The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (69 page)

By late 1952, Stalin began to eye his inner circle and wonder how many of them were actively plotting his downfall. He started to maneuver into a position to clean house, but on March 1, 1953, before he could initiate this new purge, he was felled by a stroke. As he lay helpless on the floor, his terrified staff dared not knock on his door for a full day. Even after he was discovered and doctors were summoned, his cronies suspected a trick and hovered nervously by his bedside, afraid to say anything that might later come back to bite them. Luckily, it wasn’t a trick, and Stalin died on March 5.
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Killing the Messenger

When Stalin conducted the new Soviet census in 1937, he expected to find the population bursting with socialist prosperity. Instead, the count fell 16.7 million short of where it was supposed to be.
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In a totalitarian state where every inhabitant was carefully watched, no one could use the excuse that the census takers had simply missed 16 million people. Whether they were exiled, dead, or simply failed to be born, losing that many people reflected badly on Stalin’s stewardship of the country. To keep the bad news under wraps, the census was suppressed and the heads of the census bureau were shipped off to the Gulag on charges of slandering the nation.

How many people did Stalin kill? There are three schools of thought when it comes to the number of Soviet citizens who died at his hands.

At the high end, we find estimates of 40 to 60 million. Many of these began as wild guesses during the Cold War when Soviet records were sealed and any number was possible. Estimates were pieced together from whatever scraps and stories could be uncovered. Although recent research in newly opened Soviet archives doesn’t support the highest numbers, many people have become too fond of these numbers to let them go. The big problem with these estimates is that they come close to asserting that Stalin killed every adult male in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
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At the other end, we find historians who will acknowledge a victim only if an actual body or death warrant turns up. During the Cold War, when Soviet history was closed to investigation, Stalin had many apologists who openly ridiculed the high numbers. In the absence of hard evidence, these apologists could get away with admitting only a few tens of thousands of deaths at his hands. Nowadays, the evidence for a few million deaths is too strong, so the minimalist camp will reluctantly admit to some 786,098 officially recorded executions
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and 1,590,378 officially recorded camp deaths,
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but that’s as far as they’ll go. Many of them consider the famine to be accidental and entirely beyond Stalin’s control, so those deaths don’t count.
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Historian Robert Conquest’s estimate of 20 to 30 million dead was originally derided as another wild guess when it was first proposed in 1968,
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but now it has become the third category—the consensus figure. It’s not that Conquest’s estimate was originally based on sounder evidence than any other Cold War–era estimates, but newer research has converged on it. Once you start adding all of the documented nastiness and rounding the totals upward to fill in the gaps, you find that 20 million or so seems to cover it nicely without straining credulity.
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CRAZED TYRANTS

Who’s Worse: Stalin or Hitler?

I’m sure the question you
really
want answered is “Who was the single most evil person in history?” Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer to that. You’ll sometimes see the bald assertion that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, but rational debate stumbles on two squishy problems. First, obviously, is that all of the numbers are rough guesses. Stalin killed anywhere from 3 to 50 million. Estimates for Hitler’s murders range anywhere from 11 to 25 million. Cherry-picking the right two numbers can make Stalin five times the killer Hitler was or Hitler three times as bad as Stalin.

The second problem is that no one can agree on which deaths should count as indictable homicides. Should we tally only the callous murder of the helpless? Or is starting a war a crime against humanity? Does causing a famine count as criminal negligence? Stalin and Hitler killed a comparable number of victims with their camps and secret police, but if we add the number of war dead, then Hitler surges ahead. If we count famine deaths, then Mao’s our man; however, if we stick to a narrow definition and count only the cold-blooded murder of helpless victims outside of battle, then an incomplete and debatable list of bloodthirsty tyrants might look something like this:
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•
Hitler (Germany, 1933–45): ca. 15,500,000 outright murders of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, mental patients, hostages, and prisoners of war
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•
Stalin (Soviet Union, 1928–53): 13,000,000 executions and camp deaths, but not including famine

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Mao Zedong (China, 1949–76): as many as 10,000,000 murders, not including famine

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Leopold II (Belgium,1865–1909): 10,000,000 natives dead in the Congo Free State

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Idi Amin (Uganda, 1972–79): 300,000 murders

