Who knows, perhaps there are as yet some true believers out there, shaking their heads more in sorrow than in anger each time Putin, Erdogan or Xi Jinping do something a bit dictatorial, as if they just don’t get it. Yet the success of China in particular at getting very rich while remaining a one-party state suggests that, as with belief in Marduk, patron god of Babylon, it is time to let that faith go.

Embracing capitalism is not without risk, of course, and the degree of control exercised when China was a Maoist dictatorship is no longer feasible. That said, the technologies developed in Silicon Valley have enabled all kinds of fun opportunities for surveillance and repression, and China’s conformity-inducing social credit has blazed a trail that others will follow to one degree or another. But it would seem that those regular, faintly terrifying nudges are no longer sufficient for Xi Jinping’s party, which now seeks to exert still more direct influence over people’s lives, and specifically over the culture they consume.

For instance, at the start of August an article appeared in China’s biggest state-run news agency comparing video games with “electronic drugs” and “spiritual opium”. A few weeks later, online lists ranking celebrities by popularity were banned to “rectify chaos in the fan community” . Before the month was out online gaming companies were barred from providing services to minors except on Fridays, weekends and holidays, and even then only between 8pm and 9pm.

Next, reality TV shows with “abnormal aesthetics” featuring “sissy men” were forbidden, with viewers encouraged to “love the party, love the country, advocate morality and art”, and instructed to “consciously abandon vulgar and kitsch inferior tastes, and consciously oppose the decadent ideas of money worship, hedonism and extreme individualism”.

What is going on? Many in the media have speculated that we may be witnessing the birth of Cultural Revolution 2.0, but given that Xi himself was denounced by his own mother, imprisoned and then exiled to a rural village for seven years during Cultural Revolution 1.0, it seems unlikely that this is a model that would appeal to him. Besides, that was not an orderly top-down set of mandates, but rather war waged on the Party hierarchy by Mao, who encouraged the youth to rise up against their elders under the slogan “to rebel is justified”.

Xi Jinping’s view is the opposite: to rebel is very much unjustified. The “kids these days” energy is strong: there is too much freedom, too much fun. Rather, his approach recalls the approach to culture that was standard among all 20^th century totalitarians, who were much concerned with the state of their subjects’ souls (as opposed to mere authoritarians who accepted lip service in exchange for obeisance).

Take the clampdown on “sissy men”, for instance. Among the many things banned by Saparmurat Niyazov, the late despot of Turkmenistan, was ballet. The media, always on the lookout for a quirky dictator story, reported on this as something eccentric and amusing. However, I once interviewed a former regime apparatchik who recalled watching the dictator humiliate a male ballet dancer on TV, berating him along the lines of “what kind of man prances about in tights?”

Niyazov was not randomly banning a style of dance on a whim; rather he was suppressing what he regarded as a feminising influence which had entered the country via Russian colonialism. The models of manhood he highlighted in his book The Ruhnama were Noah (in his Islamic incarnation) and stern Turkic warriors from a legendary past — and himself, of course.

Think also of Mussolini, stripping down to dig ditches with workers, seizing every opportunity to model virile masculinity. Or think of just about every single monument or painting in every dictatorship ever, whether they be Right-wing or Left-wing, all of them depicting men as hard, tough, resolved, stoic. All totalitarian regimes take a strong interest in enforcing specific ideas of gender (although it should be noted that communist iconography frequently depicted strong, stoic women working alongside their men) to demonstrate the behaviours their subjects are expected to perform.

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Likewise, we should not be surprised that Xi Jinping’s party is instructing artists and performers to behave themselves and promote specific ideas. Totalitarians take culture very seriously. Mao was a poet and bibliophile, as was Stalin, whose quip that writers were “engineers of the human soul” was repeated by Deng Xiao Ping half a century later. Xi Jinping has authored a few tomes himself. To take culture seriously means that you fear the consequences when culture goes wrong. Little wonder, then, that the Party is instructing its most influential creators as to what they can and cannot do; it would be strange if it didn’t.

The culture favored by impressionable young people, meanwhile, is all the more to be watched. Totalitarians are obsessed with childhood; in Hitler’s Germany toddlers received puzzles featuring stirring scenes of the Wehrmacht in action, while dolls had the correct kind of (Aryan) features. Sergei Mikhalkov, author of the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem, was a celebrated children’s author.

