In the winter of 1979, as a student of history in Moscow, I devoured a novel by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The Autumn of the Patriarch had just been translated into Russian. It was a story of a Central American dictator, ‘the General’, and his inevitable degradation in the bubble of power. The prose was a long fable yet intensely realistic, particularly for a young man like me living under the never-ending rule of the general secretary of the Soviet Union.

I knew little about Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s times. Leonid Brezhnev ruled through all my conscious life. I nodded vigorously when I read Márquez: ‘Our own parents knew who he was because they had heard about him from theirs, as they had from theirs before them, and from childhood on we grew accustomed to believe that he was alive in the House of Power.’ And the Leader had aged very badly. Brezhnev’s physical and mental deterioration became so pronounced that no artifice of state-controlled media could conceal it. 

Those lines could be applied to almost all of the Twelve Elders of the Politburo in 1979. The list of them had stopped changing long before and even their portraits displayed at celebrations grew yellow from ageing. Michel Foucault wrote of the genealogy of power; to watch the Soviet leaders was to engage in the gerontology of power, to see them age, their faces and bodies becoming more and more haggard, yet immovable atop the Soviet system.

Young people in the Soviet Union no longer cared about politics or the communist ideological project. They began to live in a parallel world of youth culture ‘outside’ the official realities and official discourse. It was his role in that ‘discourse’ which betrayed Brezhnev’s senility most of all. His slurred speech and increasingly frequent mistakes made him sound like a nutty grandfather, not the leader of a nuclear superpower. There were rumours that Brezhnev was a victim of poor dental work. People shook their heads in disbelief at the deterioration of the Soviet political and health system. ‘They could not even find a good dentist for Number One!’

One could spend entire evenings spooling off jokes about the general secretary’s mental health. An especially popular one was: ‘Brezhnev receives Margaret Thatcher in the Kremlin and reads from the script prepared for him: “Dear prime minister… Indira Gandhi.” He looks at Thatcher and then again at the note. His aide whispers from behind: “Leonid Ilyich, it is Margaret Thatcher!” Brezhnev looks back at the aide helplessly: “I know that she is Thatcher, but my note says ‘Indira Ghandi.’”

Another joke played on the similarity between the Russian word for ‘old’ and the English ‘star’. Brezhnev stands alone in front of a mirror and says ruefully: ‘“Oh my, have I grown old [star], very old [ochen star].” Then a better idea crosses his mind. He raises his bushy eyebrows and triumphantly concludes: “I am Super Star!”’

As I was reading Marquez’s novel, dramatic news came on Christmas night in 1979: the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. This was the final confirmation, for me and my fellow students, that Brezhnev had gone mad.

Two painful years of anxiety followed. Then came another shock: Brezhnev died. Yet gerontocracy did not loosen its grip on Soviet state power. Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, was the long-time KGB head and promised ‘a better socialist order’, but his gaunt, sick face betrayed a more gloomy forecast. Soon he disappeared and passed away; rumours ascribed his agony to his kidneys. Next, Konstantin Chernenko, the modest head of Brezhnev’s chancellery, was propped up to rule. Propped, because he was a walking corpse who could barely utter a word without betraying his terminal asthma.

Ten years of senile men pretending to run the country did more than anything to develop a collective sense that not only the leadership but the Soviet Union itself was in terminal crisis. Physical weakness and proximity of mortality made a mockery of the slogans about Communism’s radiant future. The gerontocrats were weakening the ruling regime even more effectively than the empty stores, terrible services, alcoholism, demographic decline and growing environmental catastrophe.

Decades later, as a historian of the Brezhnev period, I discovered much more about his remarkable decline. When Soviet archives opened their doors after the collapse, many candid recollections and testimonies of people who knew Brezhnev became available. To my surprise, I raised my estimation of Brezhnev. He was a rather benign version of a communist dictator. He restrained the KGB and minimised repressions (although people were still arrested and exiled for political reasons). Moreover, Brezhnev tried to make people’s life more tolerable. He dedicated years of his life to high-level diplomacy, seeking to end the never-ending confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West. His views about the roots of that conflict were a hotch-potch of simple countryside wisdom rather than the immutable dogma of Marxist-Leninist ‘class struggle’. In his latest book, To Run the World, historian Sergey Radchenko claims that Brezhnev was driven to the cause of peace and détente by his vanity and search of recognition. Whatever the case, it was Brezhnev’s personal dedication and political will that broke the ideological gridlock in the Communist Party and bureaucracy, where the majority deeply resented any partnership with ‘American imperialists’. Without Brezhnev, détente may well not have happened, and the 1970s would have been a much more dangerous decade.

