Who Was Worse: Hitler or Stalin?

I am a serial subscriber to the New York Review of Books, for reasons both laudable and lamentable. First of all, reading its book reviews is as close as I’ll ever come to reading any of the important books I will eventually claim to have read. Second, reading it in public places ropes me off as a man of letters to be reckoned with. 
        Third, I get a kick out of the egghead personals in the back, and the letters that begin with something like, “Much as I appreciated the many laudatory things Milton Ravitz had to say about my book, Arbiters Schmarbiters: The Death of Negotiation in an Age of Self, I feel I must correct several of the cavils he leveled at my assertions regarding the role scotch tape has played in the decline in the rate of teenage pregnancies.”

But in fact NYRB deserves my loyalty. It is unfailingly illuminating no matter how obscure the subject, and host to a slew of fine writers. So I was startled when I opened an issue this past March and encountered a piece by Timothy Snyder that sought to answer a question -- “Who was worse: Hitler or Stalin?”* -- that I might have expected to encounter in a secondhand copy of The Guinness Book of World Records.

The answer seemed to stand or fall on the number of people each of them killed, and in what cause. But does it matter whether you kill people because you believe that blondes should inherit the earth, or that everyone should drive a tractor? If a fellow’s responsible for the death of, oh, let’s say a dozen people, it seems to me that just going by the Biblical injunction "Thou shalt not kill," it hardly matters what he had in mind: Aryan imperialism, communist industrialization, or the barking of a dog.

Recent research conducted in Soviet archives suggests that Joe was responsible for far fewer than the 20 million victims historians have cited in the past. In fact, they think compared to Adolph and his 12 million victims, Joe was a piker. Stalin’s killing sprees began well before Hitler locked and loaded, and yet, in the end. he only managed to tally six million men, women and children. Not only did Hitler outdo him two-to-one; he intended, had he won the war, to wipe out tens of millions more in Russia itself as part of an elaborate colonization scheme. And I just think he was the man to do it, too.

I do not mean to suggest by the tone of this essay that there is anything absurd about getting the numbers right. Such tallies are important, for, as Snyder says, each number represents a life. But to ask which of these thugs was worse based on their intentions or their body counts or both is absurd. It sets up a sort of bathroom scale dynamic with which to measure the murderous thugs of our day against the murderous thugs of yesteryear. “He’s bad,” we might be expected to remark as, say, Pol Pot steps off the scales at a mere 2.5 million victims, “but at least he’s no Stalin.”

I don’t think we should allow Hitler and Stalin to set the bar for future tyrants, nor to suggest that if you sincerely intend to make a better world and keep your victims down to, say, a million -- or a thousand, a hundred, a score, or a dozen -- Hades will prove any more comfortable for you than for them. 
Or are we to reckon that the retributive punishments they should receive ought to be commensurate with the number of their victims? Should we condemn them to an eternity of hellfire for the sum total of their victims or for each individual victim, with the sentences to run consecutively, assuming for the moment that there can be more than one eternity? Can even an all wise and all powerful God do such math, let alone the negligent and impotent God who perfmitted all those murders in the first place?

But what really stunned me about the article came toward the end, where Snyder rather casually mentions that – oh, by the way -- Mao Zedong murdered 30 million Chinese in his Great Leap Forward. But then he goes on to say that Mao doesn't really count because he was only following Stalin’s example. It's as though Snyder dismisses Mao as a singularly impressionable ideologue incapable of exercising his own free will, when in fact he was the free and ruthless agent of his iron will and lunatic caprices. 
If we are truly going by the numbers, Mao must be judged almost three times the monster Hitler was, and five times the monster Stalin was. Is it because he’s Chinese that he didn’t deserve more than a parenthetical mention in the NYRB, and then only as an adjunct to Stalin’s dismal achievements? Or is it because his victims were Chinese that thirty million of them don’t even enter the equation?

Who was worse? My answer is that each of them, or so I very much hope, was as bad as it gets.  

* http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/