by Ray Black
If you combine that with his embarrassment and anger at past difficulty in performing sexually with a woman – for he was married to a Catherine de Thouars – then you have all the right ingredients in place. This is especially so, given that he committed his acts with an audience. That meant that he couldn’t show signs of compassion towards his victims, as he was supposed to be sacrificing them to appease the demons in the eyes of his henchmen. Better then to create the impression that he was emotionally detached from the experience.
However you analyse Gilles de Rais, it doesn’t excuse him of his crimes. He was a paedophile and serial killer in much the same mould as Andrei Chikatilo – the Rostov Ripper – who was executed in 1994 in Russia for similar crimes. In Chikatilo’s case, he was found guilty of the murders of fifty-two young boys and girls. His modus operandi was to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm while in the act of stabbing and mutilating his victims to death in heavily wooded areas.
Chikatilo blamed his impotence on his childhood in the Ukraine, which was disrupted by World War II. In addition, there had been a severe famine shortly before his birth and he had believed rumours that he had once had an older brother who was killed and eaten in the woods by starving neighbours. His first sexual experience involved him prematurely ejaculating while attempting to force himself upon a girl, thereby causing him to associate sex with violence. Somehow his experiences eventually crossed wires in his head and it seems that Giles de Rais was a similar case.
It can never be known for certain how many children Gilles murdered. Estimates vary greatly from multiples of ten to multiples of a hundred. He can only have been active for two or three years at the most, so it seems that the lower estimate is probably the more likely. He would have had to search increasingly further afield to find suitable children to lure and would have been found out much earlier if he had simply taken every child within the immediate vicinity. That is the only consolation that can be derived from the case, which still resonates now, even with the historical distance of some 600 years.
Peter the Great
Peter the Great . . . what? You may ask. Well, his epithet arose from his success at transforming Russia into an empire, it having formerly been only a tsardom or kingdom. So, it meant Peter the Great ‘transformer’ or ‘modernizer’. He achieved his aims by expanding Russia through conquest and by Westernizing its culture. In addition, he happened to be an unusually imposing figure, standing some 2.03m (6ft 8in) tall, which was very unusual in a world when most people were far shorter, on average, than they are today.
However, his height is generally regarded as having been a result of a genetic defect from inbreeding, for he was actually lanky, badly proportioned and physically weak. In addition, he had muscular tics, which indicated a nervous disorder such as absence seizures – a type of epilepsy. Inbreeding has been a problem among royal families for centuries as it promotes genetic mutations which express themselves in all manner of congenital defects and flaws. In short, it isn’t the way nature intends genes to be inherited as it has a tendency to amplify any miscodings in the DNA because closely related people are likely to share them and show a match.
Peter was born in Moscow as Peter Alexeyevich Romanov in 1672. He was not heir to the throne, but he was healthier and fitter than his elder half-brother Ivan V, who was sickly in body and mind – another product of inbreeding. So the boyars decided to make Peter the new tsar, as Peter I, in 1682, at the age of ten years. One of his half-sisters then led a bloody rebellion, which saw most of Peter’s relatives and friends savagely murdered. It is reckoned, with some justification, that Peter was traumatised by these events at such an impressionable age, so that he learnt to be ruthless in his political dealings from early on.
The rebellion, which became known as the Streltsy Uprising, forced Peter into a stalemate position so that he had to agree to a joint leadership, with both him and Ivan as tsars. Sophia Alekseyevna, the half-sister who had caused the rebellion, then took it upon herself to act as advisor, effectively controlling Peter and Ivan. In fact, she had a hole cut in the back of the double-throne, so that she could control matters of state by passing information to and fro. This is where the term ‘puppet ruler’ originates, as it was as if she operated them with her arms, like a pair of puppets.
Sophia remained quasi-ruler for seven years, until Peter decided enough was enough. She attempted a second rebellion but the Streltsy (royal armed guards) this time took the side of Peter. Sophia was forced into a convent, where she spent the rest of her days, having relinquished her titles and powers. She was lucky to escape with her life given the way she had treated Peter’s family and friends seven years beforehand.
Peter continued to reign alongside the invalided Ivan until 1696, when Ivan died. Peter then became sole ruler in both name and status, for until then his own mother had always had the last word, for she was officially regent. Peter was now twenty-four years of age and he had big plans for Russia. He immediately began implementing reforms in his aim to bring Russia in line with other powerful nations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Of particular interest to Peter were potential places to establish new Russian ports, so that sea trade could be expanded. At the time his only point of access to the world’s oceans was the port of Arkhangelsk on the White Sea, which joins the Arctic Ocean above Moscow and is therefore seasonally affected by temperatures. So Peter set his sights on the Black Sea, as he fancied his chances against the Ottomans, as opposed to the Swedes, who controlled the Baltic Sea. In 1697 he managed to seize Azov, on the north coast of the Black Sea, with the use of thirty new ships that were especially built for the task. He subsequently established a navy base at a place called Taganrog nearby, to make certain of his conquest.
