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This episode of Cautionary Tales is made possible by HBO and their new series, The Regime, which depicts a crisis in the rule of a fictional dictator, Helena Vernham, played by Kate Winslet. You can stream The Regime now on Max, and you can find more episodes of this show, Cautionary Tales, wherever you get your podcasts. ♪
The regime is inspired by real events and real characters, including the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, another Elena. Today's cautionary tale is all about their downfall. And a word of warning, it does contain one or two little spoilers for the regime. So you might prefer to watch that first.
Stick around at the end of this true story to peer behind the scenes of the regime and hear me in conversation with writer, executive producer and showrunner Will Tracy. But for now, on with the episode. Dr Nikolaj Decker is driving home in his little red Dacia after finishing his shift at the local hospital. Dr Decker is a short, stout man in his 50s.
He's puttering along a quiet country road, 50-odd miles outside Bucharest, Romania. The year is 1989, early in the afternoon on the last Friday before Christmas. Dr Decker has made this journey many times, but today everything is different. The news had buzzed round the hospital. The hated dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his even more hated wife, Elena, were on the run.
Protesters in Bucharest took over their palace. They fled by helicopter. Now they were who knows where. Maybe I'll catch the bastards on my way home, joked Dr. Decker. For nearly 25 years, the country has been in the grip of the increasingly deranged Ceausescus. Now they're gone. What comes next? Dr. Decker drives along, lost in thought.
His reverie is interrupted by the sight of a big man at the side of the road, urgently flagging him down. A big man with a submachine gun. Dr. Decker pulls over. The big man clambers into the back seat of the Datcher. An old woman gets in next to him, then into the passenger seat of the little red Datcher, climbs a short old man with a greying pompadour and a wild-eyed look on his face.
It's the Ceausescus. Nikolai and Elena. And what must be a bodyguard? Drive, says the bodyguard. Dr. Decker drives. Have you heard about what happened? The old dictator asks him. The doctor decides to play dumb. No, he says. I've just finished my shift at the hospital. I haven't heard any news. There's been a coup, says Nikolai Ceausescu darkly.
Then we must organise the resistance. Are you with us? Dr Decker is horrified. He can't say yes. He despises the Ceausescus, everyone does, but he's acutely aware that their bodyguard is sitting right behind him with a gun. In this moment, Dr Decker embodies the predicament the Romanian people have faced over the last quarter century.
The doctor grips the steering wheel of the little red datcher. What to do? I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. MUSIC
In Bucharest, Romania, stands one of the world's biggest buildings, the Palace of the Parliament. I went there once, years ago. It's not an experience you easily forget.
The Palace of the Parliament is vast. It's seven times the size of the Palace of Versailles, and at least as opulent. All intricately carved wood, gold leaf and marble colonnades. Enough marble to build a column 12 feet wide and 60 miles high, says the tour guide. She takes us from one ludicrously oversized room to the next.
40-foot ceilings, five-ton chandeliers, 50 acres of carpet. The carpets had to be woven in the rooms because they'd be too big to carry if you made them elsewhere. The tour goes on and on, room after room after room, and still you see just a fraction of this astonishing structure. If you didn't know its history, what would you think of this place? It would, I reckon, leave you cold.
Externally, the architecture is boring, functional, almost brutalist. Inside, it's a display of wealth, but not of taste. There's no artistic vision, just bling piled upon bling. But when you do know the history, it doesn't leave you cold. It makes you seethe.
The palace was built on the orders of Nikolai Ceaușescu. The dictator remembered mainly for his disastrous ban on birth control, which led to hundreds of thousands of unwanted children being left to rot in squalid orphanages.
As the palace was going up, Ceausescu's policies were pushing the Romanian people deeper into poverty, with rationing of food and heat turned off during the biting Romanian winters. Out on the balcony, you look straight down the two-mile boulevard that leads up to the palace, a boulevard longer and wider than the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
And you think of the swathes of old buildings that Ceaușescu ordered to be demolished to build his boulevard and his palace. The homes of 40,000 people were bulldozed to make way for this monument to megalomania, a gilded marble middle finger raised to the city. Nikolai Ceaușescu was born in 1918 into a peasant family.
As soon as he'd finished primary school in his village, his parents sent him off to the city, Bucharest, to earn his way as an apprentice shoemaker. But Nikolai soon developed other ideas. He discovered Marx and Lenin and became a communist. Nikolai seems to have been deeply earnest in his beliefs. Stories from his youth paint a picture of a humourless zealot.
