Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Beria telephoned the investigating magistrate. When he arrived, Beria explained that he was the Chief of the Secret Police in Georgia and informed the magistrate that the girl had had a few glasses of wine. A little drunk, she had become hysterical and run out into the garden where she had committed suicide. No autopsy was necessary. A statement signed by the First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Committee of the Communist Party, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, corroborated by the Secretary of the Executive Committee of Abkhazia, Nestor Lakoba, would do. All the magistrate had to do was inform the dead girl’s father about the unfortunate accident.

  Next day, Beria went back to Tbilisi.

  * * *

  As a fellow Georgian, Beria was one of the few people Stalin could trust, so his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party was effortless. In 1938, he moved to Moscow to head the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs — the NKVD — and ran the huge chain of labour camps that spread across the Soviet Union.

  As deputy premier in charge of both internal security and war production, it is hard to work out when Beria could have had time for all his womanizing. Nevertheless, Moscow was abuzz with rumours of him seducing-or raping-young girls, but the truth was not widely known until after Stalin’s death in 1953, when Beria lost out in a power-struggle to Nikita Khrushchev.

  When Beria was finally arrested during the struggle for power, one of his bodyguards produced a list of thirty-nine women with whom Beria had had sexual relations. He also claimed, rightly, that Beria had contracted syphilis in 1943. At Beria’s trial another bodyguard said that he had been employed to pick up women in the street and transport them to Beria’s home, where Beria raped them. U.S. embassy staff corroborated this. Their residence was in the same street as Beria’s home and they saw girls brought there late at night in a limousine.

  Beria did not confine his activities to his office. At night, he would often risk taking girls back to his villa, despite the presence of his wife. To keep them quiet, his victims would be plied with wine until they fell asleep. Then Beria would rape them.

  Outside Moscow, he was no better. The Minister of Culture for Georgia told of going for a ride in Beria’s cherished speedboat. Out in the lake, they came across a young woman swimmer, a member of a local sports club. Beria stopped the boat and insisted that she climb aboard. Then he began making lewd remarks and indicated his desire to seduce her, though she was plainly terrified of him. He turned to the Minister and told him to jump overboard and swim to the shore. When the poor man said he could not swim, Beria pushed him overboard. He would have drowned if he had not been spotted by one of Beria’s bodyguards who was watching from the shore and sent out a boat to rescue him.

  Beria had a proclivity for sportswomen. He insisted on having the pick of the female athletes who travelled from Georgia to Moscow for the annual Day of Physical Culture.

  The NKVD kept a special watch on the intelligentsia, while Beria himself kept a close eye on young actresses. He had an affair with Nina Alekseeka, a member of the Ensemble of Song and Dance that was sent to Finland in 1940 to entertain the troops.

  After Beria’s arrest, his office was searched. Love letters and items of women’s clothing were found. Beria’s son, Sergo, leapt to his father’s defence, but even he was forced to admit that Beria had a secret love child.

  Stalin, of course, knew all along what Beria was getting up to. The Soviet historian Dimitri Volkogonov said: “Even though he professed to value asceticism and puritanism, the General Secretary must have known that Beria was a notorious profligate.”

  It is said that Stalin laughed when he heard of some of Beria’s escapades. Beria even tried it on with a close friend of Stalin’s, Eugenia Aleksandrovna, in front of Uncle Joe himself. One evening, at dinner, he put his hand on her knee under the table.

  Joseph, he’s trying to squeeze my knee!” she said loudly. The whole table looked at Beria. That didn’t mean he didn’t try again.

  Nadya, Stalin’s wife, hated Beria and warned her husband against him, but he took no notice. There is even a picture of Beria with Svetlana sitting on his lap. He has his arms around her and she is looking very uncomfortable.

  During his trial Beria was accused of being an “imperialist agent” and conducting “anti-party and anti-state activities”, along with four counts of rape. The indictment cited orgies with teenaged girls incarcerated in his villa in Georgia as well as the girls he abducted and raped in Moscow. He was found guilty of all charges in December 1953 and immediately executed.

