Rumors about Putin’s illnesses, Yeltsin’s heart attacks and the parable of all dictators

In one of the movies of Sergey Solovyov, the director who first brought the Soviet underworld to the big screen during perestroika, one of the characters put the medical bulletin announcement of Stalin’s death on the turntable every morning, enjoying every syllable of the death report . The spectators shared the almost physical joy of this macabre ritual: the memory of the Soviet period was too fresh, along with the conviction, typical of dictatorships, that only the death of the enemy can definitively solve a problem, and only death of the dictator can bring freedom. It was this awareness, this equating of the regime with the physical body of its leader, that transformed the health and death of the leaders of the authoritarianisms into a state secret and at the same time a strategic resource. Until therapeutic persistence, as when, in 1975, Francisco Franco was kept alive for weeks, amid equipment and surgeries, while the final details of the succession to the caudillo were agreed, or when, in 1996, Boris eltsin he was re-elected president despite another heart attack between the first round of the elections and the vote.