Or let's ask his son, Valentin, who, incredibly, turned out all right. Soon after his parents were forced from power, Valentin Ceaușescu sat down with the British journalist John Sweeney. "The new kind of politicians," said Valentin, "lie all the time. My father was one of the old kind. He was driven by some kind of fanaticism, this belief that you can do good. It's a sort of madness."
After the Second World War, the Communist Party took power in Romania. Nicolae became a rising star. In 1965, when the party needed a new leader, they turned to him. At first, Nicolae seemed to be a relative good guy among the communist dictators of Eastern Europe. He seemed more open to engaging with the West. He wasn't afraid to disagree with the Soviet Union. But then, in 1971...
Nikolai and Elena went on a state visit to Asia. In North Korea, Nikolai saw how every room contained a photograph of Kim Il-sung and a 60-foot statue of the great leader dominated the Pyongyang skyline. This, thought Nikolai, is a proper level of respect. In China, Elena had an epiphany of her own.
She saw that Chairman Mao's wife had a personality cult as powerful as that of Mao himself. That, she thought, is how a leader's wife should be treated. Elena Ceausescu, in the words of historian Mark Ullman, combined arrogance, brutality, stupidity and self-confidence.
Like her husband, Elena had no schooling beyond the village primary, where her report card suggests she flunked almost every subject. But Elena decided to become a scientist. She forced actual scientists to put her name on their papers. She set herself up as world-leading expert in the stereospecific polymerisation of isoprene polymers.
Every night, Romanian television carried a two-hour update on the glorious deeds of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Newspapers gushed with praise. Elena's birthday, said one, is a crucial date in Romanian history. Her husband's underlings abased themselves. The entire country highly appreciates the outstanding activity you carry out in the field of science and technology.
It was all nonsense, of course. Obvious nonsense. Though few dared say so openly, fear of the securitate, the secret police, saw to that. Romanians would let their guard down only with people they felt they could trust. There's an urban legend from the time that goes like this. A friend of a friend was in a car that broke down. He's stranded by the roadside when another car pulls up and the driver says, where are you going? Bucharest?
Get in, says the driver. I'll give you a lift. They start to talk. They get on well. The hitchhiker tentatively ventures a comment about the state of the economy. Yes, agrees the driver. Things are very bad. And you know, you can't believe a word you read in the newspaper. A good harvest when there's so little food in the shops?
Before long, they're ripping into the delusional dictator and his dim-witted wife. They're roaring with laughter and trading well-worn jokes. Why is it a good thing that porn magazines are banned in Romania? Because we all know which couple would insist on being the centrefold in every issue. They get to Bucharest, and the passenger thanks the driver for the lift and the conversation.
We never introduced ourselves, he says. He holds out a hand and mentions his name. The driver shakes his hand warmly in return and says, I'm Valentin Ceausescu. The story may not have been true, but it captured a truth. Even the couple's oldest son knew what was really going on in Romania and felt just as powerless as everyone else.
And then, after 25 years, suddenly and unexpectedly, the people rose up. What does it take to turn sullen, private grumbles into angry public protest? In this cautionary tale, we'll meet two ideas that can help explain it. Dr Decker is gripping the steering wheel of his little red Thatcher. One minute he was quietly driving home from work...
The next, he's somehow got Nikolai Ceausescu in his passenger seat and Elena in the back, along with their gum-toting bodyguard. ''We must organise the resistance,'' says the mad dictator. ''Are you with us?'' Dr Decker tries to stonewall. ''I'm not sure I'd be much use to the resistance,'' says Dr Decker. ''I'm getting on a bit, you see, and my health isn't the best.'' The doctor's mind is whirring.
The whole country he knows would love to lynch the Ceausescus. If they're found in his car, he might be lynched too. How could he get rid of them? He's approaching a village and he sees a man he knows outside his house cleaning his car. Another little datcher. Not many people have cars in communist Romania. In the villages you'll see more horses and carts. But everyone who does have a car has a datcher.
They aren't famed for their reliability. And that gives Dr. Decker an idea. Listen to that engine, he says. It sounds like the carburettor's about to fail. I'd better stop and get help. Dr. Decker pulls over. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.
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This cautionary tale is made in association with HBO and their new series, The Regime, which depicts the rule and the fall of the fictional dictator Elena Vernham. After she's been toppled by a citizen uprising, Elena goes on the run with her confidant Herbert Zubach, flags down a bewildered citizen and jumps into the back of his car.
