There have been only three notable 20th-century leaders who were addicted to trains: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Chinese leader Mao Zedong and North Korean founder Kim Il Sung. These venerable gentlemen would readily expose their tender flesh to the inconveniences of a long railway journey rather than suffer a short flight.

In 1943, Stalin had been forced to fly to Teheran to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and had been so upset by the experience that he stayed in an ugly mood until the very end of the Big Three conference. As a result, he fared much worse in Teheran than, say, in 1945 in Potsdam, which he was able to reach by train.

Interestingly enough, membership in this exclusive railway club is strictly limited to communist dictators. Adolf Hitler, just as paranoid about his personal safety as Stalin, never hesitated to board a plane even in wartime. It is hard to say what makes disciples of Marx and Lenin susceptible to this particular phobia. Maybe this is just the metaphysical weight of hammer and sickle, two very down-to-earth, gravity-bound tools. As soon as a communist regime begins to weaken, its leaders start traveling by jet. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a frequent flyer. He probably would have prolonged his days in power if he had stuck to the golden rule of totalitarianism: Never leave the ground.