I also learned what happened to Brezhnev’s health from his doctor’s memoirs, a treasure trove for historians, not yet translated into English. The Kremlin leader suffered from overwork, stress, and insomnia, and made ‘a pact’ in the early 1970s with one of the nurses to supply him with strong sedatives. Nobody, even KGB’s Andropov, dared to break up this fateful agreement, and strong drugs gradually and irrevocably ruined Brezhnev’s brain. So much for the bad dentistry.

At first, Brezhnev’s malaise was visible only to a narrow circle – although Kissinger and Nixon noticed his bizarre shifts from drowsiness to excitement. Brezhnev’s attention span shortened and his grasp of detail began to slip; he began to blabber nonsense on television. Even his character changed as he became peevish and impervious to reason. He collapsed at a summit with Gerald Ford in Vladivostok in December 1974. At the helm of a nuclear power was a drug addict who had lost the ability to critically evaluate his own condition.

As I got older, I stopped comparing Brezhnev to the eternal Caribbean tyrant from Marquez’s novel – he was not even Spain’s dictator Franco or Portugal’s Salazar. The image of the ever-lasting ‘patriarch’ of my youth gave way to something more complex. Brezhnev even proposed to the Politburo several times that they relieve him of his duties as the general secretary, only to hear uniform assurances that he was irreplaceable.

Yet all those details did not change the big picture: Brezhnev’s degradation had a fatal long-term impact on Soviet leadership and policymaking. Superpower diplomacy depended on his political will and interactions with his American counterpart. Without this main engine, détente began to wither. Legions of sceptics would say that any US-Soviet collaboration was doomed anyway; the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire’, etc. It is quite possible, however, to see that the many crises that killed détente could have been pre-empted and averted through personal diplomacy. Jimmy Carter was eager to reduce nuclear weapons but the sick Brezhnev was no longer capable of bold policy initiatives.

The decade of gerontocracy paved the way for failed reforms and the disintegration of the Soviet state. The top political establishment preferred to keep Brezhnev in power for selfish reasons, which were highly detrimental to the country. Three key members of the Politburo reached their own unwritten pact: Yuri Andropov of the KGB, foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and Dmitry Ustinov in charge of the army and the wider military-industrial complex. Appointees of Brezhnev, they presided over colossal bureaucracies with the most vested interests. Any change of guard in the Kremlin imperilled their positions as well as those interests.

Naturally, in their own mind, those ageing men defended the status quo against something ‘worse’ –instability or a return to Stalinist dictatorship and repressions. After Brezhnev lost the capacity to process information and make decisions, the troika agreed among themselves to prepare those decisions for him, while respecting each other’s territories. Gromyko managed diplomatic détente with the West; Andropov looked after internal security; Ustinov handled the war in Afghanistan.

The partition of power into separate fiefdoms belonging to aged Politburo oligarchs doomed the Soviet Union to suboptimal and downright terrible policies. This meant a failure to properly use the state’s huge oil profits, to modernise the economy, to fix finances and to curb corruption. Gerontocracy also badly affected the younger cohort of the political class. People between the ages of 40 and 60 were kept in the role of permanent minions, who could only applaud the gerontocrats while grumbling in private about their own lack of promotion. The diaries of younger Soviet officials conveyed apocalyptic language and an inevitable political crisis of the Soviet regime. Another bitter joke of Brezhnev’s time was: ‘Why will the children of colonels never become generals? Because generals have their own children.’

One of those younger minions was Mikhail Gorbachev, 51 when Brezhnev died. By pure luck, he got to know Andropov socially while escorting him to spas in the Northern Caucasus. According to Gorbachev’s memoirs, at one point he dared to ask Andropov about the Politburo gerontocracy: ‘Who is going to take the place of your generation of leaders?’ Andropov frowned: ‘So you’ve decided to bury us all, have you?’ Gorbachev replied: ‘All I’m saying is there can be no forest without undergrowth.’ 