She, too, has a wild-eyed look on her face. Fuck me, you are joking. Will you help your Chancellor? Me, Miss? Oh, yes, yes. Where are you going in there? What, to your home. You'd be so kind. Much like Dr Decker, the bewildered citizen drives off, Elena and Zubac now in his charge.
But the outcome for fictional Elena and Zubac isn't quite the same as for their real-life counterparts. If you haven't seen the series yet, I won't spoil it for you. Let's return to the true story of Nikolai and Elena Ceaușescu. When an international church asked Nikolai Ceaușescu's permission to donate 20,000 Bibles to their Romanian branch, he said, of course.
Ceausescu was keen to get investment from Western countries and Westerners, he knew, liked the idea of religious freedom. But the Bibles mysteriously went missing in transit. A few months later, a batch of toilet rolls appeared in the shops, with fragments of verse still readable.
For religions in Romania, the unspoken deal was clear. You can operate as long as you don't cause any trouble. Religious leaders formed a multi-faith panel and issued joint statements. Nicolae Ceausescu, the leaders agreed, is a man of supreme wisdom. The greatest hero in Romanian history.
Every local priest knew that if they dared to raise doubts about the wisdom of Ceausescu's policies, the leader of their church would soon slap them back into line. But one local priest risked it anyway. Laszlo Tokas was a pastor with the Hungarian Reformed Church in Timisoara, a city in western Romania, just over the border from Hungary.
He spoke out against Ceausescu's programme of systematisation, a mad grand plan to demolish half the country's villages and move everyone into identikit high-rise blocks in new agro-industrial towns.
Tokes's boss, the bishop, ordered his troublesome priest to relocate to a new parish, in a tiny remote hamlet at the end of a rutted track, in the middle of nowhere. "No," said Tokes, "I won't go." This parochial dispute caught the attention of television journalists in Hungary, which had just emerged from its own period of communist rule.
Journalists secretly recorded an interview with Tokes and managed to smuggle the videotape over the border. Why are you putting yourself at risk like this? they asked. As a minister, said Tokes, I feel myself responsible for the people. This responsibility is all the more heavy as most of my fellow ministers are silent.
After the interview was broadcast, Toques found that his telephone line no longer worked most of the time. Sometimes it rang, and when he picked it up, he heard a torrent of anonymous threats. Some members of his congregation started getting threats too. One was found dead in nearby woods. The bishop went to court to get an eviction order that would force Toques to move to his new parish. Others tried a different approach.
Four masked men broke into Toques' home and beat him up in front of his pregnant wife and three-year-old son. Toques lost his court case. On the date set for his eviction, the 15th of December 1989, a few parishioners gathered outside his house to sing psalms. More people joined from different churches and more and more.
When a truck arrived to take Tokes and his belongings away, it couldn't get through. The mayor of Timisoara turned up and told the crowd to disperse. The crowd did not disperse. They stayed through the night. By the following evening, 5,000 people were gathered around the house of Laszlo Tokes. This was no longer a show of mournful solidarity for a priest facing eviction.
It had morphed into a full-on protest against the regime. Nothing like this had ever happened before in Ceausescu's Romania. What explains it? One answer comes from economics, the idea of an information cascade. This can happen when people make a decision in sequence, one after the other, such as which movie to watch, which product to buy or which stock to invest in.
We each have our own private information on which we could base that decision. But if we can also see what decisions were made by others before us, we might think, maybe they know something I don't. We set aside what we originally thought and make the same decision as everyone else. Cascades can be sparked by an initial choice made by just a few people.
and they can lead us astray. Often, other people don't know something we don't. We join a queue for a public toilet cubicle that turns out to be empty. Everyone just assumed that the first person in line must have checked. But cascades can also embolden us. Do we protest against a repressive regime? Our private information says of course not. We'll be arrested, or worse. Then we see a few people singing psalms.
or a few dozen, blocking a removals truck. They don't look afraid. Maybe they know something I don't. In Timisoara, the crowd forget all about the priest Laszlo Tokes. They're emboldened now to let out all their anger.
They turn on a bookshop, its shelves piled high with the latest bestseller, Romania on the Way of Building Up the Multilaterally Developed Socialist Economy, by Nicolae Ceausescu. They smash the bookshop's door, throw the books into the square and set them alight. They break into the local headquarters of the Communist Party, rip down all the portraits of the Ceausescus and add them to the bonfire.
Then, the shootings start. Machine guns spray indiscriminately into the crowd. How many are dead? As it later turns out, not quite 100.
