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In this edition of the program Vladimir Zhamkin remembers
the Portuguese strongman Antonio di Oliveira Salazar.
Was Portugal really a dictatorship on his watch? Of course
it was. But a very strange one too. A dictatorship where capital
punishment was abolished, at least on paper. A dictatorship where the strongman
saw himself just as a temporary manager called to national duty from a
professor’s lectern. Each year, for three long decades, he would
humbly ask the University of Coimbra Chancellor to please extend for another
year his academic leave so that he could properly execute his duties as
the head of state. And each year permission was granted allowing
Professor Salazar to keep working on.
The dictator lived in a small two-room apartment in the capital
Lisbon regularly paying the rent. Academics had always been his soft
spot and the people he always felt himself at ease dealing with.
University professors led almost half of his ministries, small wonder that
his were the best-educated governments which ever ruled in the 20th century.
Lawyers from his alma mater were the people Salazar most confided in.
His Coimbra University pals became the backbone the Salazar regime, the
best and most loyal executors of his ideas. Like any other ultimate scholar,
Salazar was more than just a lone bachelor, he was an ascetic. Going through
a fiery, albeit, bungled love affair early on, he vowed to never get into
such trifles again and devoted himself wholly to science. Born in
1889 into the family of a local tavern owner in the village of Santa Comba,
Salazar later entered the law department of one of Europe’s oldest and
most respected universities at Coimbra founded back in the 16th century.
Quickly posting himself at the head of his class and the university’s political
fraternity, Salazar became a very active Christian Democrat. That signaled
the start of a very long and extremely successful political career.
In 1926 General Antonio Carmona led a military coup and Antonio
Salazar was quickly invited to take up the post of Finance Minister.
He agreed only to stomp out three days later making it clear to the public
that the generals had no idea of what they were going to do with the country.
When the world economic crisis hit shortly after, however, Salazar returned
to the Cabinet on condition that he be given unlimited economic powers.
Before long he managed to do away with the towering budget deficit, stabilizing
the national currency, slashing state spending and winning kudos from both
the populace and Big Business. His personal modesty a widely known
fact, Salazar in 1932 was promoted to Prime Minister becoming the country’s
de facto ruler.
On the international scene his ways were equally unorthodox.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War found him in strong support of General
Francisco Franco nearly 30,000 Portuguese volunteers were now fighting
for. Proud and ambitious as he was, Franco was a lifelong admirer
of Salazar’s. Salazar, for his part, always despised Adolf Hitler whom
he called an upstart and a demagogue. Hundreds of thousands of Jews escaped
elimination thanks to entry visas issued them by the Portuguese. Portugal
effectively served as a staging post for Jewish emigration through the
entire duration of World War Two. From the very start of the war
Portugal was foursquare on the Allies’ side. The state-controlled media
was ordered to tone down its anti-Soviet propaganda and Salazar never missed
a chance to heap praise on the steadfastness and heroism displayed by the
Russian people. He was much less lenient towards his very own Communists
though, seeing them as an epitome of atheistic and anti-scientific chaos.
A lean but mean political police was set up to suppress internal Communism
and, lest they sing out of control, he held daily briefings with their
heads.
The years of authoritarian rule took their toll though and
when in 1958 Salazar’s handpicked presidential candidate faced off with
the charismatic hopeful General Umberto Delgao, Salazar preferred to call
of the elections to losing it altogether. He later authorized the
assassination of the popular General who by then had already left the country.
The political fallout was quick and devastating. Ostracized even
by its allies Portugal found itself in complete international isolation.
Two years before his death, the dictator suffered a brain hemorrhage. Virtually
incapacitated, he still clung to power and until his very death in 1970
he had improvised Cabinet meetings held right in his hospital room. Even
dying, the dictator refused to accept the inevitable…
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