Power and Violence

 Political Regime
 Deaths
 Period

 Soviet Union
 61,900,000
 1917-90
 People's Republic of China
 35,200,000
 1949-96

 Nazi Third Reich (Germany)
 20,900,000
 1933-45
 Republic of China (Kuomintang)
 10,400,000
 1928-49

 Imperial Japan
 6,000,000
 1936-45
 Chinese Soviets (pre-1949)
 3,500,000
 1923-48

 Khmer Rouge (Cambodia)
 2,000,000
 1975-79
 Young Turks (Turkey)
 1,900,000
 1909-18

 North Vietnam
 1,700,000
 1945-96
 North Korea
 1,700,000
 1948-96

 Poland
 1,600,000
 1945-48
 Pakistan
 1,500,000
 1971

 Mexico
 1,400,000
 1900-20
 Yugoslavia
 1,100,000
 1944-90

 Russian Empire
 1,100,000
 1900-17
 Ataturk (Turkey)
 900,000
 1917-23

 United Kingdom
 800,000
 1900-96
 Portugal (Dictatorship)
 700,000
 1926-82

 Croatia
 700,000
 1941-45
 Indonesia
 600,000
 1965-96

 
 
 
 Total top 20 (excluding military operations)
 155,600,000
 

This table is made up of R.J. Rummel's estimates of the number of civilians killed by the respective regimes--for example, Rummel estimates that Indonesia's post-Suharto government has killed 600,000 civilians, the bulk in the 1965 genocide of communists, suspected communists, people whom the local elites wanted to label as communists... and the rest in East Timor since the Indonesian occupation.

Rummel excludes soldiers killed, and excludes civilians killed "incidently" in the course of military occupations. Note, however, that Rummel regards the British WWI blockade of the Central Powers and the British use of night area bombing of cities as acts of genocide against civilians, and not as military operations that had the "incidental" effect of harming civilians as well. Thus the U.S. with its B-29s is further down the list...

Rummel stresses that all of these estimates are very uncertain. I, for example, think that his Nazi Germany estimate is much too low (by perhaps 15,000,000 people murdered) and that his Soviet Union estimate is much too high (again, by perhaps 15,000,000 people murdered).

But it seems to me that this table contains the central feature of twentieth century history: there were political regimes in the twentieth century--many of them--that murdered their own people by the tens of millions. A regime as barbarous and bloody as Indonesia's current regime barely makes the top twenty. An episode of political violence as insane and murderous as Yahya Khan's attempt to kill everyone who could conceivably become a political leader in what was then "East Pakistan" does not even make the top ten.

The existence of such regimes, the terror and death that they inflicted, the fear that their existence engendered among those lucky enough not to be ruled by them, and the frantic wise and not-so-wise attempts by the rest of us to get rid of or at least contain them is a striking and remarkable feature of twentieth century human history.

Mr. Stephanson appears to complain that periodizations focusing on the existence of such regimes, on the grounds that they obscure other possible ways of organizing the century--Mr. Stephanson, for example, wants to put "'decolonization,' 'the economic rise of Japan and Germany,'... 'the universalization of the European model of the nation-state'" in as alternative candidates. And he complains that all such alternative ways of thinking about the twentieth century are "conceal[ed] or obliterate[d] ... barred or simply subsumed" by the standard political-history trinity of Period of Appeasement/Hot War/Cold War.

Yet it seems to me that to organize the history of the last two-thirds of the twentieth century around the concepts Period of Appeasement/Hot War/Cold War/End of Cold War makes a tremendous amount of sense. This set of organizing concepts serves as the framework for a compelling narrative which relates most of the twentieth century history that had overwhelmingly important impacts on people's lives.

The story is basically that governments elsewhere in the world realized that there were regimes out there that were--potentially, at least--members of the ten-million-dead club; tried frantically to find some way to get those regimes to leave them alone; lined up with or against various members of the _club_; waged an extraordinarily brutal and vicious war of annihilation against Nazi Germany/Fascist Italy/Imperial Japan; struck many bargains with what was perceived as the "lesser evil"; settled into an uneasy semi-peace of "containment" with respect to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China; watched communist leaders of unsound mind and great malevolence be replaced by communist leaders of less malevolence and less unsound mind; and finally saw internal political processes transform the countries that lay behind the Iron Curtain into political democracies, political semi-democracies (like Russia today), or into regimes that look less like the members of the ten-million-dead-club and more like the garden-variety authoritarian warlord-thugs who usually rule human populations.

It seems to me that Mr. Stephanson's complaint about the "seamless, indivisible notion of the cold war as an epoch [and] also an essentialist principle, according to which everything is a reflection or expression of an original essence. That essence, of course, turns out to be the entire postwar relation, or conflict, between the US and the USSR" is--once one wades through less-than-helpful Hegelian verbiage--an assertion that historians ought to be telling a _different_ story in the center of the webs they weave.

[The Iron Curtain]