In Mao’s China you couldn’t listen to The Beatles but you could hear the Chairman’s slogans rendered in song, while as late as 1985 Soviet Komsomol officials, concerned about the spread of bourgeois culture via the new medium of taped music, circulated a list of Western artists and their ideological crimes to provincial authorities in the name of “intensifying control over the activities of discoteques.” Thus was Donna Summer blacklisted for “eroticism”, Sparks condemned for “neofascism and racism”, Pink Floyd denounced for “distortion of Soviet foreign policy” while The Village People, bizarrely, were found guilty of “violence”.

And, of course, all regimes sought to control children’s time, in ways that are far more invasive than restricting access to video games. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the USSR and Mao’s China all had official youth organisations (China’s Young Pioneers exist to this day), ostensibly similar to the Boy Scouts; only whereas that organisation was founded by a man keen to encourage clean thoughts and camping skills, the totalitarian versions were run by the state and mixed the fun and games with political indoctrination. In the USSR, you could start young in the Pioneers, graduate as a teenager to the Young Communist League before eventually make your way into the Party.

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However, as much as Xi’s recent spate of mandates has parallels in totalitarian regimes of the past, many of the things he is banning or restricting trouble people in Western countries, too, and are also often addressed with repressive measures, albeit usually by means other than government fiat.

A concern with “sissy men” might seem remote to us now, but the idea that males should model specific, positive forms of behaviour is hardly alien. The #MeToo movement saw the downfall of many a powerful man whose behaviour was exposed and then amplified by journalists on a mission to bring down the most egregious abusers. “Toxic masculinity” was suddenly a ubiquitous term, and while bad (as opposed to illegal) behaviour was not banned, the social costs of acting in a certain way increased dramatically, ending careers with the same finality as any government intervention. But those men had at least done something wrong; boys who are guilty of nothing at all may these days simply be medicated with drugs such as Ritalin to ensure that they behave in a socially desired fashion.

The idea that popular culture itself is subversive is likewise not unknown to us; the Catholic Church was appalled by Hollywood in the 1930s, while parents burned horror comics in the 1950s, and MPs debated whether Alice Cooper ought to be allowed to enter the UK in the 1970s, and the tabloids were disgusted by video nasties in the 1980s, and so on, ad infinitum. Even if governments are reluctant to enact bans or mandates, sufficient social pressure can and has led to self-censorship and voluntary submission before standards enforced by industry bodies. It’s not that long since something as innocuous as Michael Jackson’s Thriller video was forbidden to be shown before the watershed. Today, meanwhile, the panopticon of social media guarantees that few celebrities will deviate from the same approved set of doctrines.

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Nor is the concern for what children do with their time unique. The days of kids roaming about on abandoned building sites and lobbing rocks at each other for laughs are long gone. Today’s helicopter parents loathe the idea of unstructured time and are constantly looking for productive activities to ensure that their children grow up into the “right” kind of person, i.e. a version of themselves, but even better. However, whereas in the bourgeois West it is left to parents with sufficient means to ensure that their offspring can experience the joys of a rigorously managed childhood, in China all kids can benefit from being told exactly how long they can spend on the things they enjoy, regardless of social status.

Totalitarians everywhere dream of a world of virtue, where everyone shares the same, correct opinions (theirs). Xi Jinping has the advantage of being able to rule from the top down, whereas in the West those who would seek to instrumentalise culture and engineer our souls have to advance in a messier way, via peer pressure or through a gradual process of institutional capture.

These two approaches are not equivalent; I would much rather live in that messy world, where it is a lot harder to gain dominion. Even so, regardless of whatever short-term victories are achieved by those who dream of total control, the history of the 20^th century teaches us more than simply what their techniques look like: it also shows us that our would-be masters are always ultimately frustrated — though not before considerable damage is done first, of course.

Still, despite the fact that Stalin was a) obviously clever and b) highly successful as far as evil despots go, the idea that he was some kind of grey nonentity persisted for decades. And I think that we still have a habit of belittling tyrants and authoritarians. It makes us feel better whenever they run circles around us at some geopolitical game or other, which is quite often these days.

