The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (67 page)

The loss of the Nationalists’ urban garrisons destroyed some of the army’s best combat units, which hadn’t been all that impressive to begin with. The Communists then closed in on Beiping, took it in January 1949, and advanced south. Between April and November, the Communists rolled over most of China’s cities without much resistance. Chiang Kai-shek fled Nanjing to take refuge on the island of Taiwan, while Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in the restored capital Beijing.

Within a year, the Red Chinese had mopped up most of the warlords and quasi-independent splinters of the old empire. They overran Tibet in 1950, but grudgingly acknowledged the independence of Communist Mongolia, now a Soviet protectorate. They also ignored Taiwan for the time being.

Death Toll

No one knows how many people died in the Chinese interregnum, but reading through the literature, one gets a clear sense of a million here, a million there, tossed out almost casually. Among the bits and pieces:

The Guomindang admitted that 1 million civilians were killed or starved in the fifth annihilation campaign.
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The population of northern Szechwan was reduced by 1.1 million from war, in 1932–34.
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The population of Hubei Province is said to have fallen by 4 million, in 1925–30, with very little emigration and no natural famine.
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According to one common database of war statistics, the war between the Communists and Nationalists, in 1930–35, killed 200,000 in combat. A Muslim rebellion against the government in 1928 killed another 200,000.
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An earlier version of this database estimated that the war between the Communists and Nationalists had killed 500,000.
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Overall, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that something like 5 million Chinese died as a result of the first civil war.
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The civilian death toll of the Sino-Japanese War is any number you care to pick. Open any three books on the subject and you’ll probably see three different numbers falling somewhere from 2 to 15 million.
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The median of the guesses seems to be 8 million civilian deaths.

Because armies keep better track of their own soldiers than they do of collateral damage, we have better numbers for military deaths than we do for civilians. The total body count of the Sino-Japanese War, in 1937–45, comes to about 2.5 million soldiers:

Nationalists:
1,310,224
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Communists:
446,736
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Japan’s Chinese allies:
240,000
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Japanese:
388,600 killed in China
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During the second phase of the Chinese Civil War, 263,800 Communist troops were killed. The Nationalists lost 1,711,110, both killed and wounded, with maybe a fifth of those (some 370,000) dead.
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I see occasional estimates of totals somewhere between 1 and 3 million deaths—military plus civilian—during the second phase, but none jump out as being hugely authoritative.
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Let’s split the difference and say 2 million, all told.

JOSEPH STALIN

Death toll:
20 million (including famine and a few million atrocities committed during World War II)

Rank:
6

Type:
Communist dictator

Broad dividing line:
Stalin on top

Time frame:
ruled ca. 1928–53

Location and major state participant:
Soviet Union

Who usually gets the most blame:
Stalin personally and Communism generally

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
How did he end up as one of the good guys in World War II?

Rise to Power

At first glance, Joseph Stalin was one of the least likely people to become leader of Soviet Russia. Born in Georgia in 1879 under the name Ioseb Dzhugashvili, he only learned Russian later, in school. He was sent to a Jesuit seminary but expelled for reasons that remain something of a mystery. Speculation abounds, but none of it has been proved, so let’s just say he was expelled for being Stalin.

After the seminary, he did all of the things an aspiring rebel was supposed to—writing and printing revolutionary pamphlets, organizing strikes, robbing banks, getting arrested, escaping from custody, and serving two terms in Siberian exile. In 1913 he took the pseudonym Stalin from the Russian word for steel, which was an improvement over his childhood nickname of Chopura (“Pocky”) from the smallpox scars on his face.
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He was still in Siberia when World War I broke out. In 1917, the new republican government of Russia pardoned all of the tsar’s political prisoners, and Stalin returned to civilization. Unimportant in 1917, Stalin worked his way up during the Russian Civil War. His sycophantic subservience earned him the derisive nickname “Lenin’s Mouthpiece.” Stalin’s main rival for Lenin’s favor was the charismatic intellectual and civil war savior Leon Trotsky.

In 1922 Lenin made Stalin head of the Communist Party because no one else wanted to do it. A minor, tedious post at the time, being head of the party gave the detail-oriented Stalin the ability to purge membership rolls of Trotskyites and to advance his own people. After the Communists took control of Russia, party membership expanded. The urban intellectuals who had formed the backbone of the movement during its underground phase were overwhelmed by the influx of members who were not as well schooled in the subtleties of Marxist theory. These new members identified more strongly with the earthy Stalin than with urbane Jews like Trotsky.

Shortly after this, Lenin was weakened by a stroke, which left the government in the hands of rival flunkies arguing about what Lenin really wanted. As Lenin’s mouthpiece, Stalin controlled much of Lenin’s dialog with the outside world; however, when Lenin finally died in 1924, he had soured on Stalin. His last testament would have disowned Stalin in favor of Trotsky, but Stalin intercepted and suppressed it.

For the next few years, the Soviet Union was run by committee rather than dictatorship. Stalin hooked up with a couple of radicals—Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev—in a ruling triumvirate that shut out Trotsky. Once Trotsky was completely removed from government in 1925, Stalin dumped his original partners and took up with two moderates—Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov. He kept this troika active only long enough to strip power from everyone else. You really don’t have to know these four people, but I mention them so that you’ll recognize the names later when Stalin has them all killed.

In any case, the upshot of this maneuvering was that Trotsky was exiled in 1929 and Stalin reigned supreme.
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Stalin’s personal life was thrown into turmoil in 1932 when he had an argument at a party with his wife, Nadya, who then stepped away for a moment and committed suicide. Some biographers say that this destroyed Stalin’s last vestiges of humanity and turned him from a simple bastard into a monster.

