PC: A totalitarian state run by a group

Thanks for all the replies. This started as a sort of PC for some fiction I'm writing; it's fantasy and not set on Earth, but the AH aspect of it occurred to me so I thought I'd ask this.

A crucial feature of the fictional regime, as I have it now, is that it doesn't have a figurehead (because that figurehead died). People obey the will of the Council, which they consider a personification of the nation. Cambodia probably falls closest, with the Angkar being in control, and with Pol Pot being perhaps less in charge of the whole thing than it seemed in the West. On the ground, to a Cambodian, I sense that they would have known of the Angkar but none of the names of anybody on it.

So, I think I have my answer. There are certainly enough OTL totalitarian councils to make the concept believable. The council's members would have names and there might be one or more people with more power than the others, but no one on the "good" side knows anything about this, so it appears to be a leaderless entity. It's the difference between the reality and the appearance that was missing so far.
 
There have been plenty of real world examples given, but fictionally this is what 1984 was. Big Brother was (um, spoiler?) a fabrication, and Oceania was run by the Inner Party as a whole.
 
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