Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the USSR from 1964 until his death in 1982, through a stretch of six US presidents, led the Soviet Union to ‘developed socialism’, nuclear parity with the United States, and serious achievements in space and nuclear power. His unquestioned power and authority fascinated old rulers beyond the borders of the USSR, and even those in democratic countries. What do gerontocracies – rule by elderly people – share, other than male gerontocrats? They tend toward authoritarianism, with leaders building personality cults as they age. Gerontocrats generally preside over stagnant economies because they prioritise corrupt public works projects and physical displays of their accomplishments, rather than investments in human capital. Rulers gain authority by promising economic security, but they turn to self-enrichment in the absence of constitutional and other checks on their power.

In his last years, Brezhnev promised stability and military strength. Yet, propped up before the masses, he presided over economic failures that the Communist Party touted as victories, enriched his family and friends through corrupt projects, and engaged in self-aggrandisement befitting a feeble old man. He aged together with other Communist Party leaders into his seventies. Soviet leaders died on the job: Brezhnev at 75 in 1982, Yuri Andropov at 69 in 1984, and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985 at 73. A Moscow joke at the time was: ‘Did you attend the funeral of X?’ ‘Yes, I had a season ticket.’

Perhaps sensing their own mortality, gerontocrats manufacture written and physical legacies. Brezhnev’s ghostwriters released a series of self-congratulatory books: his three-volume Memoirs (1978-79) immediately garnered a Lenin Prize. He published a photo album of his encounters with the simple folk, Always with the People (1976). A Soviet joke has Brezhnev remarking about the public fawning over his works: ‘If they’re so popular, maybe I should read them, too.’ Vladimir Putin’s outpourings, if rivalling neither Stalin’s 14 volumes, nor Lenin’s 55, include an infamous diatribe arguing that Ukraine belongs to Russia, a history of judo, a 2019 book of aphorisms, and his Direct Speech (2016), in which Putin is cast as a central figure in the history of the 21st century ‘equal to the likes of Charles de Gaulle or Fidel Castro’. Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled his country for over two decades, wrote seven books on politics – and one on his love, football. Donald Trump’s oeuvre includes The Art of the Deal (1987) and his motivational tract Think Big and Kick Ass (2008).

Gerontocrats pursue permanent physical legacies that rarely measure up to their ambition. Brezhnev embraced megaprojects as essential examples of state power and bold leadership. His 20-year-long ‘project of the century’, a new Trans-Siberian Railroad, was ‘officially’ finished in 1983, and again in 1991, but in the 2020s it remains a ‘road to nowhere’. Brezhnev put 250 ministries and design bureaux at work on the Siberian River Diversion project (1965-88), intended to transfer water from northern Siberian rivers to Soviet Central Asia. It was forecast that 100 nuclear excavation bombs would be needed in the process; it was cancelled in 1988.

No less immodest, Marcos, who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986 through ‘constitutional authoritarianism’, paid for infrastructure that enriched his cronies and led to huge foreign debts, but reflected what critics called his ‘edifice complex’.

Simultaneously, gerontocrats embrace ‘food sovereignty’ by promoting local foods to appeal to common folk and distancing themselves from the elites whose interests they in fact represent. The Soviet agricultural sector was historically the greatest Communist failure. On his last legs, Brezhnev introduced a food programme  (1980) to deal with endemic shortages and a crisis in the collective farms. Production hardly improved, lines remained outside shops, and the elite ate caviar. The 70-year old dictator Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’s only president since 1994, often seeks to demonstrate his knowledge of the soil. He urges Belarusians to ‘dig in the ground’ to overcome the ‘foolishness in their heads’. He appeals to farmers to increase the harvest of Belarusian potatoes, beets, and cabbage, in part to ‘help Russian brothers’. Several years ago, Lukashenko met the Hollywood actor Steven Seagal, who recently fled to Russia to become a citizen and support the invasion, at a farm, where he personally peeled a carrot and handed it to Seagal, who uncomfortably nibbled on the end.