Liquidation of the Kulaks

Beginning in 1929, Stalin tried to bring agriculture in line with Communist theory by abolishing private farms and bringing all of the peasants into collective farms. Here they could share modern equipment and be forced to sell crops at government-mandated prices. Peasants who resisted were shot or, more likely, deported to unhealthier climates where they labored on government projects without anyone knowing.

Rather than surrender their animals, peasants slaughtered and ate them. Stalin retaliated against any defiance by withholding food from disobedient communities. He rationed food to families according to their loyalty to the state. Prosperous peasants (kulaks) became the universal scapegoats for everything wrong in the Soviet Union. Not only was every food shortage blamed on their profiteering, but everyone knew the kulaks spread venereal disease, had loathsome hygiene, and exploited the labor of others. Whole kulak families were uprooted and shipped off to deadly exile. Battered, deprived, and exhausted by their long journeys, kulak corpses piled up at rural train stations.
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The shake-up of Soviet agriculture disrupted the whole infrastructure—not just farms, but transport and mills as well, especially in the breadbasket of Ukraine. The system stressed and finally snapped. In 1932, a massive famine erupted all across the Soviet Union, and anywhere from 7 to 10 million people died within a couple of years. Although millions of peasants were already starving in Ukraine, Soviet commissars still seized their grain to fill rigid quotas. Even seed grain needed for next year’s planting was taken away, while 5 million Ukrainian peasants died.
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Anyone in the stricken areas who didn’t show the swollen bellies and stick-thin limbs of starvation was assumed to be hoarding food and punished.
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Taking Life Five Years at a Time

When Stalin first came to power, Russia was still operating under Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was trying to rebuild the war-ravaged economy by allowing small-scale capitalism. Not only did this annoy the hard-core Communists on a philosophical level, but also it clearly would not restore Russia to full strength in time for the next world war.

“We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries,” Stalin said in 1931. “We must cover this distance in 10 years. Either we do this or they will crush us.”

Under a series of Five-Year Plans, huge new industrial cities were built among the coalfields of Ukraine and on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains. Railroads and canals connected them with their vital resources. Dams and reservoirs tamed some of the world’s largest rivers to generate power and water crops.

To develop these projects, Stalin expanded Lenin’s political prisons into a network of slave labor camps under the “Main Camp Administration”—Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei in Russian—“Gulag” for short. The system was packed with outcasts, troublemakers, complainers, dissidents, and other dangerous enemies of the state, along with their family members and anyone else who got on the wrong side of someone powerful. The NKVD, or secret police,
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suspected anyone who had come into contact with alien ideas, whether by traveling abroad, being captured in the World War, or even collecting stamps. Merely showing up late to work too often might get someone branded a saboteur and hauled away. If more labor was needed, the NKVD arrested random individuals to fill strict quotas. By 1939, the network of forced labor camps, prisons, and colonies held 2.9 million people.
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Even though millions died in the Gulag, “labor camp” was not a mere euphemism. “The vast secret police bureaucracy . . . was far likelier to arrest, sentence, and forget about people for a decade or two than to gouge their eyes out. For the most part, the ‘meat-grinder,’ as Solzhenitsyn called the system of Soviet repression, was not intended to kill or torture people but to reduce them to the status of cattle, who were worth feeding only as long as they could help boost production figures. For the most part, the horror of Soviet camp guards lay not in their sadism but in their indifference to the prisoners’ fate.”
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The Kolyma River valley in the coldest, farthest reaches of the Arctic was a rich geologic basin stuffed with gold, coal, and uranium. Here an enormous complex of concentration camps stretched across the neck of Siberia, extracting the resources of the basin. Prisoners died daily from collapsing mines and subzero temperatures. Food was limited to the minimum necessary to support work, with perhaps a bonus for good behavior. Escape into the arctic wilderness was impossible, although the lucky ones might eventually be paroled from prison and sent to live in the squalid district capital of Magadan. Anywhere from 250,000 to 1,000,000 people died at the Kolyma complex.
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Twenty-four hundred miles away—but still above the Arctic Circle where trees don’t grow—were the coalfields of the Vorkuta labor camp, where perhaps 100,000 prisoners died. “For 15 years I shoveled coal into the furnaces,” said one former inmate. “At night we used to sleep on hard wooden shelves. So many people died of hunger and cold.”

“We had no proper winter clothes, our boots were full of holes and to eat we had crushed, salted fish and a small, frozen potato a day. All my teeth fell out because of lack of vitamins,” said another. “They made us work 14 hours a day in the mines and many men simply died. At night we slept with our clothes on, on a mattress stuffed with wood chips.”
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The Great Purge

Sergei Kirov is more notable dead than he was alive. This up-and-coming party boss of Leningrad looked like Stalin’s eventual successor until he was shot dead in his office in December 1934. The assassin, your customary troubled loner, was apprehended nearby in a state of confusion and hustled away.

Stalin immediately assumed that the assassin was part of a larger conspiracy and issued orders to neutralize anyone suspected of being an enemy of the people. Every problem from the past decade—shortages, famines, accidents, even natural disasters—was now to be blamed on counterrevolutionary saboteurs undermining Soviet society. Trotsky was assumed to be at the center of this conspiracy, deliberately creating chaos that would open the door for his return.

Stalin’s unrestrained paranoia became the guiding principle of the government. The assassin was accused of being in league with Trotsky and shot.
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Two dozen associates of the assassin were shot. Almost every loser in Stalin’s earlier climb to power (Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov, and Zinoviev, for example, see above) was arrested, beaten into confessing, paraded through show trials, and shot.
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An assassin was dispatched to hunt down Trotsky in his Mexican exile. Trotsky was tricked into trusting him, and then brained with an ice axe.
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