Mengistu Haile Mariam

Mengistu Haile Mariam rose from a representative of the Derg’s Third Division to the dominant ruler of Ethiopia, then made the former emperor’s palace a stage for a revolution that reproduced the hierarchy it had promised to abolish. The book presents him as both an ambitious political survivor and an emblem of the iron law of oligarchy: a new ruling group could displace an old one yet revive its privileges, methods of rule, and extractive institutions, with consequences more devastating than the original order.

Rise within the Derg

The Derg emerged from 108 representatives of military units across Ethiopia. Mengistu, then a major, represented the Third Division in Harar province. In its initial declaration on July 4, 1974, the group professed loyalty to Emperor Haile Selassie, but soon began arresting government officials to test the strength of opposition. As the officers concluded that support for the emperor’s regime was hollow, they arrested Selassie on September 12. Executions of leading figures from the old government followed, and by December the Derg had declared Ethiopia a socialist state.

The new government did not establish its authority through political openness. In 1975, the Derg began nationalizing property, including urban and rural land and most forms of private property. Its increasingly authoritarian conduct provoked opposition across the country. Independence movements arose in Eritrea and Tigray in response to the regime’s repression, while the Somali army invaded the Somali-speaking Ogaden. The Derg itself fractured into rival factions. Mengistu proved the most ruthless and politically adept among them: by mid-1977, he had eliminated his principal opponents and effectively taken charge. The regime was saved from collapse later that November by a large influx of weapons and troops from the Soviet Union and Cuba.

The palace and the return of imperial power

By 1978, Mengistu was the Derg’s unchallenged leader. At a national celebration marking the fourth anniversary of Haile Selassie’s overthrow, he watched the parade from a gilded armchair. He had chosen Selassie’s Grand Palace as his residence, and official functions were again held there, with Mengistu seated on the former emperor’s throne. He also began comparing himself to Emperor Tewodros, who had refounded the Solomonic Dynasty after a period of decline.

The setting made the political reversal plain. Selassie had ruled from the palace as the head of an extractive system, dispensing favors and patronage while punishing disloyalty; the Derg had seized power in the name of revolution. Yet Mengistu occupied the same imperial residence and used its symbols of sovereignty. The change in leadership did not, by itself, undo the concentration of power that had defined the monarchy.

Revolutionary ideals reversed

Dawit Wolde Giorgis, one of Mengistu’s ministers, recalled that the early revolutionary leadership rejected signs of wealth and bourgeois respectability: cars and suits were shunned, and even neckties were treated as suspect. Around 1978, he said, this rejection gave way to a new official culture in which material comfort became accepted and then expected. Senior officials and members of the Military Council wore designer clothes from leading European tailors and enjoyed the best homes, cars, whiskey, champagne, and food. Giorgis described this as a complete reversal of the revolution’s ideals.

He also recalled the change in Mengistu’s conduct after he became sole ruler. Colleagues who had once spoken to him informally began standing stiffly to attention and addressing him with a more formal pronoun. Mengistu moved into a larger, more lavish office in Menelik’s palace and began using the emperor’s cars. Giorgis’s account culminates in the paradox at the heart of Mengistu’s rule: a revolution ostensibly committed to equality had produced a leader who, in the minister’s judgment, had become a new emperor.

Repression, famine, and the iron law of oligarchy

The book places Mengistu’s rise within a broader pattern in which leaders who seize power promising radical change reproduce the institutions and practices of those they replace. It describes this recurrence through Robert Michels’s “iron law of oligarchy”: hierarchical organizations tend to recreate oligarchic power even when a new group takes control. Mengistu’s return to imperial surroundings and privileges makes that pattern concrete. The Marxist officer who took power after the monarchy came to rule from the emperor’s palace, enrich himself and his entourage, and preside over a system of coercion and extraction.

The repetition was not merely symbolic. The Derg’s policies brought recurring famine to Ethiopia’s fertile lands. A famine in Wollo province in 1973 had helped solidify opposition to Haile Selassie, whom the book describes as apparently indifferent to it. Mengistu’s regime made famine an instrument of politics, using it to weaken opponents. The contrast marks an escalation: where the former emperor had been indifferent, Mengistu treated famine as a means of rule. In the book’s account, the old tragedy returned in a distorted and more cruel form, exposing the human cost of a revolution that changed the ruler without delivering its promised break with the past.