  4. HANGING OUT WITH MUSSOLINI

  There was nothing furtive about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s sex life. In fact, he could have been a Democrat. He had all the wham, bam thank you ma’am of a JFK or a Lyndon Johnson.

  During his teens, he admitted to undressing every girl with his eyes. Even before he was eighteen, when he was at school in Forlimpopoli, he would visit the local brothel. In an early fragment of an autobiography written during one of his frequent periods of imprisonment, he described having sex with a whore whose “flaccid body exuded sweat from every pore”.

  It also told how he seduced his cousin and a number of her friends, but these encounters were usually quick and unpleasant. He described his first brutal sexual encounter with a country girl named Virginia. She was “poor… but she had a nice complexion” and “was reasonably good-looking”.

  “One day I took her upstairs, threw her onto the floor behind the door, and made her mine. She got up, crying and insulting me between her sobs. She said that I had violated her honour. I probably had. But what sort of honour can she have meant?”

  These passages are, of course, omitted from his official autobiography published in 1939.

  His first steady sexual partner was the Russian socialist agitator Angelica Balabanoff. She was fourteen years his senior and soon got tired of the violent, egotistical youth.

  When he was nineteen, Mussolini spent four months working as a schoolteacher in Gualtieri. There he met a woman named Luiga. She was the wife of a soldier, a beautiful girl of twenty and he treated her ruthlessly.

  “I accustomed her to my exclusive and tyrannical love,” he said. “She obeyed me blindly, and I did what I liked with her.”

  He bullied and abused her, and once stabbed her in the thigh. He always made love to her savagely and selfishly in a way that characterized all his affairs.

  Mussolini saw himself primarily as a man of action. He could not hang around in a small Italian town, teaching a class of forty children. He had to get out and make his mark on the world. In June 1902, he travelled to Switzerland without a penny. He slept under bridges, in public lavatories and, occasionally, with a medical student, a Polish refugee whose lovemaking he said was “unforgettable”. Around this time he contracted venereal disease from a married woman who was “fortunately older and less strong than I was” and who, as always, “loved me madly”.

  He returned to Italy to become a journalist and political agitator, getting himself arrested regularly. During a brief period of freedom in 1909, he was living at his father’s house when he fell in love with Augusta Guidi, the older of the two daughters of his father’s sullen mistress, Anna. He decided that he would marry her, but she thought he was much too unstable. She married a man with regular work as a gravedigger instead. So Mussolini turned his attention to Augusta’s younger sister, Rachele, who gossips referred to as his half-sister.

  Mussolini had just finished his one and only published novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress, which was serialized in Il Popolo d’Italia. It was not well received, but Rachele liked it. One of the most sympathetic characters, the maid who gives her life to save her mistress, was called Rachele.

  One night, after they returned home to his father’s house from an outing to the theatre, Mussolini demanded that Rachele be allowed to live with him. Anna, her mother, would not countenance it, so Mussolini produced a pistol and said: “You see this revolver, Signora Guidi? It holds six bullets. If Rachele tu
rns me down, there will be a bullet in it for her and five for me. It’s for you to choose.”

  Anna gave the couple her blessing. A few days later, Mussolini rented two cramped damp rooms in Forli.

  “We moved into the place one night,” Rachele recalled. “I remember how tired and happy he was perhaps a little uncertain of my reaction because the marriage papers were not yet ready. But I understood I saw the man of my heart there before me, eagerly awaiting the only gift life could give him — my love. His young face was already lined by his daily struggle. There was no hesitation. I went with him.”

  Life together was hard. Mussolini was offered a job as editor of a newspaper in Brazil which he was tempted to take; but Rachele’s pregnancy, with the first of their five children, prevented him from accepting it.