Andropov introduced Gorbachev to Brezhnev. As a junior among gerontocrats, Gorbachev was kept on the back bench, in charge of the hopelessly unproductive Soviet agricultural sector. Only after Andropov took power did Gorbachev begin to be trained as a potential successor. Andropov’s death ended that apprenticeship, though it was apparently insufficient. As leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev excelled as a political tactician and parliamentary manipulator, but he knew little about the Soviet economy, finances and foreign policy. After becoming general secretary in March 1985, Gorbachev concluded that ‘the entire system was rotten’ and a comprehensive ‘revolution’ from above was necessary. He was at the start of a learning curve when the clocks of gerontocracy chimed for the end of his nation. 

Within just four years, instead of modernising the Soviet economy and system, Gorbachev led the USSR deeper into crisis through misguided and confusing policies, some of them remarkably hasty, others puzzlingly late and slow. Gorbachev’s ‘revolution’ ultimately failed to reinvigorate Soviet politics and the economy; it instead empowered the forces that destroyed the Soviet Union from within. Many would say the Soviet system was doomed anyway; even a genius could not have saved it. In an authoritarian system, however, the leader at the top is the key factor; with his failing, the entire edifice of power crumbles. The end of Gorbachev’s perestroika let loose the pent-up discontent and encouraged others to make their headway into mass politics.

Boris Yeltsin was another upstart frustrated by the long reign of gerontocracy. He had been the Communist Party chief of an industrial region in the Ural Mountains, born in the same year as Gorbachev. In 1985, once in power, Gorbachev brought him to the highest echelons of government but gave him an impossible mission: to clean out the corrupt corridors of Moscow.

Yeltsin’s failure and frustration led to a nervous breakdown. While Gorbachev’s choice was to launch a new revolution to rescue the socialist project following the rotten rule of gerontocracy (he called it ‘the time of stagnation’), Yeltsin became an anti-systemic populist. At first, he also rooted for the rejuvenation of socialism, but then took a giant leap of faith to become a fan of American capitalism and democracy. The rapid evolution of those two ambitious leaders of the young party cohort testified to the deep fissures in the discipline of the Soviet political class and the loss of its ideological moorings.

The feud between Gorbachev and Yeltsin in 1989-91 became the third factor, after the gerontocratic rule and hasty reforms, that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991 Yeltsin, as Brent Scowcroft, the American national security adviser, remarked later, ‘pulled Russia’ from the Soviet Union and from under Gorbachev. Yeltsin leaned on a cohort of very young reformers, to dissolve the Soviet Union, push Gorbachev out of the Kremlin, and bring in a market economy in one big leap.

As the 1990s began, educated and liberal-minded people of my generation hoped that post-Soviet Russia would never again experience the infamy of gerontocracy. We were wrong. At first, the destruction of the party and the Soviet state opened up the political space and bureaucracies for radical rejuvenation by new people. The team that led economic reforms and the privatisation of state industries consisted of economists and technocrats in their 30s and early 40s. Some of my friends and peers ended up in elevated positions as the editors of major journals and newspapers, television anchormen, heads of independent television companies and prominent parliamentarians.

History, however, prepared another cruel twist. The radical reforms, instead of creating a young liberal political class, produced a young, arrogant oligarchy of wealth, desperate to strip and share state assets among themselves. The Russian economy rapidly deindustrialised while the promised marvels of market transformation came very slowly. Most Russian working people felt discarded and unwanted, without any future or hope. Millions felt humiliated by the sudden plunge into misery, while the government and state leaders washed their hands and told everyone to wait for market forces to fix their problems. People cursed Gorbachev and Yeltsin and yearned for the times of Brezhnev.

It only took two or three years for Boris Yeltsin to change radically. His ratings dropped to a single digit. His personality altered dramatically: he relieved his stress not with pills, like Brezhnev, but with alcohol – his great weakness from long before he became Russian president. Yeltsin was turning into a tragic twin of the late Brezhnev at the age of just 63. What could the people do with a leader of a democracy who could not even button up his shirt anymore?