But in the chaos, the carnage seems much greater. It's surely 1,000, 10,000, 60,000. Rumours of the massacre start to spread. And the rumours are impossible for officials to quell because everyone knows you can't believe a word you read in the newspaper. Back in Bucharest, 250 miles to the east, Nikolai blames foreign enemies.
He decides to give a speech to show the world that the Romanian people still support him. They never realised it, says their son, Valentin Ceaușescu. They never realised that they were not loved. Nicolae orders tens of thousands of workers to be bussed into central Bucharest. It's a well-worn routine. The workers are given banners to hold with communist slogans.
or big photos of Nikolai and Elena, plain-clothes members of the Securitate, stand at the front to lead the applause and look enthusiastic for the television cameras. Comrades, begins Nikolai. A warm, revolutionary greeting. But then there's noise from the crowd. A scream, a shout. What are they saying? Tim Mishwara. Tim Mishwara.
Everyone's heard the rumours of a massacre in Timisoara. On live television, Nikolai pauses. He looks confused. He raises his hand as if to quell applause, but this isn't applause. And he doesn't quell it. An apparatchik appears behind him and mutters in the dictator's ear. The microphone picks it up. They're getting in.
In a village outside of Brookerest, 35-year-old factory worker Nikolai Petroshchor is cleaning his dacha. When a car pulls up at the roadside, he recognises the driver. It's Dr Dekker from the local hospital. And that old man in the passenger seat, is that...
Petroshaar watches in astonishment as Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu get out of Dr Decker's car and then get straight into his car. They're followed by a big man who waves his gun at Petroshaar. Get in and drive, he says. Petroshaar gets in and drives.
He turns on the radio. Out booms the jubilant voice of a dissident poet who's been under house arrest. At last we are free. Turn that off, says the old dictator. Petrashaw turns it off. On the road ahead, villagers are gathered in the street in spontaneous celebration. As Petrashaw drives past the crowd, someone notices who's in his passenger seat.
Stones rain down on the car. Petroshaw's terrified. He stands on the accelerator, urging the little datcher onwards. But where to? The bodyguard suggests they seek refuge at a steelworks that's somewhere near here, though he's not exactly sure how to get there. Stop over there, he says to Petroshaw. I'll go and find someone to ask directions. The bodyguard gets out and doesn't come back.
Some children walk past the car and start to shout, ''Hey, look who's in there!'' Now Elena's got a pistol. She puts it to Petrishaw's neck. ''Get us out of here!'' she says. Petrishaw drives off. Where can he take the old dictator and his wife? They pass a nunnery. Perhaps the old couple can seek refuge there? ''Get lost,'' say the nuns. Maybe they'd heard about the toilet paper.
There's a hotel for Communist Party officials. Surely they'll take him in. Sorry, we're fully booked. Petrishaw realises they're close to an agricultural institute. He knows the director. Why not take them there?
The director is in his office, glued to the television news. The Ceausescus are on the run. They're rumoured to be somewhere near his town. The army is on the side of the people, but loyalists of the Securitate are fighting back. Into the director's office bursts a white-faced Nikolai Petroshchor. I've got the Ceausescus at the back of my car! He says. The director is appalled. What did you bring them here for?
Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.
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Picture the scene. A palace under siege. Protesters rage unchecked through its hallways, pillaging, looting, smashing. A fallen leader scrambles to escape by helicopter from the palace roof. That's what happens in the HBO series The Regime.
But how do all-powerful dictators, whether the fictional Elena Vernham or the all-too-real Nikolai and Elena Ceausescu, find their power suddenly evaporating? The answer turns on a strange-seeming question. What do we know about what other people know? Let me give you an example from a very different situation. Imagine that you're on a date. The evening seems to have gone well. You say...
"Would you like to come back to my place for coffee?" "I'd better not," comes the reply. "I can't drink coffee late at night. It keeps me up." Except, as Seinfeld's George Costanza once realised just a little too late, coffee's not coffee. Coffee is sex. So why don't we just say, "Would you like to come back to my place for sex?" The linguist Steven Pinker is intrigued by that question.
Why do we use indirect speech such as euphemisms and innuendos? His answer traces back to what seems like an obscure distinction, made in philosophy journals in the 1970s, between common knowledge on the one hand and mutual or shared knowledge on the other. It's a slippery difference to grasp, so let's explore it with an example, what economic theorists would call a game.