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Take Putin, for instance. When he was first elected, a lot of coverage focused on this bland, faceless nonentity, an ex-KGB officer of middling rank leading a decrepit ex-superpower. They kept that up for a while, then switched to mocking him for posing shirtless. Next thing you know, he’s annexed the Crimea. Similarly, Gaddafi was barely coherent, yet he was pretty good at charming Blair and Mandelson — and might still be up waving his golden gun about if we hadn’t gone and dropped a pile of bombs on Libya.

Being a dictator is a difficult job, then, and those who succeed at it should not be underestimated. There is more going on behind those dead eyes than we think, even when they seem unhinged, weird or boring. Yet there is perhaps one exception, a dictator so profoundly mediocre that it would be difficult to underestimate him: Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the leader of the ex-Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. Recently turned 63, he is a man without qualities, and even, it seems, a bit dim. However, 13 years into his reign he remains firmly in power. So how has he achieved this feat, and what can we learn from it?

Berdymukhamedov came to power in 2007, after his corpulent, megalomaniacal predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, dropped dead of a heart attack. Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi (“father of all Turkmen”) had become famous due to his extravagant personality cult. He literally renamed the month of January after himself, and renamed bread after his mother, while also authoring a truly atrocious “holy book” that he called The Ruhnama, or “book of the soul”.

That level of totalitarian excess is quite rare, and so it seemed that the Turkmen were due a break. Surely it was time for a normal dictator, less given to erecting gold statues of himself that rotated to face the sun?

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At first Berdymukhamedov was very dull. A former dentist who had risen to the position of deputy prime minister, he was made interim president when Niyazov went to his eternal reward. This was in defiance of the constitution — the job should have gone to the speaker of parliament — so perhaps some powerful forces thought he would prove to be malleable. And Berdymukhamedov was cautious at first, making only vague statements about change, while adding that the country would walk rather than run.

Definitely a bit dull, then, and perhaps in more ways than one. Months later, I interviewed some Turkmen emigres in Moscow, and one of them said this to me:

“The new president? I know someone who studied at the medical school where he was the principal. They said he was an idiot. And that the teachers said it openly, about him, and to his face — you’re an idiot, an idiot. What can we hope for from him?”

At the time I thought this was an exaggeration; emigres can be pretty bitter about the countries they have left behind, especially when they are repressive dictatorships. But as the years rolled by, and Berdymukhamedov grew more comfortable in his new job and started to adapt the structures his predecessor had left in place to his own use, well, I started to wonder.

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Berdymukhamedov’s cult was strikingly derivative and pedestrian. Niyazov was “Father of All Turkmen”; Berdymukhamedov was “protector”. Niyazov was leading Turkmenistan into the “golden age”; Berdymukhamedov was spearheading the “renaissance”. Clearly, he did not have too many ideas. And nowhere was that more obvious than in the books that he put his name to.

While Niyazov’s cult was grotesque and obscene, it was, at least, ambitious. Similarly, The Ruhnama was terrible, but its author at least knew what ought to be in such a book — history, myth, moral teachings, God, the people and his own personal story. Berdymukhamedov’s books were a lot less complicated. One of the emigres had predicted to me that since he was a medical professional his book would follow that theme — and sure enough, a series on the Turkmen herbal remedies appeared under his name. With that out of the way, he cast around for other themes, but he didn’t cast far. Turkmen were famous horse riders, so there was a book about horses. Then he produced a book about his dad. Running low on national motifs, he eventually put his name to a tome about drinking tea. The books were strikingly literal, strikingly pointless, oblivious to their own bathos. They were unselfconscious and kinda dumb. Here was a dictator with no depth at all.

Don’t just take my word for it. In 2010, Wikileaks published diplomatic cables from a US diplomat who, after referring to the Turkmen president as a “practiced liar” and “micromanager” made this memorable observation: “Berdymukhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is. Since he’s not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.”

This lack of sophistication gives Berdymukhamedov’s propaganda an impressively transparent quality. Classic cults of personality, like those of Stalin or Mao, usually serve to efface the characteristics of the leader, who is always a universal genius and superlative leader. Even Niyazov, who built his own traumatic childhood into the cult, remained a remote, aloof figure.