The Russian reformers and liberals were left with no good choices. The economic recession and mass suffering killed any immediate prospects of a stable Russian democracy. The only way to persevere on the path of liberal democracy was to keep Yeltsin in power and maximise his power against the much-feared communist and anti-liberal revanchists. In the end, Yeltsin and the reformers performed a constitutional coup: the old parliament that opposed reforms was dissolved, triggering armed fighting in downtown Moscow in October 1993, and the reformed presidency was endowed with full and permanent control over the army, the internal security apparatus and the police.

Nobody thought in 1993 that this would be the turning point on a path to another ‘forever rule’ by an autocrat. But a year later people already began to see it. Yeltsin was the first democratic leader of Russia to lose his mind while in office. The president’s capacity to govern shrank by the day and again there was a pact of complacency around the Russian leader. This time it was not a cabal of gerontocrats but rather a consensus of reform-minded Russians, many of them young. Those people reasoned among themselves that Yeltsin’s withdrawal from office would mean the end of a democratic Russia and probably the advent of a fascist or authoritarian communist regime and a return to confrontation with the West. Yeltsin became the only and last obstacle to evil taking over Russia and perhaps destroying it entirely.

There was a new cartoonish character to justify this apocalyptic view: Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He was a populist politician under 50, vigorous, and incredibly versatile, his rhetoric unmistakably fascist and anti-Western. In the first parliamentary elections after the constitutional coup, in December 1993, Zhirinovsky and his party garnered one quarter of the vote, more than any other party in the country. He was poised to become the next president of Russia and who could stop him?

The sense of apocalyptic fear among the post-communist ruling elites made them prop up the failing Yeltsin for another six years. There was one more important, if less public, reason, too. Yeltsin’s supporters were rapidly enriching themselves by acquiring enormous economic assets in the process of hasty privatisation. Without Yeltsin, the oligarchy could be in mortal danger.

Another interested party in support of the disabled Yeltsin was the West. Bill Clinton and his administration knew that Yeltsin had gambled his entire presidency on leaving Russia’s communist past behind to join the West. Yeltsin and his pro-Western ministers were uniquely valuable partners. Clinton’s friend and chief adviser on Russian policy, Strobe Talbott, later quoted the American president saying: ‘We can’t ever forget that Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober.’ Western leaders put up with the strange acts and gaffes of the declining Russian patriarch, as long as he presided over the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany, cut nuclear arsenals, and did not stand in the way of NATO enlargement.

Yeltsin’s increasingly fictitious leadership in the 1990s pointed to the same outcome as that of Brezhnev. Both periods were debilitating and ultimately destructive for the country and its ideological and political foundations. Many Russians became utterly cynical about life, authority and ideas. Money remained the only real source of value and power. Whoever was in control of the state had to steal as fast as possible. It became as natural as breathing. While the travesty of Brezhnev’s rule eroded the political foundations of the Soviet Union, the tragedy of Yeltsin’s governance fatally corrupted the chances for Russian democracy.

Veterans of the Russian political class of the 1990s – now ensconced in exile in Western countries – do not want to admit that their choices helped to open the gates to the authoritarian regime of Putin. The people who made the choices continue to claim that there was no better way: Russian reforms were in mortal danger, from both communists and fascists such as Zhirinovsky.

In 1993, Yeltsin and his supporters had destroyed the checks and balances of the existing political system in the name of the strong presidency. In 1994, Russia’s political class supported the use of force against separatists in Chechnya, which turned into a long and brutal war. In 1996, despite Yeltsin further slipping away, his entourage, helped by wealthy Russian bankers and media figures, got him re-elected through a combination of bribes, propaganda, and public manipulation.

In 1997, when the re-elected president, debilitated further by two heart failures, shrunk into a husk of a leader, Yeltsin’s entourage began to look for a successor. Rather than choosing a liberal parliamentarian, they zeroed in on a candidate from the security forces who was humble, loyal and ready to guarantee the future of the presidential ‘family’ and its sponsors. Yeltsin’s family, including his daughter Tatiana and the ghost writer of Yeltsin’s books, Valentin Yumashev, concluded that Vladimir Putin was ‘a wonderful man’.

