The Worst Non-Soviet European Communist Dictators

duh, i forgot the yugoslavian dudes. though i don't think that tito was the worst of the bunch.

How did Dubcek get on this list, comrade??

i just pulled a straight list from each country via wikipedia -- i know that dubcek doesn't really belong in the company of the likes of ceausescu, hoxha, honecker, jaruzelski, etc. and was a much better person than any of them. but he was in charge of czechoslovakia when it was in the warsaw pact -- and hopefully, no-one will vote him the worst (unless we have some stealth hardcore stalinists here).

you mean non-russian rather than non-soviet? none of these guys except the albanians were exactly independent operators.

though obviously stalin wasn't simply 'russian' either.

Was Jaruzelski that bad?

Errrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmm, TITO? Where is he? Kind of an important figure, don't you think?

lol nasty communists worse than thatcher

Haha no Tito. He has cousins in MN; my grade school best friend's dad was his cousin. I am not aware of any other friends having links to Bloc era leaders...

css that suzy is able to namedrop even tito

Dubcech really doesn't belong on this list at all. You might as well have a poll on most hated white apartheid leaders of South Africa and include Mandela. [Well, not quite, but you know what I mean]

I'm assuming Ceausescu is the worst, but I won't vote yet, in case someone adds something to this thread that makes me realise there was someone worse out there.

Amazingly some of these folks are still alive. I don't know why I think it's amazing really, they just seem to be from a different time. Anyway Alia (one of them who is still alive) doesn't really deserve to be here. He was one of the reformers, albeit a pretty cautious one. The same can be said for Grósz (apart from the being alive bit) and Gheorghiu-Dej, who, in some ways was a kind of ahead of his time in his delaings with "The West" - obviously his...erm...legacy is somewhat tarnished by his successor. Who I think ought to walk this.

There really should be a book about some of these people and how they worked together or not and their relationship with russia. I find it fascinating but have only read bits and pieces scattered in other books (mostly about russia). If anyone knows of such a book please inform me of it.

i repeat, my omission of the yugoslavian communist leaders was purely accidental -- i didn't even realize it until shortly after i hit the "submit response" button. anyway, i wouldn't think that Tito would "win" this contest anyway -- though, if i am not mistaken, wasn't Milosevic also in charge of Yugoslavia (not merely Serbia) at some point? he might be the only one who could really give Ceausescu a run for the money.

and yeah, Ceausescu will probably "win" -- him (and maybe Hoxha) are pretty much as synonymous with the worst of eastern european communism as Stalin and Brezhnev themselves. on the other hand, i think that the east germans collectively -- that is, both Ulbricht and Honnecker -- could more strongly "contend" in that they had refined their brutality to the point of blandness. which is kind of interesting in itself, since Ulbricht was the guy who built the Berlin Wall and the Stasi (both of which are infamous world-wide symbols of eastern european communism) and Honnecker "refined" his predecessor's legacies.

Was Jaruzelski that bad?

compared to ceausescu, hoxha, and the east germans, probably not. my beefs with him may be mainly from familiarity (the crackdown on Solidarity and all that, his involvement in the 1968 anti-Semitic purges) and personal -- he came from the same pre-war social strata as my grandmother's family (i.e., "kresniak" galician polish gentry), so on a certain level i see his becoming Communist as a something of a personal betrayal (considering the brutality meted out to Poles of Jaruzelski's social status in the portion of Poland under Soviet control before Hitler's invasion).

Bela Kun!

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http://www.lanceandeskimo.com/images/tito.jpg

How did Dubcek get on this list, comrade??

1. He was a communist.

2. He was, briefly, the head of an authoritarian regime in Czechoslovakia, albeit one attempting tentative liberalisation. Nice dictators are still dictators.

I have voted for Zhivkov, mainly because Ceaucescu had a couple of redeeming features (progressive foreign policy, mainly). Zhivkov was a total cockfarmer.

The German ones are the ones I know best... whether it is Ulbricht, a comedically pompous little man, or Hoenecker, who seems to have spent his entire reign being a bit confused. Is Hoenecker dead yet?

who was the least stylish?

Enver and his pillboxes.

(ILMish offtopicism alert) I can see how people may reasonably be offended abt it in one way or another, but I love how Laibach, in the midst of accusations of (pseudo, crypto or actual) fascism in dichotomist uk music press, release this stuff on the label Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien!

http://www.laibach.nsk.si/krst.jpg

Voted Hoxha btw.

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