Peter now embarked on a tour of Europe. His intention had been to form alliances against the Ottomans, but the European powers had other fish to fry. So Peter became the Renaissance man and used his time in Europe to learn as much as he could about Western cultures, especially their advances in science and technology, which he knew would be a useful knowledge base. He spent about a year on the road, travelling as far as London.
Then the Streltsy formed a rebellion in his absence, but Peter rushed back to Moscow and managed to quell an uprising. This was when he really began to show his mean streak. To make an example, over 1,200 mutineers were tortured and executed. Peter even mucked-in himself to show that he wasn’t about to let others do his dirty work for him. It is fair to assume that he was pretty miffed that he’d had his holiday cut short.
Peter had been so impressed by what he had seen abroad that he thought it best to mimic Western ways as a part of the modernisation process, in much the same way that so many countries are influenced by the US culture in these modern times. He ordered all members of court to ditch their traditional garb and begin wearing European clothing, which he viewed as more sophisticated. He also gave the thumbs down to beards and introduced a beard tax for those who just couldn’t give up their hirsute ways.
In order to fit in with the world at large, Peter even altered the Russian year and timeframe. He adopted the Julian calendar so that the year began on January 1st instead of September 1st. This also meant that years were counted from the birth of Jesus as dictated by Christianity. As it happened, Europe had taken up the Gregorian calendar in 1582, which was slightly more accurate, but the two were similar enough to be workable and Russia wouldn’t bother to change again until 1917, with the takeover of the Communists. Incidentally, it was they who killed off the Romanov lineage, too.
Having taken Azov back in 1697, Peter now managed to negotiate a peace treaty with the Ottomans. This enabled him to focus on the Baltic Sea. Peter made several attempts to oust the Swedes from the shores of the Baltic, but proved no match for the king of Sweden, Charles XII. By 1708, Charles had turned the tables and invaded Russia, but he was deterred from reaching Moscow by Peter managing to diminish the Swedish army’s supply of food. In much the same way as Hitler
in 1942, Charles XII was forced to retreat his forces, which had become demoralised by lack of food and the cold of the Russian winter.
Eventually, Peter managed to overpower the Swedish army in the Ukraine, sending Charles XII into exile with the Ottomans. This led Peter to make the mistake of attacking the Ottomans. After a disastrous campaign, Peter was forced to capitulate and, in so doing, lost his Black Sea ports. Charles XII was returned to Europe in the peace process and Peter resumed his efforts to take the eastern Baltic coast. Ultimately, Charles died in battle in 1718, enabling northern Europe to agree peace terms with Russia. Peter emerged triumphant, as he had managed to secure a portion of territory from Finland so that Russia had a major port on the Baltic coast at St Petersburg. Peter was so pleased that he made the city his new capital.
The remaining four years of Peter’s life were spent as emperor of the newly formed Russian Empire. His official title was ‘Peter the Great, Father of His Country, Emperor of All the Russians’. Naturally, just ‘Peter the Great’ stuck in the public consciousness. This was not least because most European nations refused to recognise him as an emperor anyway, as it implied superiority over the title of king. Peter was only fifty-two years old when he died of necrosis (gangrene) of the bladder in 1725. He had first become infected in 1723 and suffered surgery to release trapped urine, but the infection remained.
Peter the Great, like so many leaders of note, succeeded by cultivating a necessary ruthless streak. He learnt from his formative years that it would be necessary to rule with an iron rod if he expected to see his reforms put in place and to survive. He certainly did order the deaths of many, but always in a way calculated to make sure that his subjects realised that he meant business. Perhaps the most shocking example of this was the torture and execution of his own son Alexei, but this was because he had disobeyed the emperor and opposed official policies. Peter clearly put the future of his empire above all other concerns. Consequently, his memory is revered by some, vilified by others.
PART TWO: Tyrants and Despots
Pol Pot
The story of Pol Pot is what you get when you mix communist ideology with a lack of insight and wisdom. In short, his political ambitions were perhaps honourable, but he was woefully lacking in necessary intellectual calibre to bring his aims to fruition. As a result, he resorted to carnage as his primary means of people management, thereby exhausting his nation of the very people it needed to make his plan work.
Pol Pot’s real name was Saloth Sar. He was born in the country now known as Cambodia, but it was named Kampuchea 1976–89. The name ‘Pol Pot’ was an abbreviation of the French phrase politique potentielle, which translates as ‘political potential’. He earned the nickname because of his determination as leader of the communist movement in his country. The predominant ethnic group in Cambodia are the Khmer, so the communist movement became known as the Red Khmer, or Khmer Rouge in French, as red is the communist colour.
Saloth Sar was born into a reasonably well-to-do Cambodian family with connections to the royal family. His sister was a concubine to the king, which meant that Saloth had access to the palace and was able to rub shoulders with members of court. This is where Saloth began to cultivate delusions of grandeur, which would eventually manifest themselves in his political ambitions.
He was not blessed with the academic prowess he had hoped for and failed in his university studies in Cambodia. He eventually won a scholarship to study at a technical college in France, by which time his inferiority complex had germinated and taken root. It was at this time that he fell in with people of socialist leanings, who introduced him to the ideals of communism.