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Berdymukhamedov, however, is a simple sort. He enjoys his hobbies and they are reflected in the cult. He likes horses and racing cars and shooting guns and fishing and is often filmed engaged in one of these pastimes. But most of all, it seems, he likes playing music and singing. He isn’t the first musical dictator — Kim Jong-il wrote opera librettos, while Stalin was a decent tenor who liked to sing Georgian folk songs, though only for the inner circle. But Berdymukhamedov is surely the first dictator DJ, the first dictator to bust a rhyme in public, and also the first dictator to serenade his people on New Year’s Eve.

His musical oeuvre is quite broad. In 2015 Berdymukhamedov entered the Guinness Book of Records when over 4,000 of his adoring subjects (no pressure) joined him in singing a Eurodisco number he had written himself. Berdymukhamedov enjoyed the experience and he has since performed in public many times, though without so large an ensemble to share the spotlight.

On International Women’s Day, he serenaded the ladies (and some gents) with a cover version of Karakum, a Soviet rock song about the Turkmen desert. More recently, he laid some beats on the populace during Turkmenistan’s televised 2019 New Year’s Eve celebration. He has also been filmed demonstrating to soldiers how to play guitar, though often the camera mysteriously cuts away from his face whenever it comes to difficult bit.

My favorite performances, however, are his duets with his beloved grandson Kerimguly. The themes are powerful and moving: in one song, the intergenerational duo hymn the praises of his favourite horse, while in another Kerimguly sings in English while his grandpa delivers a rap dedicated to the glory of the nation. Indeed, Kerimguly appears to be getting a mini-cult of his own. Opposition sites report that he appears on TV more often than his father, Berdymukhamedov’s only son; a state news website reports that he recently won the “Golden Age” artistic award and received a gold chain and some cash.

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So clumsy and naïve is Berdymukhamedov’s cult that it serves as a particularly potent reminder of Anthony Daniels’ famous observation that the purpose of propaganda is “not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate”. But while Turkmen citizens, condemned to live in a repressive police state run by a dullard, have little choice but to play along with Berdymukhamedov’s fantasy image of himself, the truly impressive thing is the way in which the president sometimes succeeds in getting foreign diplomats and organisations to abase themselves before him.

For instance, the regime’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is extremely stupid, even by Berdymukhamedov’s standards. The authorities deny that Turkmenistan has any Covid-19 cases but say that there might be a problem with “dust” — and so insist that everybody wear masks and gloves and practice social distancing. Apparently there’s quite a lot of dust about. And also “pneumonia”.

The mendacity, goading in its transparency, is almost impressive. But it isn’t, not really; rather it’s ridiculous, worthy of contempt. Yet Eurasianet reports that the British ambassador, after tweeting a selfie of himself wearing a face mask and urging others to do the same subsequently denied in a Twitter exchange that he was implying that Turkmenistan had the virus. Instead he urged people to “pay attention to the findings of WHO and Turkmen government experts, who are the experts here”. That’ll be the same WHO that recently sent a delegation to the country, praised the government for its high level of preparedness, didn’t say whether Covid-19 was on the loose, but then advised the Turkmen authorities to act “as if” the virus was circulating and adopt the standard protective measures.

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Thus Berdymukhamedov, despite being a “not very bright guy” gets away with it.

Sometimes, when I read about evil regimes and go looking for small consolations, I remind myself that it is not, in the end, all that enjoyable to be a dictator. Yes, you have a lot of power, but the trade-off is isolation, paranoia, a loss of humanity and a life spent looking over your shoulder. As far as punishments go, it never fits the crime, but it’s something. Yet when I look at Berdymukhamedov, I just don’t see a whole lot of angst there. Maybe he’s worried about the economy; maybe, deep down, he’s a bit nervous about Covid-19. But he long ago started to believe in his own luck and looks as though he’s enjoying himself a lot of the time.

The only comparison I can think of for dictatorial ebullience is the footage of Kim Jong-il from years ago, when he managed to get Bill Clinton to come to North Korea and eat a shit sandwich in exchange for the release of some American journalists. Kim was really enjoying himself that day; but that was a very complicated pleasure to arrange. All Berdymukhamedov has to do to feel good about himself is call up Kerimguly and sing a few songs for the cameras and he’s happy as Larry. Not quite stupid enough to mess up the repression machine he inherited from Niyazov and his Soviet predecessors, Berdymukhamedov carries on dictating with a song in his heart, and — as often as not — on his lips too.