This leads towards people thinking that all you need to do to end a brutal dictatorship is to assassinate its leader and everyone will live happily thereafter. While an interesting plot for a movie, the real life works quite different from this overly simplistic understanding of how dictatorship works. In most cases assassinating the strongman will not only fail to end the regime, it also likely to make things even worse in the short term.
Regardless of whether a leader first took his power and build his governing team afterwards, like Putin, or already had an established party of loyal followers when they took the power, like Hitler, they are by far not the worst members of their respective regimes. The real purists and believers, who often have most power, typically stand one or two steps behind the throne, far enough to not be targeted, but close enough to "advise" the leader or to step up to keep things under control if something happens. I will analyse each of these regimes separately to explain why.
Sure, there is an off chance that the leader is also a lynchpin that hold the regime together. They were more in common in the past, Ivan IV the Terrible or Blackbeard are arguably the last of these types of rulers who ruled by intimidating court around them. Though Ivan the Terrible also had Maluta Skuratov to do that for him. It barely worked even then. Nowadays however, such arrangements are ultimately unstable and prone to collapse. You will never find it in any country of any level of significance, only in few peripheral African states where lack of any interest in their land prevented a more organised regime from displacing the current subpar one.
I will begin with Adolf Hitler. He was leader of NSDAP almost since the party inception and led it through pretty much every important event in its history. He wrote his autobiography, Mein Kampf, as an account of personalist struggle against the system, one man versus all the enemies combined, sounds heroic, isn't it? Nazi system was also infamous for its Fuhrer Princip that insisted absolute subordination to the leaders. Does not all that prove the idea that all the threads lead towards the man at the very top, the Fuhrer himself?
Turns out not so much. Sure, Hitler was the leader almost since the beginning, but the reason he was made leader in the first place was the fact that his speeches managed to attract the most approval of the general public. Public speaking is both a skill and an art, some can easily energise the crowd and get them to support your cause, others stumble to put words together. Hitler's oratorial skills paired with his personal appeal to people made him the perfect face of the party. Other members noticed that and made him a leader for that simple reason. Not because he is the one true Fuhrer, they all will follow all his words to the letter. The one true Fuhrer is merely a public image or a myth the party deliberately cultivated around their leader.
It is a smart strategy that any party or political movement will be wise to imitate. A true devout and uncompromising believer at the helm will repel the more moderate sections of society and party will forever remain a niche phenomenon with but a handful adherents. In contrast a charismatic worldly leader with broad appeal and ability to attract the undecided, will attract many more followers and will much more likely to propel the party into power. As Malcom Turnbull said, power is won in the center. Once a broadly appealing leader brought the party into power, the more radical members can take control of individual governmental departments and pursue their agenda from there.
Particularly in NSDAP it worked as follows. The real power behind the throne was the SS and its Reihs Fuhrer SS, Heinrich Himmler. SS stands for Schults Staffel or Hall Security, an un-descript name that hid the true importance this organisation had.
SS was essentially a state within the state that control both political and criminal police (infamous Gestapo and Cripo). They also run all the concentration camps and even had a private army called Waffen-SS with several elite divisions, like Das Reich and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler as well as divisions consistent of foreigners, sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
At first this strange combination of agencies under the control of the SS makes no sense at all. What criminal police has to do with foreign volunteers. However, it will make sense if you think of it as a measure to ensure the survival of the regime in the event of Hitler assassination or a military coup to remove him and Nazis from power. Cripo and Gestapo can go after the conspirators while Waffen-SS can be called for if military will bring their own divisions to support their bid for power.
SS came to be this way, when NSDAP took power, there was a surge of interest by various members of the Weimar elites to join the party. However, their reason to join was not because they suddenly seen the light of NSDAP vision and decided to contribute to the cause, but simply because they did not want to lose the power and influence, they had. The original members of the NSDAP liked to call these new members "beefsteak Nazis". As useful as they were, however, it was important to separate these new members from true believers in the cause. That is why Allgemeine-SS came to be, an inner party for true believers in the cause. The key agencies under the SS would be staffed with such core believers to ensure loyalty to the cause and to prevent the coup.
Because of that, as much as some wished to remove Hitler from power, the smarter of them would surely realise that Hitler's death will not result in regime or policy change. Himmer and the SS will be able to remove anyone they dislike from power and replace them with someone who will continue the Nazi policies. If anything, assassination of Hitler would only make things worse as it will provoke the hornets' nest of the SS, fill it with vengeance and make them go after the conspirators until all of them are dead.
However, what if the person without any party comes to power and becomes a dictator. Sure, it all should hinge on them and if they are removed from power, dictatorship will end, right? There are even some historical examples of that, like death of Franko in Spain lead towards democratic transition.
Again no. Franko is partially an exception as he originally was supported by monarchists who wished for restoration of monarchy and Franko promised them just that to win their support during the Civil War. Once in power, he made himself a regent for a temporarily missing King. Eventually he appointed son of the previous king as his designated successor but said he could only take power once he learned how to govern. After Franko's death monarchy was restored. Democratisation came later and only with personalist approval of the new King, that kept military and other conservative Spainards if not happy, but content.