In December 1999, a rambling Yeltsin announced his retirement to a surprised nation. His designated successor, Vladimir Putin, ran for the presidency with the enthusiastic support of the people who had propped up the sick and unpopular Yeltsin four years before. It was a much easier task this time. Putin was young and energetic. He promised to eradicate crime and terrorism, and he appealed to a humiliated nation that wanted to see Russia rise from its knees.

History looped. In order to keep Russian democracy – and the newly wealthy oligarch class – intact, the Russian reformers brought to the Kremlin an unknown ex-KGB officer of dubious political credentials. A quarter of a century later, Putin is an autocrat who will, in a few months, become the longest-ruling leader in 200 years of Russian history.

In the 1990s, Russians felt shame and envy when they the compared energetic, quick-witted, and well-spoken Clinton with the obviously drunk and inadequate Yeltsin. As I began my new career as a historian in Washington and then Philadelphia, I told myself that American democracy could never produce such an embarrassment for its citizens and voters. I was terribly wrong again.

The causes of the current American political crisis will be studied by legions of sociologists, political scientists and future historians. They can explain, more or less, how and why the greatest democracy in the world became so polarised. What is harder to explain is what happened to the culture of American political leadership.

In January 1981, 69-year-old Ronald Reagan became the oldest president in American history. How, then, have we come to one of the most crucial contests in recent American politics in which both contenders are over 80? What happened to younger leaders, even those of Reagan’s age? This issue is central, given America’s traditional obsession with personalities in power in contrast to their platforms and ideology. We cannot explain this without addressing the state of American society, culture, education, and associations – all traditional foundries of US political leaders.

I wish I could say that the cases of Brezhnev and Yeltsin have nothing to do with the contest between Trump and Biden. Of course, Biden, a long-serving politician, cannot to be compared with Brezhnev or Yeltsin. And yet, as a witness to the Soviet decline of the 1980s and Russia’s democratic demise of the 1990s, I cannot suppress the shudders of recognition. The reasons and justifications for keeping Biden in the White House ring very familiar to my ear: ‘to prevent the worse’ from happening, to save democracy, and to prevent violence and terror.

This time, however, I have different books to meet my concerns. Marquez’s novel, after all, was not such a good guide even to understand Soviet gerontocrats. Two books feed my reflections on the American situation today. The first is Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America. The French aristocratic thinker travelled across the United States at the critical time when Andrew Jackson challenged the political, social, and economic status quo established by a small group of wealthy and well-educated men.

For the United States’ first decades, the White House had passed from one gentleman to another. Jackson ended a regime that looked close to an enlightened oligarchy. No wonder that ‘Jacksonian democracy’ and its supporters came to Washington as barbarians and conquerors, viewed by the establishment as a great danger, possibly a path to rule by the mob or to dictatorship led by a man on the horse. Nothing like that happened, and Tocqueville’s book provides a good explanation of why. American democracy survived severe political crises, including a civil war, a great depression, and the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. Democratic institutions adapted and weathered crises while growing more diverse as the United States expanded across the American continent.

Another book is Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Written in the aftermath of civil war in England, this tract reveals an oft-obfuscated truth: all political systems are born out of violence. Today liberal democratic politics represent, first and foremost, the substitute for violent struggle for power. A modern, democratic Leviathan is above all a constitutional pact that power must change hands at regular intervals, with common consent, and without the use of force. Trump came dangerously close to violating this pact on 6 January 2021. Yet where did the mob that stormed the Capitol come from? Why do so many millions of working-class white Americans religiously follow Trump? While the Constitution needs to be protected and its transgressors punished, threats of ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘dictatorship’ should not become a justification for setting up an American ‘Brezhnev’ or ‘Yeltsin’ in the White House for the next four years. An elected leader who is unable to properly lead will only drag the United States further into a systemic political crisis.

Alexis de Tocqueville raised a fundamental question: how could America clear up the channels that generated political imagination and leadership in the past for the future? Hobbes pointed to an even more fundamental question: how can the American people, including the supporters of Trump, regain faith in the greatest constitutional compact in history? Russia suffered under the rule of a gerontocracy and is now paying the price. America cannot follow the same path.