nearly a year, ho bombarded her with love letters. But his inability to dance and his elaborate formality put her off.

During the Moroccan war, he was injured by a bullet in the lower abdomen. Some people have speculated that this was the reason he showed little interest in sex.

Posted home to Oviedo, he met a slender, dark-eyed local girl called Maria del Carmen Polo y Martinez Valdes. She was fifteen; he was twenty-four. Despite the opposition of her family, he began writing to her at her convent. When she came of age in 1923, they married.

For Carmen, it was a dream come true. Five years later she said: “I thought I was dreaming or reading a novel about me.”

It was a stable, if not passionate, marriage. They had one child, a daughter, Nenuca, horn in 1926. There have been persistent rumours shat Nenuca was not their child, but. the daughter of Franco’s notoriously promiscuous brother, Ramon. Anyway, Franco did not have the usual latin desire for a son, so when he died there was, thankfully, no one to step into his shoes.

In 1936, he was mocked as “Miss Canary Islands” — but this was because of his hesitation in backing the military coup against the government, rather than a reflection of his sexual proclivities.

Franco and his wife gradually grew apart. After El Caudillo — the leader — came to power, he seemed morose and inhibited in the company of Doña Carmen. Neither of them seems to have taken any other lovers. He preferred playing cards and fishing They were still married what Franco died fifty-two years later. The life of a dictator can be positively boring.

And who wants to know what a monster like Pol Pot totalitarian leader of Cambodia who caused the deaths of three million of his own people — got up to in bed?

Well, actually, not a lot. Pol Pot’s first wife was a teacher eight years older than himself. Her Students called her “the old virgin” behind her back. They met when they were both studying in France. The marriage took friends by surprise. Few Cambodian men marry older women. She was a revolutionary and encouraged him is his murderous scheme to turn Cambodia back to “Year Zero”. After he was forced from power by the Vietnamese, she had a nervous breakdown. With her permission, he took a second wife — this time, true to his ideological commitments, he chose not an intellectual but a peasant. In 1988, she gave birth to his first child. Pol Pot, you will be delighted to hear, is a very affectionate father and was often seen carrying his baby daughter in his arms to cadre training sessions — which only goes to prove, never trust a politician who espouses family values.

However, the boring ones are the exception. Think about it. You are a dictator. You rule over millions of people. What you say goes. The temptation to use your unlimited power must be overwhelming.

Look at President Sukarno of Indonesia, the authoritarian president who believed in “guided democracy”. Like many anti-colonial leaders of his era, he spent much of his youth in jail where, presumably, he was sexually deprived. But once in power, he loosened up. Well into his sixties, he was an extraordinary womanizer, making up for lost time. American magazines called him a “skirtchaser” and a “lecher”. French newspapers referred to him as “le grand seducteur” and British reporters claimed that, over and above his eight legitimate children, he had sired a hundred more.

During his childhood, Sukarno had found security in the beet of Sarinah, the family servant, and spent the rest of his life trying to regain it in the beds of others.

Much of him early political education came from courting Dutch girls. In his twenties he married his first wife, Inggit. She was eleven years his senior and had to divorce her first husband to many Sukarno. She supported him and gave him confidence during his years of struggle. But after seventeen years of marriage, he decided that she was barren and married a young model named Fatmawati.

After the revolution, he married Hartini. Once he had consolidated power, his interest in sex became more excessive. He married twice more — Dewi, a highly talented Japanese bar-girl he had met in Tokyo in 1959, and Yurike Sanger, whom he could not formally marry because he had already fulfilled his four-wife Islamic quota.

His sexual athlethicism won him admiration as well as notoriety. In his fifties, he was a playboy. In his sixties he was a philanderer of the worst kind. However, this brought with it the censure of more conservative elements and helped hasten his downfall. When he finally fell from power, his wives deserted him too.

Even essentially boring dictators such as the Ceausescus come to life under the sexual microscope. Elena Ceausescu worked in a bar-cum-brothel when she first arrived in Bucharest from the countryside as a teenager. Nicholae Ceausescu’s brother, Nicholae-Andruta, testified that one day in 1943 he had found his wife and Elena naked with two German officers. Nicholae was in prison at the time.

Elena does seem to have been hotter all round than Nicholae, who never had a girlfriend before he was married. Once they were in power, palace spies say she always initiated sex.

Nicholae was not above instructing his spies to use sexual entrapment; Nicholae and Elena watched blue movies together — special ones made by the Romanian intelligence service showing Western diplomats in compromising positions. Nicholae was embarrassed, though. He preferred watching Kojak.

Elena was also obsessed with the sexual peccadilloes of the Politburo wives. She had the Romanian intelligence service bug them so she could listen to the sounds they made when they made love.

Their son Nicu was a sexual monster. Nicholae Ceausescu praised him for attaining his manhood at fourteen by raping a classmate. Nicu casually raped his way around Bucharest and no one did anything about it.

The collapse of Communism put paid to the Ceausescus and the dictators of Eastern Europe. Even in South America, democracy is on the march. In the Middle East though, secular dictators like the Shah of Iran have fallen, only to be replaced by theocratic dictators like the Ayatollah Khomeini. Sadly, they lie beyond the scope of this book; and I can guarantee you now that there will be no Sex Lives of the Mullahs in this series. I don’t like the company of Special Branch that much.