There are conflicting reports of what happened, but after a routine night of heavy drinking until the early hours of March 1st, the guards became alarmed when there was no sound from their master all day and late in the evening a guard or a maid ventured in and found him lying on the floor of his bedroom. One account says he was conscious, but only able to make incoherent noises, and had wet himself. Nikita Khrushchev recalled that he and Malenkov, Beria and Bulganin went out to Kuntsevo after a telephone call from the guards to Malenkov.
The four men, embarrassed and not realising that anything was seriously wrong, went back to Moscow. Not until the next day, with Stalin paralysed and speechless, were doctors summoned. Almost too frightened to touch him, they announced that he had suffered a massive stroke. Leading Politburo members went to the dacha every day, hesitating and dithering, apparently unsure what to do, while rumours spread that they or some of them had taken a hand in putting an end to the dictator.
According to his daughter Svetlana, who was at the bedside, at 9. He raised his left hand, pointing upwards, perhaps threateningly, and then death took him. It was announced on the radio the next day, with appeals for calm, and the funeral was held in Red Square on March 9th in the presence of a huge crowd — so large that some were crushed to death.
Malenkov, Molotov and Beria had taken steps to secure their own positions. The definition can determine, after all, international relations, foreign aid and national morale. His case in point: Stalin. Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the s. Both destroyed their countries and societies, as well as vast numbers of people inside and outside their own states. Both, in the end, were genocidaires. All early drafts of the U. The Soviet delegation vetoed any definition of genocide that might include the actions of its leader, Joseph Stalin.
The Allies, exhausted by war, were loyal to their Soviet allies — to the detriment of subsequent generations. In the process of collectivization, for example, 30, kulaks were killed directly, mostly shot on the spot.
About 2 million were forcibly deported to the Far North and Siberia. Historian Norman Naimark Image credit: L. The destruction of the kulak class triggered the Ukrainian famine, during which 3 million to 5 million peasants died of starvation. We will never know how many millions Stalin killed. Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times. Russian public opinion polls still rank him near the top of the greatest leaders of Russian history, as if he were just another one of the powerful but bloodthirsty czars.
His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events.
Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions. Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million. Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died.
Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities.
Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao? Traditionally, Mao apologists blame any deaths that did occur on natural disasters. We can discard natural causes; yes, there were some problems with drought and flooding, but China is a huge country regularly beset by droughts and floods. Chinese governments through the centuries have been adept at famine relief; a normal government, especially a modern bureaucratic state with a vast army and unified political party at its disposal, should have been able to handle the floods and droughts that farmers encountered at the end of the s.
What of the explanation that Mao meant well but that his policies were misguided, or carried out too zealously by subordinates? But Mao knew early enough that his policies were resulting in famine. He could have changed course, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns in order to retain power.
In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different. The Cultural Revolution—the ten-year period — of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1. It is probably fair to say, then, that Mao was responsible for about 1. At this point, I must digress briefly to deal with two specters that diligent researchers will find on the Internet and even on the shelves of otherwise reputable bookstores.
One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel — , a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historian—that Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths. His work is disregarded as polemical, but has a strange life online, where it is cited regularly by anyone who wants to score a quick victory for Mao. Equally scorned but extremely influential is the British-based author Jung Chang. After writing a bestselling memoir about her family the most popular in what now seems like an endless succession of imitators , she moved on to write, along with her husband, Jon Halliday, popular history, including a biography of Mao as monster.
Few historians take their work seriously, and several of the most influential figures in the field—including Andrew J. Goodman— published a book to rebut it. But is starting a war of aggression less of a crime than launching economic policies that cause a famine? If one includes the combatant deaths, and the deaths due to war-related famine and disease, the numbers shoot up astronomically. The Soviet Union suffered upward of 8 million combatant deaths and many more due to famine and disease—perhaps about 20 million.
Ukrainians starving in the street during the Soviet famine of the early s. As for Hitler, should his deaths include the hundreds of thousands who died in the aerial bombardments of Germans cities? After all, it was his decision to strip German cities of anti-aircraft batteries to replace lost artillery following the debacle at Stalingrad.
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