Why We Weep When Dictators Die

The Iranian state television announcer was gasping for air. I almost felt bad for him. That's how hard he was weeping when he delivered the news of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's demise. He reached for a tissue, blew his nose. His cheeks glistened. This wasn't Walter Cronkite choking up for a second while delivering the news of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The Iranian announcer was heaving.

In New York City, Masih Alinejad, a dissident who'd been targeted for death by the Islamic Republic, burst into the streets when she heard the news. "The dictator of my country is dead! He's dead!" she shouted, wailing hoarsely. A stranger stopped to hug her—uncertain whether she was experiencing joy or sadness, relief or exhaustion.

The Emotional Deluge of Dictatorial Deaths

Such torrential downpours, from loyalists and dissenters alike, often follow the deaths of notorious long-ruling dictators—Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein. When North Korean leader Kim Jong Il succumbed to a heart attack in 2011, crowds of hundreds bawled loudly in unison; others fell to the ground and shook in their grief.

Did they love the man who starved them and trapped them like rats in a cage? Were they performing for the state to avoid suspicions of disloyalty? Or were they really mourning? And if so, for what exactly?

People don't shed tears for the same reasons. The Iranian announcer was grieving the loss of a "father," while for Alinejad and countless other Iranians, the vaporized man was a villain who'd micromanaged every aspect of their lives, perhaps ordered their friends tortured and killed. There are tears of anger and tears of deliverance, and they don't always look different.

When the Compass Shatters

Ad Vingerhoets, a scholar of crying and author of Why Only Humans Weep, writes that "the most common emotional trigger is a feeling of powerlessness or helplessness." What could be more destabilizing than the loss of the Great Leader? If Mao was, as Communist propaganda claimed, the "reddest, reddest sun," wouldn't an eclipse make humans howl in confusion and fear?

In 1986, on the tenth anniversary of Mao's death, oral histories from Chinese citizens appeared in the Los Angeles Times. "I was shocked. Mao dead?" said student Shen Ji. "The first words we learned to speak were 'Long Live Chairman Mao.' He was God. God never dies."

Another respondent was overwhelmed because as a boy he'd been told Mao could live 10,000 years, and he believed it. Shen described crying out of self-pity because other students could produce tears but he couldn't. What would this mean for his future in the Communist Party? "My classmates were crying so rhythmically that I began to feel deep admiration, and jealousy. My heart ached. And then—my eyes moistened."

The Collapse of Predictability

What collapses with the dictator is what dictators spend their long reigns reordering around themselves: predictability. Even those who hated the ayatollah have now entered a story without its reliable antagonist.

Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky wrote "Reflections on a Spawn of Hell" on the 20th anniversary of Stalin's death—leaving no mistake about his feelings. Yet he completely understood the copious tears that flowed through Russian gutters in March 1953. Stalin had been as reliable a presence as the sky for three decades, "no matter how nightmarish it had been."

Citizens were used to him, "as people get used to the portrait of a relative or to an old lamp." People grew up, married, divorced, had children, got old—"and all the time the portrait of Stalin hung over their heads. There was some reason to weep."

Living Inside Their Heads

For Soviets, Stalin was "a category of consciousness"—meaning he lived inside their heads. This was true for Khamenei as well. For three decades, the Iranian leader set the boundaries for morality, for thought, for what could be spoken and what could be worn. He reached into the most private parts of people's lives.

Just last month he committed mass murder against those who dared protest his regime. In his white beard and black robe, he was represented by the state as an eternal being, a total master of his domain. Shiite Muslims, for whom he was religious and not just political leader, were crying in Tehran's streets, describing themselves as "orphans."

The Inherited Sickness

It's easy to reduce these tears to simple expressions of happiness or sadness. But recognizing their deeper source reveals much more troubling implications for what happens next. You can't just wipe away that feeling of rupture, or the decades of fear that preceded it. People become comfortable with the reality they know; they'll mourn even an abusive father, and might require a lifetime to overcome the abuse.

Poet Osip Mandelstam was one of Stalin's many victims. His widow, Nadezhda, described the regime's reverberations for both supporters and opponents. "Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit again for civic life," she wrote in 1970, more than three decades after Mandelstam died in a labor camp.

"It is an illness that is passed on to the next generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps only the grandchildren begin to get over it—or at least it takes on a different form with them."

The answer may determine whether Iran's next chapter writes itself in hope or chaos.