  Rachele, Mussolini and their growing brood lived together in the two rooms for three years. He became the Secretary of the Forli Socialist Federation, and used his wages to fund his own weekly paper La Lotta di Classe — “The Class Struggle”. He wrote all four pages of it himself, drank wine with his friends and, occasionally, pinched the bottom of a pretty girl. But for the time being he remained faithful.

  He also wrote another novel, this time about the Archduke Ferdinand who committed suicide with his seventeen-year-old mistress at Mayerling. It remained unpublished. Like The Cardinal’s Mistress, it was practically soft porn. Throughout his life Mussolini had a taste for cheap and erotic novels.

  Gradually, La Lotta di Classe became influential. As his message spread, Mussolini began to spend more time away from home. The temptation this put in his way proved irresistible.

  By the time Mussolini came to power, he was insatiable. He compulsively sexually confronted any women who came up to his hotel room, or the flat he had in the palazzo in the Via Rasella. There were no ifs or buts and no niceties. He simply took them with a frantic passion. He rarely bothered with a bed, preferring to do it on the floor or against the edge of his desk. The act was perfunctory. He would not bother to take off his trousers or his shoes. The whole thing would be over in a minute or two.

  As a young man he had preferred intellectual women, especially schoolteachers, but as he grew older, anyone would do provided they were not too skinny. He liked his lovers to smell a lot. He particularly liked the smell of sweat, though a strong scent was good too. He was not that clean himself, often dabbing himself with Cologne rather than washing with soap and water. He often did not bother to shave; once he even turned up unshaven at an official reception fir the King and Queen of Spain.

  The sexual act was always performed purely for his own gratification. He thought of neither the woman’s pleasure nor her comfort. But the women did not seem to mind. Without the tiniest preamble, he would launch himself on female journalists, the wives of party members, actresses, maids, countesses and foreign visitors. Afterwards, they would speak of their sexual encounter with him with pride. Many said they enjoyed his no-nonsense approach. They liked the brutal carnality of it. As he reached a climax, he would curse violently; then, for a moment, he would be tender. Sometimes, when he lifted himself from a woman’s body, he would take up his violin and play something beautiful. The whole experience of sex was unselfconscious and animal though, once he was satisfied, women seemed to perceive in him a deep affection.

  One of his casual lovers said that, at first, she was repelled by his clumsy attempt at foreplay, which amounted to roughly squeezing her breasts before he forced himself upon her. But afterwards, she found herself going back to him because she was unable to resist “a man of such importance”.

  Mussolini had a free hand because Rachele did not want to come to live in Rome. She was conscious that she looked and talked like a peasant. In Rome, she felt gauche and out of place. She also knew of his many mistresses. Often, when he said he was visiting his family, he was staying with one of them, Margherita Sarfatti. But it did not bother her. He loved his family and the marriage was a happy one. Hard-working and longsuffering, she was the perfect Fascist wife.

  His love of sex and children was soon turned into public policy. He urged a doubling of the birth-rate. Italy needed large families, he said, to have more soldiers. He imposed a tax on

  “unjustified celibacy”, while employers were told to discriminate in favour of family men.

  Hypocritically, he imposed severe punishment for adultery — harsher for women than for men. Closer to his heart, he made it an offence to infect anyone with syphilis. He was also against modern dancing, which he complained was “immoral and improper” and he tried to regulate Rome’s decadent night life. The pope applauded, but complained that there were still nude shows in defiance of the law.

  Il Duce was deeply devoted to his five children and the Italian press portrayed him as uomo casalingo — the perfect family man. But it was hard to hush up some of his not-so-homeloving activities and scandalous stories about his sexual activities leaked to the foreign press.

  One of his early mistresses was a neurotic woman named Ida Dalser. They had lived together on and off until 1915, when he abandoned her. She had a physically deformed and mentally retarded son, Benito Albino, whom Mussolini acknowledged as his own although he had a horror of deformity and illness.