A baker has to decide what to bake to sell at the market. One thing she could bake is a batch of buns for hot dogs. That would net her the most profit, but only if the butcher has decided to make sausages. If the butcher comes to market with something other than sausages, nobody will buy the baker's buns.
This is a variant of what game theorists call a coordination problem. If the bakers and butchers could agree to make buns and sausages, they'd both be better off. But they can't talk to each other. Each has to decide based on their expectation of what the other will do.
When Steven Pinker and his colleagues ran this experiment, they found that most bakers sensibly chose not to gamble on the butchers having made sausages. They played safe by baking something other than buns. Then the experimenters changed the set-up. They had a messenger visit each baker and say, "Just so you know, I've talked to the butcher. "He's aware that hot dogs will fetch a high price at the market. "This is shared knowledge.
The baker knows that the butcher knows. Is that enough for them to gamble on baking the buns? This time, about half the bakers decided to risk it. Then, in a final twist, the experimenters made an announcement over a loudspeaker. There's a great profit margin on hot dogs.
This time, the vast majority of the bakers chose to bake the buns. They knew the butchers had heard the announcement too and felt sure they'd bring the sausages. The loudspeaker turned shared knowledge into common knowledge. On the surface, that might not seem like much of a change. After all, even with shared knowledge, the baker knew the butcher knew. But the loudspeaker changed how people acted.
Steven Pinker argues that this transition from shared to common knowledge is a powerful explanation for a range of puzzles, including why we say, do you want to come in for a coffee? We know it's about sex, but that's shared knowledge. Asking, do you want to have sex, would make it common knowledge, and that could make the situation far more awkward.
Common knowledge, says Pinker, creates a distinctive cognitive state. It happens when shared knowledge gets out there in a way that's impossible to ignore.
In Bucharest, Nikolai Ceausescu begins his speech. Comrades, a warm revolutionary greeting. Everyone who's been bussed in to be part of that crowd hates Ceausescu. They all know that everyone else like them hates Ceausescu too.
But that shared knowledge has never before been enough to spark collective action to bring down the regime. At every previous rally like this, for years and years, people have held up their banners, applauded on command, glanced nervously at the guns of the Securitate, and gone back home to complain to each other in private.
Today, in the shadow of the protests and the killings in Timisoara, that changes. A scream, a shout, a chant. Timisoara! Timisoara! Ceausescu's pause, his confused look, it's just like the loudspeaker announcement in the Butcher-Baker game. Suddenly, shared knowledge becomes common knowledge. Out there, impossible to ignore.
And just like in the butcher-baker game, the switch from shared to common knowledge solves the coordination problem. Everyone spontaneously decides to act together. In Timisoara, the crowd had grown gradually as people observed others choosing to join. In Bucharest, the crowd was pre-gathered and its mood changed like the flipping of a switch.
All around the city, people watching on the television saw Ceausescu pause. Then the screen went dead, the television director choosing not to show what was happening. They understood. All at once, they left their houses and took to the streets. An information cascade had started the revolution. Common knowledge was about to finish the job.
Inside the palace, with protesters breaking in, the Ceausescus face a choice. Take the lift down to the basement and try to make their escape through a secret tunnel? Or take the lift up to the roof, where a helicopter awaits to whisk them away? They choose the roof. Nikolai and Elena cram into the helicopter, along with two bodyguards and two henchmen who are also keen to get away. It's too many. The helicopter struggles to lift.
Where to? asks the pilot. Snagov, the dictator says. A country palace not far from Bucharest. The pilot lands the helicopter. Nikolai goes inside to make phone calls. The pilot turns on the radio news. The army has changed sides, he hears. But some Securitate loyalists are still fighting for the old dictator. The pilot calls his superior. What should he do?
"Figure it out for yourself," comes the reply. Power, it seems, is fast draining away from the Ceausescus. And here they are again, still with the bodyguards, but the henchmen have decided to take their chances on their own. Nikolai tells the pilot to fly to an Air Force base. The pilot thinks, "I'm not doing that. "The army's supporting the revolution now. "What if they shoot us down?" But then the bodyguards also have guns.
What to do? The pilot takes off, then makes up an excuse. Something's wrong. We have to land here, in a field, by a country road. Nikolai, Elena and one of the bodyguards walk to the road and flag down a passing dacha, the country doctor, Nikolai Deka. The doctor dumps the Ceausescus on Nikolai Petrishor, who offloads them onto the director of the Agricultural Institute. The director calls the police.