As a general rule that does not work either. The reason for that is the simple fact that if a dictator has someone in their inner cycle, who is more charismatic, popular and likable than they are, it will be far too easy for such a person to eventually organise a coup and take power. Even if they themselves are not very coup prone, the court (elites) around them will organise the coup themselves and then give power to this person.
Because of that, smart dictators always surround themselves with people who are more brutal, uncompromising and stupid than themselves. It's a simple matter of survival and self-preservation. The court will not plot a coup if every potential replacement is a magnetite worse than the current leader. Foreign special forces will not assassinate them for exact the same reason.
A good example of that will be Putin in modern Russia. Since war in Ukraine has begun, many called for his assassination or a coup, but this have not materialised. The reason for that is that all the people close to the throne are both more radical and more uncompromising than Putin himself. As much as one wish to see someone who will end the war to take Putin's place, when you look at actual people around him, such prospects seem unlikely.
To begin with there is Dmitri Medvedev. He already been President between 2008 and 2012 and then Prime Minister from 2012 to 2020 so he has all the experience one could possibly wish for and theoretically could have built, himself a power base of those who want alternative to Putin. He did not build anything, however. Nowadays he spends his time tweeting nuclear threats to the West, clearly indicating that things will only get worse if he will be in charge again. He is either a very good team player who cleverly props Putin up or a very stupid man who drags his own chances at leadership into the ground.
There is also current Prime Minister, Michail Mishustin, who, per Russian constitution, will officially succeed Putin as acting President in case of latter's resignation or death. Early elections will be called within 3 months of Putin's death, but until then and sometime before new President's inauguration, Mishustin will be in charge.
Big and bulky, dull but intimidating looking man, Mishustin is a former tax collection boss, Russian analogue of head of IRS. In his time there he was famous for figuring out ways to squeeze more money from businesses that ever before. Mishustin has zero reasons to be liked by anyone, and I doubt anyone in Russia would be happy to see him replacing Putin as president.
Some also named Igor Sechin as potential successor, but there is nothing that would indicate that he will be any less militaristic than Putin. If anything, he looks much more of a hardliner than bad-Vlad.
Just like that the idea that Putin can be replaced with someone who will end the war, crashes against the reality when you start looking at actual people who are in any position to replace him.
Sure, there could be someone further away from the throne, but they are too far to actually make it to the throne in case of vacancy. The further person away from the throne, the more extensive will be the changes they will make to the existing hierarchy and pecking order. Everyone will much rather be surrounded by loyalists they could trust instead of the people who were close to the previous leader. Because of that the further the person away from power, the less likely the court will consider them as a viable replacement for the current ruler. That is just common sense as a survival strategy for the court members, that is doubly important in a country that murdered so many politicians like Navalny, Nemtsov or Politkovskaya.
Fundamentally Putin's system is not that different from the one of the Nazis. In both cases the leader is mostly a public face of the system and the real power, or the guardians stand couple of steps behind the throne. In both cases should something happen to the leader, it will not lead to regime change or even policy change, instead a swarm of angry inner cycle people will go after the perpetrators and will likely kill them in retaliation.
Both NSDAP and Putin's regime have an opaque and obscure inner cycle that de facto runs the state. In case of NSDAP many were early members and founders of the party, in case of Putin most of his inner cycle were his friends and associates from way before he became President. Now some these people hold some key positions withing the official government or key corporations like Gasprom or Rosneft, while others stay hidden in shadows pretending to be average unconcerned citizens, but secretly monitor situation for the regime while also ready to replace more visible members if something happens to them.
Russia too has several obscurely named agencies like federal guardian service (FSO), that are actually among the most powerful people in the system simply because they serve as bodyguards for visible VIPs like Putin. The looks of Putin himself have changed over time and that does not look like ageing. Possibly there is no any real Putin at all and Putin is just a symbol of the system, played by variety of body doubles over time. There possibly was some original Putin at some time, but it could also be that he was always fake and entirely fictional from the very beginning.
All that however does not mean that systems cannot be dismantled and elites that have stranglehold on power cannot be removed. It's just that one had to go deeper than just the leader. One has to analyse the system, find its key pillars and members and then hit them all simultaneously. If done right, the system will not be able to respond timely and will lose grip on power.
However, for every puppet master who pulls the strings of public figures from the shadows, there could be someone even more hidden who pulls theirs and even one above that one as well. I am not saying that something like Zionist conspiracy, Masoning Lodges or Bavarian Illuminati control the world, I am merely saying that it is much safer to pull strings from the shadows, because then your enemies will do not know who to go after and if they take your puppets down, you can find replacement ones.
Dictatorships and some other political systems are not as simple as public imagines them to be. There is more behind the throne that initially meets the eye. Before going after the throne, make sure you know of all the hidden pillars that prop it.
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