Then, in 1950, when Saloth was twenty-five years old, something radical happened in the neighbouring country of Vietnam. The French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français – PCF) took up the cause of the Vietnam government’s call for independence from colonial rule by the French. Cambodia was also under the colonial thumb of France and within a year Saloth had become a prominent figure in a communist cell affiliated with the PCF and known as the Marxist Circle (Cercle Marxiste).
The PCF was markedly anti-intellectual in its policies, enabling Saloth to quickly make a name for himself and, at the same time, nurture the growing chip on his shoulder about his academic failings. Suitably, he became the first member of the Marxist Circle to return to Cambodia, precisely because he had failed his exams in France and been dropped from college. He was thus able to get an early foothold in the political scene, which led to the independence of Cambodia in 1954.
As soon as Cambodia gained its independence, infighting began between political parties left and right of centre. The country effectively became a monarchy, with King Norodom Sihanouk manipulating things, so that politicians had to remain liberalist to stand any chance of enjoying the limelight. Leftists, such as Saloth, were marginalised and realised that they could only ever come to power by illegal means.
By the early 1960s, the king was beginning to actively persecute the communists. This led to the arrest and murder of the communist party leader Ton Samouth. As a result Saloth – by now known as Pol Pot – became acting leader by default. Pol Pot now went into hiding, where he forged alliances with Vietnamese guerrillas, whom he persuaded to help in establishing a base camp for the Cambodian communists. Between 1963 and 1967 the Khmer Rouge ideology was developed, and the movement grew in strength as many disaffected Cambodians volunteered to join.
In January 1968, the Khmer Rouge – proper name Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) – began its uprising against the existing seat of power. The rebellion saw the Khmer Rouge seize army weaponry and begin to establish its own arsenal. As the Khmer Rouge became increasingly powerful in military terms, so Pol Pot became more powerful within the party. He assumed absolute power, consigning his former power-sharing colleagues to positions below him. Pol Pot had metamorphosed into an omnipotent tyrant – a despot. All others had to defer to his wishes, and it only became possible to communicate with him if he chose to summon someone, but that was not necessarily a good thing.
The year 1969 was spent consolidating his position and then events in Cambodia began to assist Pol Pot in his ambitions. Tensions between the Cambodians and North Vietnamese (Viet Minh) had led to rioting in early 1970 because the Viet Minh wanted control of the peninsula. Insurgents blamed the king and his government for the troubles and demanded that he be removed from power. This gave Pol Pot his opportunity. He sided with the Vietnamese, who invaded much of Cambodia in the same year.
Warring between the Viet Minh–Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian government continued for five years. The communists were heavily funded by the communist Chinese government, which was naturally anti-imperialist. Gradually, the Khmer Rouge grew into a formidable communist army and Pol Pot became increasingly extremist in his leftist leanings. The true nature of the man’s insecurities revealed themselves as he banned students and the middle class from joining the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. Only those who came from the peasantry were allowed in, even though he himself had come from a privileged background.
Things began to get unsavoury in 1973, when Pol Pot introduced the torture and summary execution of anyone who stood against the Khmer Rouge. He also began ordering the populations of cities and towns to move away from their urban environments to work in the fields. The logic behind this policy was that a rural life would cause them to forget about their former capitalist ways. By 1974, Pol Pot had also planned to phase out the use of money so that people traded by barter as the ultimate two-fingered salute to capitalism.
The Khmer Rouge seized total control of Cambodia in April 1975. Then all hell let loose on the population. Pol Pot put to death all members of former government. He then began the systematic process of torturing and murdering anyone deemed to be unsuitable for his regime’s purposes. This meant anyone who was educated or privileged in any way. The Khmer Rouge used a proverb in summing up their attitude: ‘To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.�
�� That chilling sentence justified the extermination of perhaps two million people who were simply seen as surplus to requirements. They were known collectively as ‘depositees’.
Death camps and killing fields were used in this wholesale slaughter and burial of human life. Inevitably, in their desire to thin out the population, those who lost their lives to the Khmer Rouge also included people from ethnic and racial minorities, those with physical and mental disabilities, and anyone who even appeared to be more intelligent than they needed to be, such as those who wore glasses. The infamous S-21 camp was the sinister heart of the purging machine. It was where thousands were tortured into confessions before dying. Pol Pot justified these acts by claiming that the gleaned information provided useful intelligence for his government. In truth, it was a sadistic way of getting his own back on the memory of all those who had ever belittled him, either intellectually or aristocratically.
Ultimately, the Khmer Rouge shot itself in the foot and failed in its aims. With the deaths of so many able-bodied people, the Cambodian population might have been described as a body without a head. Pol Pot’s ideas failed to take account of the fact that intelligent and educated people are needed for any infrastructure to remain functional, whether communist in principle or otherwise. His lack of cognitive ability had let him down in a catastrophic way, seeing widespread famine and associated disease take a grip on his nation. To make matters worse, the Khmer Rouge rejected outside humanitarian aid when the world outside realised what was going on.