They can decide what to do with the old dictator and his wife. Nikolai keeps looking at his watch and glancing impatiently at the window, as if expecting the Securitate to rescue him at any moment. The door opens, and it's not the Securitate. It's two local policemen. They put Nikolai and Elena in the back of their police car and take them to an army barracks. Nikolai seems to assume he's still in charge.
Well, what's the situation? He says to the major at the barracks. Give me your report. The major explains his instructions. I'll protect you from the mob, he says, and wait for the new government in Bucharest to tell me what to do. Nikolai and Elena spend three nights in the barracks, complaining about the uncomfortable bed, the smelly toilets and the food. I can't eat this, they say. When offered salami, bread and cheese...
It's normal army rations, their guards explain. This stuff's inedible. At home we have proper food. Then they try a different tack. Take me out of here, says Nikolai. I could see that you get one million dollars. On Christmas Day, helicopters arrive from Bucharest with lawyers, judges and a video recorder. Some members of the old regime have moved quickly to seize power and they've made a decision.
The Ceausescus must die. They hastily put on a show trial and it's all a bit of a farce. The prosecutor accuses them of killing 60,000 people in Timisoara, which, it turns out, wasn't actually true. He goads Elena, "Who wrote your scientific papers?" "You can't talk to me like that," snaps Elena. "You smuggled money out of the country," says the prosecutor. "Where's your proof?" the couple say.
You ate well while everyone else had meagre rations. Nikolai keeps repeating, I do not recognise this tribunal. No matter. The judge gives his verdict. Guilty. It's only as their hands are tied together behind their backs that Nikolai and Elena seem finally to understand what's about to happen. Elena snaps at a soldier. Go fuck your mother. They're led into the courtyard. BANG!
where the firing squad jump the gun. By the time the cameraman's ready, it's all over. He can only film close-ups of the bodies. For a while, it feels like catharsis, but then the doubts set in. Was that really the best way to do it? The couple's son, Valentin, doesn't think so. The execution was a political mistake, he says. They should have said that they were shot while trying to escape. Maybe.
I can't help wishing that they'd had a proper trial with detailed charges and evidence. The best way to rebuke a dictator is by upholding due process, that fundamental virtue that dictators erode. But if you're tempted to feel sorry for Nikolai and Elena, I suggest you visit their offensively opulent palace in Bucharest. Your sympathy...
will vanish as suddenly as their grip on power.
This episode of Cautionary Tales was produced in partnership with HBO and their new series, The Regime, starring Kate Winslet. You can stream The Regime now on Max and you can find Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode relied on books about the Ceausescus by John Sweeney, Mark Almond and Edward Bear. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
Up next, I'll be sitting down with regime creator Will Tracy to discuss the thinking and research behind the series.
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When it came to writing HBO's new show, The Regime, the series creator Will Tracy drew inspiration not just from the Ceausescus in Romania, but from real rulers around the world and throughout history. From cruel autocrats such as Bashar al-Assad in Syria, to democratically elected but unconventional populists such as George M. Maloney and Donald Trump.
These governments offer a plethora of cautionary tales, and I'm curious about the research and thinking behind the show. And I'm delighted to say that series creator Will Tracy joins me now. Welcome to Cautionary Tales, Will. Thanks, Tim.
One theme that struck us as we were thinking about cautionary tales inspired by the regime was this idea of germophobia. And Elena Vernham is terrified of mould and this idea that black mould is going to get into her lungs. But as we started to look into this, we realised this is not just something you made up idiosyncratically. It turns out there's something of a running theme with dictators and germophobia. Yeah.
Yeah, I think for many of them, it might stem from this idea of purity. And I think obviously with a kind of xenophobic or nationalistic state, that makes some sense, right? If you're constantly talking about the purity of culture, the purity of thought, politics, and the purity of genetics, it would make sense that you become quite paranoid about the idea of contamination, generally speaking. But, you know, I also think that
and this is certainly the case for the character in the show, that the germophobia, it's an excuse to isolate from the mess of other people. The more that you create this pretext of contamination, the fear of contamination, the more you're able to kind of remove yourself from people and stay within your bubble, the less that you'll have to actually confront people
people and hear about whatever their personal messes, whatever their problems are, problems which probably your state that you've created is the culprit of. And so you can kind of remove yourself from that. You don't really have to confront what's wrong with the lives of the people you are leading. Yeah, that's interesting because I had thought in part, or maybe this is just about being
This is a celebrity problem as a celebrity. Everyone wants to get close to you. Everyone wants the selfie. Everyone wants to shake your hand just to touch you. That just must get quite wearing for someone who can never get away from that. And I thought of the germophobia as possibly a little bit of an extreme response to that. But yeah, there's the politics of it as well. Yeah, well, it's an externalization of an internal feeling that something might be wrong.
