Titans of History (54 page)

As army supremo, “the Chief” (also known as the Goat) ruled in an absolute tyranny, backed by a savage secret police, the SIM (Military Intelligence Service). He covered himself in medals (hence his nickname, Bottlecaps), renamed the capital Trujillo City and the highest mountain Mount Trujillo, killed and tortured thousands of opponents and stole millions of dollars. In 1937 he ordered his troops to kill all dark-skinned “Haitians”—20,000 were slaughtered with machetes in what became known as the cutting or the Parsley Massacre (those who couldn't pronounce the word
perejil
—the Spanish word for Parsley—were murdered).

Though he admired Hitler, Trujillo remained neutral in the
Second World War and accepted Jewish refugees, yet he continued to murder his enemies, awarding himself the titles Great Benefactor of the Nation and Father of the New Dominion. But by the 1950s, Dominicans—and the US—were sickened by his excesses. After a plot against him was uncovered, Trujillo tortured and murdered the implicated Mirabal sisters; their fate—dramatized in the film
In the Time of the Butterflies
(2001)—horrified everyone.

CIA-backed plotters finally assassinated Trujillo in his car in 1961, a story retold by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in his book
The Feast of the Goat
(2000). But the dictator's playboy son Ramfis Trujillo seized power and tortured suspected plotters to death before his uncles, Hector and José Trujillo, returned to take over. Finally, the USA ended the monstrous reign of the Trujillo dynasty, whose members fled into exile in November 1961.

1870–1924

One out of ten of those guilty of parasitism will be shot on the spot … We must spur on the energy of the terror … shoot and deport … launch merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and white guards …

Lenin in 1918

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the gifted, ruthless, fanatical, yet pragmatic Marxist politician who created the blood-soaked Soviet experiment that was based from the very start on random killing and flint-hearted repression, and which led to the murders of
many millions of innocent people. Lenin was long revered in communist propaganda and in naïve Western liberal circles as the kind-hearted and decent father of the Soviet peoples, but the newly opened Soviet archives reveal that he relished the use of terror and bloodletting and was as frenziedly brutal as he was intelligent and cultured. He was, however, one of the political titans of the 20th century, and without his personal will there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Unimpressive in appearance but exceptional in personality, Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, known as Lenin, was small and stocky, prematurely bald, and had a bulging, intense forehead and piercing, slanted eyes. He was a genial man—his laughter was infectious—but his life was ruled by his fanatical dedication to Marxist revolution, to which he devoted his intelligence, pitiless pragmatism and aggressive political will.

Lenin was raised in a loving family, and was descended from nobility on both sides. His father was the inspector of schools in Simbirsk, while his mother was the daughter of a wealthy doctor and landowner; further back his antecedents included Jews, Swedes and Tartar Kalmyks (to whom he owed his slanting eyes). Lenin possessed the domineering confidence of a nobleman, and as a young man he had even sued peasants for damaging his estates. This helps to explain Lenin's contempt for old Russia: “Russian idiots” was a favorite curse. When criticized for his noble birth, he replied: “What about me? I am the scion of landed gentry … I still haven't forgotten the pleasant aspects of life on our estate … So go on, put me to death! Am I unworthy to be a revolutionary?” He was certainly never embarrassed about living off the income from his estates.

The rustic idyll on the family estate ended in 1887 when his elder brother Alexander was executed for conspiring against the tsar. This changed everything. Lenin qualified as a lawyer at Kazan
University, where he read Chernychevsky and Nechaev, imbibing the discipline of Russian revolutionary terrorists even before he embraced Marx and became active in the Russian Socialist Workers' Party. After arrests and Siberian exile, Lenin moved to western Europe, living at various times in London, Cracow and Zurich. In 1902 he wrote
What Is to Be Done?
which defined a new vanguard of professional and ruthless revolutionaries and led to the break-up of the party into the so-called majority faction—the Bolsheviks under Lenin—and the more moderate Menshevik minority.

“Trash,” “bastards,” “filth,” “prostitutes,” “Russian fools,” “cretins” and “silly old maids” were just some of the insults Lenin heaped on his enemies. He had enormous contempt for his own liberal sympathizers, whom he called “useful idiots,” and mocked his own gentler comrades as “tea-drinkers.” Reveling in the fight, he existed in an obsessional frenzy of political vibration, driven by an intense rage and a compulsion to dominate allies—and to smash opposition.

Lenin cared little for the arts or personal romance: his wife, the stern, bug-eyed Nadya Krupskaya, was more manager and amanuensis than lover, but he did engage in a passionate affair with the wealthy, liberated beauty Inessa Armand. Once in power, Lenin indulged in little flings with his secretaries—at least according to Stalin, who claimed Krupskaya complained about them to the Politburo. But politics was everything to Lenin.

During the 1905 Revolution, Lenin returned to Russia; but the Bolshevik uprising in Moscow was suppressed by Tsar Nicholas II and Lenin had to escape back into exile. Desperately short of money and always pursuing factional ideological feuds that split the party further, Lenin used bank robberies and violence to fund his small group. During these escapades, Stalin caught Lenin's eye and he consistently promoted him even when other comrades
warned him of Stalin's violent propensities: “That's exactly the sort of person I need!” he replied. By 1914 the Bolsheviks had almost been crushed by the tsarist secret police, and most were in exile or prison: as late as 1917 Lenin—who spent the war in Cracow, then Switzerland—was wondering if the Revolution would happen in his own lifetime.

But in February 1917 spontaneous riots brought down the tsar. Lenin rushed back to Petrograd (St. Petersburg), invigorated the Bolsheviks into an energetic radicalism, and through his own personal will created a program that promised peace and bread, and so popularized his party. Despite huge opposition from his own comrades, Lenin—backed by two gifted radicals, Trotsky and Stalin—forced the Bolsheviks to launch the October coup that seized power in Russia and changed history.

From the moment Lenin took power as premier—or chairman of the Council of People's Commissars—the new Soviet Republic was threatened on all sides by civil war and foreign intervention. Lenin made peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk and introduced the New Economic Policy to encourage some un-Marxist free enterprise, but pursued victory in the Russian Civil War with war communism, brutal repression and deliberate terror. “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless,” he said. In 1918 he founded the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, and encouraged pitiless brutality. Between 280,000 and 300,000 people were murdered under his orders; this only came to light when the archives were opened in 1991. “We must … put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades,” he wrote.

After Lenin himself was shot and almost killed in an assassination attempt in August 1918, the Red Terror against all those considered enemies of the people—such as the kulaks (wealthy peasants), was intensified. His most energetic and talented protégés,
Stalin and Trotsky, were also the most brutal. When the peasantry opposed his policies and millions perished in famines, Lenin said, “Let the peasantry starve.”

The following order, issued in 1918, is typical:

Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed
.

The interests of the whole revolution require this because the last decisive battle with the kulaks is now under way everywhere An example must be demonstrated
.

1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers
.

2. Publish their names
.

3. Seize all their grain from them
.

4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday's telegram. Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks
.

Telegraph receipt and implementation
.

Yours, Lenin
.

PS: Find some truly hard people
.

By 1920 the Soviet Revolution was safe, but Lenin himself was exhausted, and he never really recovered from the bullet wounds he had received in 1918. In 1922 he promoted Stalin to general secretary of the party, but when Stalin insulted other comrades and then Lenin's own wife, Lenin tried to remove him from his position. It was too late. Lenin was felled by a series of strokes, but managed to record a testament in which he attacked all his potential successors, including Trotsky and especially Stalin, whom
he said was “too rude” for high office. But his health collapsed and he died in 1924. He was embalmed, displayed in a mausoleum in Red Square, and worshipped like a Marxist saint.

In the Soviet Union, Leninism and Stalinism were one and same: a utopian totalitarian creed, founded on repression, bloodletting and the destruction of personal freedom. Thanks to Lenin, this ideology took the lives of over 100 million innocent people in the 20th century.

1886–1921

Even Death is better than the Baron
.

Refugee fleeing from the rule of Ungern in Mongolia

In 1920, Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, a sadistic, mystical Russian warlord obsessed with Genghis Khan, Buddhism and anti-Semitism, conquered Mongolia with a ramshackle army of Russian and Mongol cavalry. The crazy reign of this psychotic Mongolian-Baltic Colonel Kurtz—“the Bloody Baron”—is one of the most grotesque stories of modern times and personifies the murderous tragedy of the Russian Civil War in which millions perished.

Born in the Austrian city of Graz, Ungern was a Baltic nobleman of German descent, raised in Tallinn, capital of Estonia, then part of the Russian empire. He joined the Russian army, serving in the disastrous Russo-Japanese War and earning demotions for
thuggery. Aristocratic connections repeatedly saved him. His service in the Far East sparked his fascination with Buddhism, albeit of a kind far removed from the trendy peacenik version of film stars today; it was already linked to the anti-Semitism that would attract the then Dalai Lama to Nazi racial theories.

In the First World War Ungern rose to cavalry general, and when the Bolsheviks seized power he joined the Whites in the Far East and fought under another fascinating psychopath, the Cossack
Ataman
(chief) Semenov, backed by Japan. He was given command of a division of Asian cavalry within Semenov's self-declared “Mongol-Buryats Republic.” Though resolutely anti-Bolshevik, the two men enjoyed a fractious relationship with the other White armies opposed to the Reds, defying the authority of Admiral Kolchak, supreme ruler of the Whites, and operating independently.

Ungern governed a small town, Dauria, where he presided over a hellish crew of bloodthirsty torturers who killed any Bolsheviks or Jews. Turning against Semenov, he created a private army of Buryats, Tartars, Cossacks and tsarist officers that resembled a medieval host. Ungern personifies the tragic brutality of the Russian Civil War (1918–21), in which communist commissars, savage White warlords, generals, anarchists, nationalists, Cossacks and cut-throat anti-Semites managed to kill (by massacre or starvation) 10–20 million people.

Ungern was obsessed with his role in history: to restore monarchy under Nicholas II's brother, Grand Duke Michael (actually already killed by Bolsheviks), in Russia and restore Genghis Khan's glory and the rule of the living god-king, the perverted Bogd Khan, in Mongolia. In a savagely inept campaign, Ungern managed to expel Chinese troops, take the Mongolian capital Urga (now Ulan Bator), and restore the Bogd Khan with himself as dictator (aided by Tibetan troops lent by the Dalai Lama).

His reign was a surreal fiesta of tyranny, torture and murder. Unfortunate victims—whether communist, Jewish or merely the well-off—suffered frenzied beatings (“Did you know men can still walk when flesh and bone is separated?”), beheading, burning alive, dismemberment and disembowelment, exposure naked on ice, or being torn apart by wild animals. Some were dragged by a noose behind moving cars, hunted through streets by Cossacks, forced naked up trees until they fell out and were shot, or tied between bent-back branches, which when released would rip their bodies apart.

Ungern had long adhered to a quasi-religious mysticism that for many—with the Revolution and the Civil War—took on a millenarian bent, anticipating a coming apocalypse, the collapse of society and the creation of a “new world order.” Ungern came to see himself as the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. He hated Jews, whom he killed wherever possible, claiming “the Jews are not protected by any law … neither men nor women nor their seed should remain.” Even women and children were not spared.

In June 1921, Ungern's armies were defeated by the Bolsheviks. He himself was seriously wounded, and, as he attempted to flee, his surviving troops mutinied and attempted to kill him. They failed, but in August handed him over to the Bolsheviks. The “Bloody Baron” was transported back to Russia in a cage, given a public show trial in the city of Novosibirsk, and executed by firing squad on September 15, 1921.

1871–1922