ABSTRACT
The provocative description of the four men, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Truman, as mass murderers might be taken as an attempt to show that they were all equally evil. In the minds of many people who lived outside the former USSR, the story of the Ukrainian famine is a story of poor weather followed by a poor harvest followed by starvation. But this famine, like most famines, originated in politics. Stalin hated the kulaks, but he had no reason to hate the farmers who starved in the famine. If he could have arranged matters differently, abolishing markets, collectivizing plots of land, without starving the farmers, he would have preferred to do so. The standard view of the Dresden bombing is that this was a necessary act in a just war. That the bombing was necessary, that it was a step towards Nazi surrender, that it had any positive effects at all, this the author disputes.