That everything that I've created might come crashing down. That this is all going to end. That there's going to be reprisals. That there's going to be the hag. That I might be hanged in the town square. That maybe my ideas are wrong. That maybe I've created something wrong. That there's some sort of corruption or sickness that's in me that has created this world that I live in.
But if you externalize all of those feelings and kind of repress them and shut them out and convince yourself that, well, no, there's something in the walls that's trying to get me or there's something in the air or there's something on people's hands or on surfaces and it's that contamination that's trying to destroy me. I think it probably becomes a bit easier psychologically for these kinds of narcissistic personalities to go through their days in the comfort that what they're doing is right.
Yes, and in the regime as well, it becomes a metaphor for corruption. Yes, absolutely. Herbert Zubach is telling Elena that the mold is really the corruption of the people around her and her weakness. Exactly, yes. Her mycophobia is delusional. There is not black mold in the walls that's trying to kill her. That he correctly diagnoses, but I think he somewhat incorrectly diagnoses what the underlying problem of the regime is.
The underlying problem, of course, is her and her narcissism. And I think he likes to convince her that it is not. It's the foreign bodies who threaten you, the foreign bodies of NATO and this fifth column of corrupt ministers within your palace. One of the things I enjoyed doing while watching the regime was playing spot the despot. LAUGHTER
Because, of course, some of it is from your imagination. Some of it is purely fictional. Yeah, it's a mix. But some of it is based on real dictators or is inspired by the behavior of real dictators. And one I wished I'd had more time to look into is the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. Tell me about him and how he inspired some of the scenes.
I was reading a book by Kapuscinski called The Emperor about the last days of Haile Selassie. You know, it kind of brings you through the end of his regime, but it's also, it's just kind of a look of what his day-to-day life was like within that bubble that he had created.
When he would get up, what he would eat for breakfast, how he would dress, who would dress him. As the walls were closing in and the country was sort of spiraling into famine and unrest, there was still this kind of immaculate little jewel box of a palace that he lived in. And it was just a question amongst his servants and bureaucrats to what extent he was aware, really aware, of what was happening outside that jewel box.
whether he knew or didn't know, and how much he wished to conceal about that knowledge. In the case of Selassie, he's quite different from other dictators in that he didn't react with extreme emotion or anger or desperation as the wall started to close in. He sort of maintained this perfect facade of calm.
as long as he sort of presented this veneer of kind of placid lack of concern that would not only deny that there was a problem, but also would kind of bolster his own sense of himself as someone who was unshakable. That, in the end, backfired in a way because that unshakability and that
that seeming calm and placidity just came off as cluelessness, completely out of touch. Yeah. Am I right in thinking that the flower garden scenes in the conservatory are inspired by something he used to do? Yeah, he would sort of in his daily constitutional, he would sort of walk around the flower gardens. They had a kind of zoo within the palace and...
He would feed meat to the lion and he would water the flowers. And while he was doing all of this, his palace spy master would give him the update on what's happening. Not only what's happening outside in the countryside and also on the world stage, but what's the palace until? What are they whispering? What are they saying?
And the way Selassie would handle this is quite similar to how the character on the show handles it, which is to offer no reply, to just simply listen. If you only listen and you offer no reply, you immediately are sort of baking in a plausible deniability later. It's quite easy to reshape your thoughts and reactions to intelligence you're receiving later if you say nothing while you're receiving the intelligence. Yes, they're very striking scenes.
So you studied all sorts of dictatorships while you were researching the show. And I'm curious as to whether you think that fundamentally they're all alike or whether it's more accurate to say that every single one is different. I would say I have noticed maybe a few commonalities amongst the leaders of these regimes as opposed to commonalities amongst the regimes themselves. One commonality that I have noticed is
amongst many of these leaders is that when they first arrive on the scene, there's something off about them. They look a little funny or they sound a little funny. In some way, they don't fit the mold of what a head of state is supposed to look like. They might even be a little bit laughable because they are so new and so different, you know, in the media or pundit class or just generally amongst the general population. The tendency is to laugh.
Because it's so new and so odd and so strange. And you're not supposed to talk like that or sound like that when you're in that position. That's not the visual that we're used to seeing on the screen when we think of a leader. What these autocratic figures often do then is they take these idiosyncrasies and they weaponize them and they turn them into superpowers. They turn them into the thing that makes them unique and authentic.
