Quoted in Professor John L. Gaddis' biography of U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan, this excerpt on absolute power referred to the regime of Tsar Nicolas I, Emperor of Russia (from 1825 to 1855), recounted by the Marquis de Custine, a French aristocrat on tour in Russia in 1839
With eerie foresight, Custine anticipated the defining traits of authoritarian power in Russia, from Stalin onward...
George Kennan brings out the analogies (writing in 1971)....
...the absolute power of a single man; his power over thoughts as well as actions;
...the impermanence and unsubstantiality of all subordinate distinctions of rank and dignity - the instantaneous transition from lofty stations to disgrace and oblivion;
...the indecent association of sycophancy upwards and brutality downwards; the utter disenfranchisement and helplessness of the popular masses;
...the nervous punishment of innocent people for the offenses they might be considered capable of committing rather than the ones they had committed;
...the neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification;
...the general silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy;
...the tendency to rewrite the past
Quoting George Kennan, in John L. Gaddis' biography "an American Life" p.619