Presented here is perhaps the only psychoanalytic study of villainy, careerism, and lust for power. The author offers a kind of political-technological analysis of the life and rapid ascent of Count A. A. Arakcheyev, who managed to become a figure of influence at the courts of Paul I and Alexander I, effectively concentrating in his hands control of the State Council, the Committee of Ministers, and his own Imperial Majesty’s Chancellery.
As the author shows, Arakcheyev was marked by the psychology of a slave—one who bends before the powerful of this world and destroys those beneath him. A slave whose cruelty had no equal among his fellow countrymen.