And they ride that feeling of uniqueness and authenticity to power. But, of course, you know, what happens is they never forget. They used to laugh at me. That sort of insecurity, I think, is hardwired into the personality of a lot of authoritarians. I was not respected. I wasn't taken seriously by the establishment or by the elite. I'm not taken seriously on the world stage. And I demand to be taken seriously because I'm a serious figure. I'm not a laughable figure.
What happens, of course, in order to get back at their alleged enemies and all the people who laughed at them, the more power that they accrue, they become increasingly out of touch and thus increasingly somewhat ridiculous. And so the problem just sort of compounds itself. And I have noticed that being an issue amongst otherwise quite dissimilar personalities who become authoritarians.
Did you also draw inspiration from some of the democratic populists in Europe, people like Marine Le Pen, Maloney in Italy? To what extent are they inspirations for Elena Vernham?
Yeah, certainly Le Pen was a big influence, a seemingly mainstream figure who was actually smuggling in some quite insidious and racist views from the party of the father, right? Marina Le Pen, what she's been able to do with alarming success is sort of sanitize the party. You know, at heart, it's not very different from anything her father was espousing, but it sort of cleaned up
and made more photogenic, more telegenic. It sounds a little nicer. It helps in a way that it's given, I think, very consciously what she has, I think, called herself a sort of woman's touch, right? This feeling that it's coming from a softer place, right? It doesn't feel as hard as her father, right? It feels in some ways...
and more nurturing, more caring. She's been able to use her status as a woman in some ways in a very weaponized and cynical way. And I always thought that would be more interesting for this character of the authoritarian in the show to be a woman leader rather than a male leader. I think we've seen that archetype of the strong man so often in...
And, you know, what would that be like to see someone who uses the optics of femininity in a really destructive way, but also in a way to kind of win the approbation and investment of the West? She knows this will look good. A strong woman leader in the region. Ignore the fact that I'm actually just as repressive as any male. I kind of have the air of being new, modern, progressive. Yeah.
I wanted to ask about the parallels and differences between dictatorships and democracies. Donald Trump was democratically elected and then he was democratically rejected. But some of the techniques that he uses to win power or to justify what he does are the same techniques that dictators use. And is it a bright line between dictatorship and democracy or is there a certain leadership style that works in both?
Boy, that's a great question. I know the UK certainly has its own problems politically, but I do sometimes think about the usefulness of having a culture in which all the focus and all the bright light and all of the blame and credit and the kind of heat and celebrity of politics isn't all focused on this one person.
Which very much feels like it is in America, that this person has to be everything to everybody. We have to have this feeling of this person being the leader who brings us into the fray rather than a leader of their party or a leader of parliament, one sort of head of state functionary, and then you have another kind of ceremonial, maybe monarchical functionary who can kind of take some of that heat away from the bureaucratic leader. Right.
I do think sometimes in America you dovetail into the possibility of a demagogic figure because we kind of place all of our attention on this one person meaning everything to everybody. One of the things we always try to do on Cautionary Tales is to learn from the mistakes of the past.
Do you think that there is a mistake that dictators make over and over again, some common theme? You know, I think that sometimes it's an inability to be able to tell a salami from a suckling pig, if you will. Sort of that inability to know how to do these small, incremental, terrible things in little steps and then going for the big brass ring once you feel that your power is unchecked and that you can do anything.
Putin's big mistake is something that you will see quite a bit, right? There's a similarity there between what Putin did with Crimea versus Ukraine and what Hitler did in Poland versus Russia, right? It's inability to see the task in front of you because you've had so much success or you've had so much appearance of success.
Do you regard the regime as a cautionary tale? Yeah, I mean, in a sense, the regime has this other layer on top where the cautionary tale is not just about how a seeming democracy can fall into autocracy, but it's also how democracies around the world can abet and aid autocracies around the world. Some of these states, because of their geographical placement or background,
or because of a natural resource they have, or because of their usefulness as a foil against a common enemy, it becomes very easy for an autocracy to become a client state of a so-called progressive Western democracy like the United States. You know, I think we can all think of the examples. I suppose a cautionary tale of how to avoid finding yourself in a country like the country and the regime, but also...
How to question the way your own government interacts with oppressive regimes around the world. So probably more in that sense it's a cautionary tale. HBO's The Regime is available to stream now on Max. Will Tracy, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Tim. ♪
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Vital Mollard, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com.
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