Titans of History

INTRODUCTION

When I was a child, I read a short article—like one of those contained in this book—about the sinister world of Josef Stalin. It fascinated me enough to make me read more on the subject. Many years later, I found myself working in the Russian archives to research my first book on Stalin. My aim is that these short biographies will encourage and inspire readers to find out more about these extraordinary individuals—the men and women who created the world we live in today.

But history is not just the drama of the terrible and thrilling events of times gone by: we must understand our past to understand our present and future. “Who controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell, author of 1984, and, “Who controls the present controls the past.” Karl Marx joked about Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon III that “all historical facts and and personages appear twice—the first time as a tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx was wrong about this—as he was about much else: history does not repeat itself but it contains many warnings and lessons. Great men and women have rightly studied history to help them steer the present. For example three of the 20th century’s most homicidal monsters, Hitler, Stalin and Mao—all of whom appear in this book—were history buffs who spent much of both their misspent youths and their years in power reading about their own historical heroes.

At the time that Hitler came to order the slaughter of European Jewry in the Holocaust, he was encouraged by the Ottoman massacres of the Armenians during the First World War: “Who now remembers the Armenians?” he mused. The Armenian massacres feature in this book. When Stalin ordered the Great Terror, he looked back to the atrocities of his hero, Ivan the Terrible: “Who now remembers the nobles killed by Ivan the Terrible?” he asked his henchmen. Ivan the Terrible too is in this book. And Mao Zedong, as he unleashed waves of mass killings on China, was inspired by the First Emperor, another character who can be found in this book’s pages.

This is a collection of biographies of individuals who have each somehow changed the course of world events. This list can never be either complete or quite satisfactory: I have chosen the names; thus the list is totally subjective. There may be names you think are missing and others whose very inclusion you question: that is the fun and frustration of lists. You will find familiar names here—Elvis Presley, Jack Kennedy, Jesus Christ, Bismarck and Winston Churchill for example—but also many you may not know. Our modern world is dominated by the Near and Far East so that in this book you will not just find “traditional” leaders such as Henry VIII or George Washington but also the creators of the rising powers of today: Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Islamic Iran, Deng, who forged modern China, King Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia.

When I started this project, I tried to divide these characters into good and bad, but I realized that this was futile because many of the greatest—Napoleon, Cromwell, Genghis Khan, Peter the Great, to name just a few—combined the heroic with the monstrous. In this book, I leave it to you to make such judgments. We can go further still: the political and artistic genius of even the most admirable of these characters requires ambition, insensitivity, egocentricity, ruthlessness, even madness, as much it demands decency and heroism. “Reasonable people,” said George Bernard Shaw, “adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people adapt the world to themselves. Therefore change is only possible through unreasonable people.” Greatness needs courage (above all) and willpower, charisma, intelligence and creativity but it also demands characteristics that we often associate with the least admirable people: reckless risk-taking, brutal determination, sexual thrill-seeking, brazen showmanship, obsession close to fixation and something approaching insanity. In other words, the qualities required for greatness and wickedness, for heroism and monstrosity, for brilliant, decent philanthropy and brutal dystopian murderousness are not too far distant from each other. The Norwegians alone have a word for this: stormannsgalskap—the madness of great men.

In the last half-century, many history teachers seemed to enjoy making history as boring as possible, reducing it to the dreariness of mortality rates, tons of coal consumed per household and other economic statistics, but the study of any period in detail shows that the influence of character on events is paramount, whether we are looking at the autocrats of the ancient world or the modern democratic politicians of our own day. In the 21st century, no one who looks at world history after 9/11 would now claim that the character of US President George W Bush was not decisive in its contribution to the momentous decisions that were taken during this period. Plutarch, the inventor of biographical history, puts this best in his introduction to his portraits of Alexander and Caesar: “It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds, there is not always an indication of virtue, of vice; indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.”

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE