The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (110 page)

2.
Stewart, "Catastrophe at Smyrna."

3.
Marrus,
Unwanted, p. 98.

4.
Arnold Toynbee, quoted by Stewart, "Catastrophe at Smyrna."

5.
Marrus,
Unwanted, pp. 97–106.

Chinese Civil War

1.
Johnson,
Modern Times, p. 200.

2.
Spence,
In Search of Modern China, pp. 345–348.

3.
Ibid., pp. 351–352.

4.
Ibid., pp. 353–354.

5.
Gunther,
Inside Asia, pp. 112–115.

6.
Chang and Halliday,
Mao, pp. 81–87.

7.
Ibid., pp. 124–125.

8.
McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 827.

9.
Gunther,
Inside Asia, p. 235.

10.
Spence,
In Search of Modern China, p. 445.

11.
Ibid., p. 447.

12.
Wallechinsky,
David Wallechinsky's Twentieth Century, pp. 89–90; John K. Fairbank et al.,
Cambridge History of China, vol. 13:
Republican China 1912–1949, Part 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 555.

13.
Spence,
In Search of Modern China, p. 470.

14.
Chang and Halliday,
Mao, p. 297.

15.
Ibid., pp. 312–313.

16.
Ibid., p. 314; "Time for a Visit?"
Time, November 1, 1948.

17.
"30,000,000 Uprooted Ones,"
Time, July 26, 1948.

18.
Edgar Snow,
Red Star over China (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 188, citing Guomindang press releases.

19.
Ho,
Studies in the Population of China, p. 249.

20.
Johnson,
Modern Times, p. 200.

21.
Sarkees, "Correlates of War Data on War."

22.
Sivard,
World Military and Social Expenditures, p. 30.

23.
According to Jan Lahmeyer, "CHINA: Provinces Population,"
Population Statistics,
http://www.populstat.info/Asia/chinap.htm
, the sum of China's provincial populations declined by 5,643,300 between 1925 and 1936. This might be an actual decline in population or just a discrepancy between different sources. According to Lahmeyer's data, the population declined in ten notably wartorn provinces (Hunan, Shaanxi, Guangdong, Hubei, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guizhou, Henan, Gansu, Shanxi) and grew in the others.

24.
Number of civilian deaths in the Sino-Japanese War, in ascending order: Sivard,
World Military and Social Expenditures, p. 30 (civilian, 1937–41: 1,150,000; 1941–45: 850,000); Kinder and Hilgemann,
Anchor Atlas of World History, p. 218 ("civilians . . . 5.4 mil. Chinese "); Ellis,
World War II, p. 253 ("Total Civilian Casualties . . . 8,000,000"); both Keegan,
Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War, p. 205, and Overy,
Hammond Atlas of the 20th Century, p. 103, reprint much of the same material for this subject (civilians: "up to 10,000,000"); Grenville,
History of the World, p. 292 ("No one knows how many million Chinese died in the war; the figure may well be in excess of 10 million"; this would include both civilian and military); Werner Gruhl,
Imperial Japan's World War Two (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2010), p. 143 (15,554,000). Ho, in
Studies in the Population of China, p. 252, cited a survey that estimated 335,934 Chinese civilians killed in air raids and 1,073,496 killed otherwise. That would come to some 1.4 million civilians killed directly by war, in 1937–45, but his methodology specifically did not include the Nanjing Massacre and the Yellow River flood.

25.
The number of Guomindang deaths in the Sino-Japanese War: "World Wars," in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 29, p. 1023, 1992 printing (1,310,224); Keegan,
Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War, p. 205 (1,324,000); Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflict, vol. 2, p. 412 (1,319,958);
Information Please Almanac, Atlas and Yearbook 1991, 44th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 311 (1,324,516); Ellis,
World War II, p. 253 (1,400,000).

26.
Ho,
Studies in the Population of China, pp. 250–252.

27.
Ibid. Puppet regimes lost 960,000 soldiers, killed and wounded. As a rough guess, a fourth of this would be 240,000 killed.

28.
Ellis,
World War II, p. 256.

29.
Ho,
Studies in the Population of China, p. 253.

30.
Total number of deaths in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War: Dan Smith,
The State of War and Peace Atlas (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 25 (1,000,000); Sivard,
World Military and Social Expenditures, p. 30 (1,000,000); Robert L.Walker,
The Human Cost of Communism in China, Report to the Subcommittee on Internal Security of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971) (1,250,000); Lorraine Glennon, ed.,
Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th Century (Atlanta: Turner, 1995), p. 339 (3,000,000).

Joseph Stalin

1.
Simon Sebag Montefiore,
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2004); "Joseph Stalin," in John Simkin, Spartacus Educational,
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSstalin.htm
(accessed March 25, 2011).

2.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 761.

3.
Mace, "Soviet Man-Made Famine in the Ukraine"; Green, "Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide."

4.
Robert Conquest,
Harvest of Sorrow, cited in Chalk and Jonassohn,
History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 293.

5.
Service,
History of Twentieth-Century Russia, p. 224.

6.
Anne Applebaum, "My Friend, the Trotskyite,"
Ottawa Citizen, August 18, 2002, p. A11.

7.
Hochschild,
Unquiet Ghost, p. 237.

8.
Julius Strauss, "No Escape for Gulag's Former Prisoners,"
Daily Telegraph (London), January 3, 2004.

9.
Service,
History of Twentieth-Century Russia, p. 214.

10.
Ibid., pp. 218, 221.

11.
Hochschild,
Unquiet Ghost, p. 192.

12.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, "On the Man Who Unleashed Stalin's Terror,"
Sunday Telegraph (London), August 10, 2008.

13.
Bykivnia: Raymond Pearson,
The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 127: "near-incredible" 200,000; Michael Hamm,
Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 235: "Perhaps 120,000 victims were buried there; another estimate puts the figure as high as 225,000"; Taras Kuzio and Taras Andrew Wilson Kuzio,
Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2000), p. 95: "a mass grave reputed to contain over 200,000 bodies."

14.
Mark Franchetti, "Russians Discover Mass Grave of 30,000 Stalin Victims,"
Times (London), September 15, 2002.

15.
Fred Kaplan, "Mass Grave Bears Stalin's Touch,"
Boston Globe, August 13, 1994.

16.
Estimates of the number of dead buried at Kurapaty run anywhere from 40,000 to 200,000. Overy,
Russia's War, p. 296; Mikhail Shimanskiy, "Whose Remains Lie in the Forest near Minsk?"
Izvestiya, August 28, 1988, via BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, "Commission Investigating Unmarked Graves in Belorussia," September 13, 1988; "Soviet Weekly Provides Gruesome Details of Stalin-Era Massacre," Associated Press, October 7, 1988; "Belarus Police Break up Protest at Mass Grave Site," Agence France Presse, November 8, 2001.

17.
Kenneth Christie and R. B. Cribb,
Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe: Ghosts at the Table of Democracy (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), p. 83.

18.
Roger Reese,
The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 99; Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, vol. 2, p. 791.

19.
Overy,
Russia's War, pp. 214–215.

20.
Ibid., p. 160.

21.
Ibid., p. 128.

22.
Anders and Munoz, "Russian Volunteers in the German Wehrmacht in WWII."

23.
Overy,
Russia's War, p. 297.

24.
Ibid., pp. 232–234.

25.
Nicholas Werth, "A State against Its People," in Stephane Courtois et al.,
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 231. Numbers vary. I use a different source in my chapter on World War II.

26.
Adrian Bridge, "Iron Curtain's 100,000 Dead,"
Independent (London), October 27, 1991; Ray Moseley, "Buchenwald Haunts Muses' Valley,"
Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1991.

27.
Hochschild,
Unquiet Ghost, p. 113.

28.
Hobsbawm,
Age of Extremes, p. 393.

29.
Among the places you'll find the highest estimates: Davies,
Europe, p. 1329 (44 to 50 million); Roy Medvedev,
Let History Judge (New York: Knopf, 1971); Rummel
, Death by Government, p. 8 (42,672,000); Solzhenitsyn,
Gulag Archipelago.

30.
Alec Nove, "Victims of Stalinism: How Many?" in J. Arch Getty and Robert T. Manning, eds.,
Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 270–271.

31.
I've taken this statistic from Applebaum,
Gulag, pp. 582–583, but please see her explanation for all of the reasons that this number is probably incomplete and should be higher.

32.
Low estimates can be found in: Getty and Manning,
Stalinist Terror; Melanie Ilic and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, eds.,
Stalin's Terror Revisited (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft,
The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).