  When Mussolini broke off the affair with her, she had to be confined to a mental hospital. From as early as 1913, she began claiming that he had promised to marry her. Sometimes she changed her story and claimed that she had actually married him — and she was not going to be bought off with maintenance money for the child. When he was still a journalist on Il Popolo d’Italia in Milan, she stood outside the offices with her son and shouted up to Mussolini to tome down if he dared. His response was simple and direct. He came to the window with a pistol.

  Later, she set fire to a room in the Hotel Bristol in Trento, screaming hysterically that she was the wife of Il Duce. She died in a mental hospital in Venice in 1935. Their son Benito was confined to an asylum in Milan, where he died in 1942.

  * * *

  Mussolini seduced the anarchist intellectual Leda Rafanelli in 1913. Only later did she discover that he was married. He explained that Rachele did not mind his infidelity. He wanted to continue the affair, claiming that every good newspaper editor needed a talented woman as an official mistress.

  Another woman who Mussolini said “loved me madly” was Margherita Sarfatti, the art critic of Avanti! She became the editor of the Fascist magazine Gerarchia, ghosted articles in American magazines for him and wrote his official biography, which ends with a description of “his eyes shining with an interior fire”. The affair lasted into the 1930s. She was his official mistress, Clara Petacci’s only serious rival, but she eventually fell foul of Mussolini’s anti Jewish legislation.

  In 1937, the French actress Fontanges, who was also a journalist under her real name Magda Coraboeuf, came to Rome to interview Mussolini for La Liberte. After the interview, she refused to return to Paris until he had made love to her. He did so, violently. The first time they had intercourse, he tried to strangle her with a scarf.

  “I stayed in Rome for two months and Il Duce had me twenty times,” she told the press.

  Desperate to hush up the story, Mussolini made it clear to both the police and the French embassy that Mademoiselle Coraboeuf had outstayed her welcome. Magda reacted violently. She tried to poison herself. When that failed, she shot and wounded the French ambassador, who she blamed for having lost her “the love of the world’s most wonderful man”. She was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for malicious wounding. In her flat, police found over three hundred photographs of Mussolini.

  After the war, she was imprisoned again for having been an agent for the Axis powers. She eventually succeeded in poisoning herself in Geneva in 1960.

  Mussolini was not incapable of sustaining a long-term relationship, though. In 1932, he was being driven to Ostia in his official Alfa Romeo when, at the roadside, he saw a pretty young girl waving and shouting “Duce! Duce!
” as he went by. Mussolini told his driver to stop. He got out and walked back to her.

  When he spoke to her, she started trembling with excitement. Her name was Clara Petacci. She was the wife of an Italian Air Force officer, whom she later divorced. Mussolini had him posted to Japan to get him out of the way.

  Clara was twenty-four (Mussolini was fifty-three) . She had green eyes, long, straight legs and heavy breasts which Mussolini adored. Her voice was husky and her teeth were small, but she learned to smile with her lips only slightly parted. She was a hypochondriac, sentimental, rather stupid and utterly devoted to Il Duce. He felt the same about her, even taking time off from making the trains run on time to be at her bedside when she had her appendix removed after a near-fatal bout of peritonitis.

  But when it came to sex, he was no more gentle and considerate with her than he had been with any of his other lovers. Mussolini gave her a flat at the Palazzo Venezia, where he would have sex with her between one meeting and the next. Perversely, the relationship worked. She stayed with him for the next thirteen years and, when escape was possible, she chose to die at his side in 1945.

  She knew that he would not leave his wife and family for her, and she knew that he was not faithful to her. Nevertheless she would wait in her apartment, hour after hour, reading love stories, drawing designs for new clothes, painting her nails, or simply staring out of the window or into the mirror. Often he would not turn up until ten o’clock at night. Sometimes not at all, and she would curse the old countesses he was making love to on the black velvet sofa downstairs.

  While she tolerated these little peccadilloes, she constantly worried about losing Mussolini’s love. She fretted that he might go back to an old mistress or find a new one. Angela Curti or Margherita Sarfatti were two names that constantly cropped up; and she heard that there was another woman called Irma who was trying to take him away from her.