The aim of this article is to illustrate the specificity of the functioning of power mechanisms in non-democratic systems, with particular emphasis on the relations between entities of a cratic structure, i.e., the person exercising the highest power in the hierarchy of a socio-political system vs the ruling elite, the ruling elite vs the ruling class, and the ruling class vs social masses. Moreover, based on current research in the area of governance in authoritarian and totalitarian systems, conceptualisation was performed on anti-transformational leadership, which is a theoretical category reflecting in the fullest possible way the essence of relations of domination and subordination between the ruling and the ruled in regimes with a permanent deficit of legitimation, whose constitutive feature consists in the desire to ensure absolute obedience of particular subjects of the socio-political hierarchy. Furthermore, an exemplification of the indicated relationship was provided by reference to the erosion of totalitarian leadership in the political system of the Polish People’s Republic.