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Francisco Franco (Spain, 1939–75): 175,000 political opponents executed
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Vlad Dracula (Wallachia, 1456–62): 100,000 impaled or otherwise murdered
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•
Murad IV (Ottoman Empire, 1611–40): 100,000 offenders against the sultan’s authority put to death
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Ezzelino da Romano (Padua, 1236–59): 55,000 citizens, rivals, prisoners of war, beggars, and others killed
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Francisco Macias Nguema (Equatorial Guinea, 1969–79): 50,000 murders
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Sekou Toure (Guinea, 1958–84): as many as 50,000
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Hissene Habre (Chad, 1982–90): 40,000 murders
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François Duvalier (Haiti, 1957–71): some 30,000 people murdered
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Ivan the Terrible (Russia, 1533–84): at least 3,700 random individuals killed in anger; another 18,000 to 60,000 people massacred at Novgorod in 1570
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•
Hastings Banda (Malawi, 1966–94): 18,000
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Tiberius (Roman Empire, 14–37): 10,000 paranoid executions
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Cornelius Sulla (Roman Republic, 82–79 BCE): 4,700 killed in his purges

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Augusto Pinochet (Chile, 1973–90): 3,000 deaths and disappearances

But as they say, a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
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Numbers aside, the West generally considers Hitler worse than Stalin because Hitler’s evil disgusts more successfully on a gut level. The human face of the Holocaust is Anne Frank, an innocent little girl hunted down and exterminated because of dangerous racist pseudoscience. The human face of the Gulag is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a cranky old guy in a wild beard who survived.

Hitler also makes a much better morality tale: By appealing to people’s fears and hatreds, he whipped the mob into a frenzy and became leader of a free democracy, which he quickly twisted to his own desires. While trying to conquer the world, he committed unparalleled atrocities. Finally, Hitler overreached and was taken down by the wrath of a unified world in a final apocalyptic fury. It’s a more satisfying narrative that people enjoy telling over and over again.

Stalin, however, is more typical of tyrants throughout history. He lurked in the shadows, manipulated his way to the head of a preexisting autocracy, consolidated power brutally, and expanded his empire by cleverly playing both sides of the fence. At a fine old age, he died in bed, undefeated, unpunished, mourned by a loving nation.

ITALO-ETHIOPIAN WAR

Death toll:
750,000
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Rank:
59

Type:
colonial conquest

Broad dividing line and Major state participants:
Italy vs. Ethiopia

Time frame:
1935–41

Location:
Ethiopia (sometimes called Abyssinia at the time)

Who usually gets the most blame:
Mussolini

A
S THE LEADING EDGE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION SHIFTED TO NORTHERN
Europe, Italy fell one step behind on most modern trends. Italy didn’t even become a unified country until the mid-nineteenth century, and it almost missed getting a slice when the Europeans carved up Africa. As a latecomer, Italy was given only a few coastal stretches of desert that no one else wanted. When the Italians tried to enlarge their holdings by conquering Ethiopia in 1896, their army was badly beaten, making Ethiopia the only native state in Africa to survive European ambition—also making the Italians the laughingstock of imperialists everywhere.

When Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, he tried again, bringing modern firepower to the situation. In 1935 two columns thrust into Ethiopia from the Italian colonies on either side, Somaliland in the south and Eritrea in the east. Italian aircraft bombed and strafed Ethiopian troops, villages, and cities. Ethiopian soldiers were mowed down by machine guns and choked with mustard gas. Although it wasn’t quite the naked spearmen charging tanks that Western imagination made it out to be, the Ethiopian army was completely outclassed and overwhelmed, losing almost twenty of their own soldiers for every Italian they killed. Even so, the Ethiopians went on the offensive in December and January.

Because blatant imperialism had grown unfashionable since the nineteenth century, the world condemned Mussolini. Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie delivered an impassioned plea in Geneva to the League of Nations to rescue his ancient land, so the league imposed economic sanctions against Italy. One of the first times this tactic was ever used, it became an early example of sanctions failing miserably. Many statesmen and strategists suggested that extending the embargo to oil or closing the Suez Canal to Italian shipping would have more teeth, but these were dismissed as impractical or needlessly provocative. No one really wanted to make the Italians angry.

In May 1936, the Italians took the capital at Addis Ababa, and Ethiopia stayed quiet for a short time while the remnants of the native armies organized an underground resistance. In February 1937, guerrillas tried to kill Italian General Rodolfo Graziani, and the Italians launched a three-day retaliatory massacre in Addis Ababa in which thousands of citizens were killed. In May, the Italians destroyed the Shawan monastery of Dabra Libanos and executed several hundred resident monks. The guerrilla war continued, as did the Italian retaliation.

Finally, World War II brought Ethiopia into the larger fight between Italy and Britain, which made the Italian colonies fair game for an Allied offensive. The British flew Haile Selassie into the Sudan to wait while British troops cleared the Italians out of East Africa in 1941. When all was safe, he was allowed to reclaim his throne.
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