I think people really do believe that one man somehow steers an entire nation of one hundred and forty million people because he's just that scary or something. Never mind that he rules thanks to the complicated loyalty of a class of billionaire oligarchs, or that there's a vast bureaucracy, or the complicity of many thousands and thousands of government officials, police officials, military officers, and so on and so forth. Nations aren't complex phenomena emerging from the actions of many millions of people. It's just this one guy.

I think the pushing of the Great Man narrative serves a couple of propaganda functions. If Hitler really was the sole driving will of the entire Nazi state then getting rid of Hitler magically cleanses the Germans of all their crimes and ill deeds. If Stalin was the sole actor driving the Soviet Union during the Holodomor and the Great Purge then the post 1953 Soviet leadership can wash their hands of all ill deeds done by simply declaring deStalinization. Just don't ask what they were up to in 1933 or 1937. Americans can blame the nuke on Truman and absolve themselves of bloodthirsty, racially driven mania for revenge. Mao was personally responsible for the great famine and Cultural Revolution, it wasn't the collective actions of tens of millions of people. It simplifies everything. People don't have the education or knowledge to make sense of huge, multilayered, extremely complicated social and economic phenomena. Everything is the action of indvidual Great Men. And, for propaganda purposes, changing the Great Man can magically change an entire country or movement. Killing Osama bin Laden was utterly insignificant, the pointless murder of an old man and his family. It caused no operational impairment to al Qaeda, it was simply an act of revenge. But it was hailed as some kind of great victory. Killing Saddam didn't bring back any of the people he murdered or change the course of Iraqi politics. The man was literally hiding in a hole in the ground, as abject a position as you could be in. But, again, it's hailed as a significant event. I'm not as clear on Gaddafi because I don't know much about the internal structure of Gaddafi's Libya, but I feel that the killing of Gaddafi was a symbolic closure of an already existing change of power.