Marcos invited foreign agribusinesses to Philippines, but this enabled them to expropriate peasant land. A rice famine resulted, as did higher poverty rates and huge levels of inflation. The government engaged top sports stars in a propaganda campaign to proselytise eating grits as a short-term solution. During repeated food shortages, the Marcoses took credit for saving people with ‘Marcos Manna’, a fortified soy flour ‘nutribun’, introduced in fact by USAID to combat child malnutrition. During one crisis, eight million nutribuns were air-dropped into famine regions. The president’s kleptomaniac wife ordered the nutribun bags stamped with the slogan ‘Courtesy of Imelda Marcos’.

Eventually, gerontocrats embrace personality cults. Brezhnev proudly draped dozens of medals, some that he awarded to himself, across his breast. He pinned on so many that one joke had it that he underwent ‘chest expansion surgery’ to make room for more. Offices, schools, boulevards were always plastered with his portrait. Trump, too, relishes having his likeness hung on government façades, while his handlers edit photos to exaggerate his crowd size. If Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, Kuibyshev, and Kirov had cities named after them, the trend toward place-naming has spread to the US. Three states have named highways after Trump; one lawmaker suggested his portrait for the discontinued $500 bill; and yet another lawmaker proposes renaming US coastal waters as the ‘Trump Exclusive Economic Zone’.

Brezhnev revelled in parades that packed in huge crowds, often brought in by party operatives in the back of dump trucks. Putin modernised the Soviet tradition with his victory parade on 9 May 2025, which included ‘missiles, men and MiGs‘. Trump, envying the tanks and ICBMs rumbling through Red Square, plans a military parade to celebrate the 250th birthday of the US Army. The parade will include 7,500 soldiers, 120 military vehicles, 25 Abrams tanks and 50 helicopters. The cost is estimated at $45 million.

Following the Kremlin style of self-glorification, Lukashenko appears on Belarusian postage stamps, giving rise to a joke about citizens spitting on the likeness side of the stamp. He spreads a cult of the ‘humble strongman‘, like Pinochet, who projected power, yet also his accessibility, when he wore his dress military whites before adoring crowds.

Longevity enables gerontocrats to cultivate financial windfalls. Kremlin leaders enriched themselves by limiting consumer goods production in favour of military profits and through access to special stores, clinics, and resorts. Brezhnev accumulated wealth as general secretary. He relished his collection of expensive automobiles including a Cadillac that Richard Nixon gifted him. The USSR was the ‘corrupt society‘. Indeed, Brezhnev’s son-in-law stole millions of rubles in a cotton production scam. Scores of his associates were implicated in the scandal. Corruption and crony capitalism flower in gerontocracies. When the Marcoses were forced to flee to the Philippines after a popular uprising, the US military facilitated their removal to Hawaii. Among their possessions US Customs agents discovered: 24 suitcases of gold bricks and diamond jewellery and billions of dollars in certificates for gold bullion. In Marcos’s presidential mansion, Filipino investigators discovered 2,700 pairs of shoes, 15 mink coats, 508 gowns, 888 handbags and a bulletproof bra belong to Imelda. Similarly, Pinochet, his family and military allies set up hundreds of bank accounts abroad, including in the US, to funnel millions of dollars out of Chile into their own pockets.

The aging US political leadership suggests that another gerontocracy has developed. President Joe Biden was 81 when he left office. Congress continues to grow older: in 2025, 30 per cent of senators were older than 70. In the 1960s, the median age of Congress was about 54. Now the average age in the Senate is 63, and the average age in the House is 58, while the median age in the US is 38. A true gerontocrat at 79 years old, Donald Trump keeps flirting with the idea that he should be eligible to serve another term, no matter the constitution or his age.

The Brezhnev years became known as the time of ‘stagnation’. Yet even now many Russians imagine his last years with hopeful nostalgia. He aged, but each day stores would be open, even if stocks were low; buses would run, if behind schedule; a bottle of vodka was cheap; the US was at bay; and socialism was just around the corner. Yet if gerontocracy facilitates these modest achievements, it always runs the risks of engaging in timid economic policies, promotion of megaprojects, and the embrace of ageing cults.