Top 10 Times One Person Destroyed a Government

#10: Julius Caesar

Roman Republic

Caesar’s bid for personal power ended the Roman Republic as a functioning constitutional order. Crossing the Rubicon in 49 BCE triggered civil war; victories over Pompey and the senatorial coalition let him centralize authority. He stacked the Senate with loyalists, pushed aside the assemblies, controlled magistracies, and accumulated extraordinary powers before being named dictator perpetuo in 44 BCE. Reforms like the Julian calendar served statecraft while tightening his grip. His assassination did not restore the res publica: instead, it opened the door to another round of civil wars and, ultimately, the era of the Principate. The result was irreversible: the Republic’s checks and rotating offices gave way to a permanent, personal regime that set the template for Roman imperial rule.

#9: Muammar Gaddafi

Libya

A 27-year-old captain toppled King Idris in 1969, scrapped the 1951 constitution, and dissolved parliament: the Revolutionary Command Council ruled by fiat. In 1977 Gaddafi proclaimed the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” replacing ministries and a legislature with Basic People’s Congresses and People’s Committees that pretended to be direct democracy while Revolutionary Committees enforced loyalty and silenced dissent. The Libyan People’s Court was for the people in name only, and the Green Book functioned as a pseudo-constitution. The result was a hollowed-out state: a system designed to be ungovernable without him. When his regime fell in 2011, Libya didn’t transition: it fractured, proving how thoroughly he had tanked the government he replaced.

#8: Pol Pot

Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh and then erased the Cambodian state on principle. Cities were emptied, markets and money abolished, ministries dissolved, religion and schooling banned. Civil servants, professionals, and perceived “old society” elements were purged or worked to death; security centers like S-21 institutionalized torture and execution. Under the banner of “Year Zero,” the regime reorganized the country into agrarian communes that answered only upward: to Pol Pot himself. The toll was catastrophic: as many as two million dead and no functioning institutions left to inherit. Vietnam’s 1978 intervention toppled Democratic Kampuchea, but the damage was done: Pol Pot didn’t capture a government so much as liquidate one.

#7: Augusto Pinochet

Chile

On 11 September 1973, Pinochet led the armed forces in toppling President Salvador Allende. La Moneda was bombed, Congress dissolved, and the 1925 constitution suspended. Pinochet’s junta created the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (or National Intelligence Directorate) to detain, torture, disappear, and exile opponents while censoring media and criminalizing dissent. Pinochet centralized power in his own hands and subsequently rewired the state: the 1980 constitution entrenched military “tutelage,” extended his rule, and shielded the regime with an amnesty decree. A group of Chilean economists — branded the “Chicago Boys” for having studied at the University of Chicago — deepened the regime’s reliance on repression. A 1988 plebiscite cut Pinochet’s rule short, forcing a transition in 1990.

#6: Benito Mussolini

Italy

The October 1922 March on Rome coerced King Victor Emmanuel III into appointing Mussolini prime minister, giving a minority party executive power. He then dismantled Italy’s liberal state by law, not debate. The Acerbo Law of 1923 rigged elections to hand him two-thirds of seats; after the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti was murdered in 1924, Mussolini used the crisis to consolidate rule. He outlawed opposition parties, crushed a free press, neutered unions, and replaced elected local councils with regime appointees. By 1926 Italy was a one-party dictatorship. The Lateran Pacts and corporatist “reforms” followed, but the essential fact was already set: parliamentary Italy had been legally erased and replaced by the first durable fascist state.

#5: Oliver Cromwell

The Protectorate

After the Army’s purge of Parliament, Cromwell drove the trial and execution of Charles I, abolished the monarchy and House of Lords, and proclaimed a kingless Commonwealth. When the Rump showed reluctance, he literally shut it down, replacing it with the short-lived “Barebone’s Parliament.” He then imposed the Instrument of Government (England’s first written constitution), creating the Protectorate with himself as Lord Protector. Backed by the New Model Army, he ruled by ordinances, censored the press, and deployed the Major-Generals as regional military governors. Conquests in Ireland and Scotland crushed resistance; parties and traditional checks were gone. Restoration came after his death, but for a decade it felt like the old order had been wiped from the history books.

#4: Mao Zedong

China

The Chinese Communist Party’s decisive win in the civil war against the Nationalists ended the Republic of China’s rule on the mainland and replaced it with a one-party Leninist state, centered on the CCP and its Chairman. The Great Leap Forward wrecked administrative capacity and triggered mass famine, after which Mao reasserted personal supremacy with the decade-long Cultural Revolution in 1966. Party and state organs were put on ice, courts and ministries sidelined, schools and universities shut, and governance routed through Red Guards, “revolutionary committees,” and ultimately the People’s Liberation Army. Mao didn't just overthrow a government in 1949: he dismantled one from within.

#3: Ruhollah Khomeini

Iran

On 1 February 1979, Khomeini toppled the Pahlavi monarchy and scrapped Iran’s 1906 constitutional order. A referendum in March abolished the throne; by December a new constitution entrenched a Supreme Leader above elected offices, a Guardian Council to vet laws and candidates, and an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to protect the regime. Parallel bodies overrode the provisional government and purged the old elite. The U.S. embassy seizure in November 1979 crushed moderates and unified power around Khomeini. Parties were banned or broken, minorities and regional autonomists were suppressed, and universities were shuttered during the 1980–83 “Cultural Revolution.” The Shah’s centralized monarchy was replaced by a relatively stable clerical state, whose unelected institutions — overseen closely by the Supreme Leader — still define Iran’s politics.

#2: Vladimir Lenin

Russia

The October Revolution of 1917 toppled the short-lived Russian Provisional Government, and authority shifted to the Bolshevik Party and Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka. When voters returned an unfriendly legislature, he dissolved the Constituent Assembly the following January, then ruled freely by decree. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk pulled Russia out of World War I at immense cost, consolidating Bolshevik control. War communism and the Red Terror crushed opposition and centralized the economy under party and police. By 1921, the ban on factions guaranteed internal unity, and Lenin’s New Economic Policy was more market-oriented… but without loosening political monopoly. Lenin died in 1924, but the resulting power vacuum led directly to the rise of Joseph Stalin.

#1: Adolf Hitler

Germany

He didn’t inherit a democracy: he throttled it. Appointed chancellor in January 1933, Hitler exploited the Reichstag Fire to gut civil liberties and enact mass arrests. The Enabling Act transferred lawmaking to his cabinet under SA and SS intimidation: parliament became décor. Gleichschaltung, the process of quote-“Nazification,” did the rest: parties were silenced, unions smashed and replaced by the German Labor Front, and Dachau opened for political prisoners. The Night of the Long Knives in summer of 1934 announced murder as state policy and eliminated internal rivals. Hitler fused the offices of president and chancellor into Führer and bound army oaths to himself. The Weimar Constitution was obliterated, and in its place stood a police state engineered for industrialized atrocity.

Which historical moment on our list shocked you the most? Are there any we missed? Be sure to let us know in the comments below!