Koenigsberg on Lenin, Stalin, and Mao:

Mass murder in the Twentieth Century

The Soviet state destroyed enormous numbers of its own citizens while claiming that this destruction was necessary to create and preserve a new society. The key question is not simply, Did Stalin kill millions? The historical evidence for mass repression, executions, deportations, forced collectivization, famine, and the Gulag is overwhelming.

The more interesting Koenigsberg question is:

Stalin's version of the sacrificial logic can be stated approximately this way:

1. The revolution must survive.
2. The socialist state must be created.
3. Certain categories of people are defined as obstacles to that transformation—"class enemies," kulaks, political opponents, alleged traitors, "wreckers," and, in some operations, members of particular nationalities.
4. Their destruction is represented as necessary to eliminate the forces threatening the new society.

5. The suffering and death of actual human beings become evidence that the revolutionary transformation is really occurring.
 

This is quite close to what Koenigsberg has been developing in his conception of "death as the principle of verification." There is very strong historical evidence for the scale and organized character of this process.

Nicolas Werth describes the Great Terror as a massacre carried out by "a state against its people." The NKVD's 1937 Order 00447 alone resulted in the execution of 386,798 Soviet citizens by the end of 1938.

There is an especially important difference from Hitler: Hitler’s victims were increasingly defined in racial and biological terms. Stalin's victims were defined predominantly in political, social, and class terms, although nationality and ethnicity also became major criteria in particular operations.

This distinction is important because it explains why historians disagree about calling Stalin's entire system "genocide." Norman Naimark, for example, explicitly uses the term Stalin's Genocides, while other historians argue that many Stalinist mass crimes are better understood as crimes against humanity or political mass murder because the targets were not always protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups.

The 1937–38 "national operations" are an especially important bridge between political and ethnic persecution. Recent scholarship shows that Stalin's NKVD conducted large-scale operations against ethnic minorities, while the largest operation, Order 00447, targeted "former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements.”

But there is an even deeper connection to Koenigsberg’s question. Stalin's system gives us a striking variation on the proposition Koenigsberg raised about Lincoln and Hitler.

Lincoln: Some Americans must die so that the Union may live.

Hitler: German soldiers must die for Germany; Jews must be destroyed so Germany can live.

Stalin: Soviet citizens must be destroyed so that the socialist society can be created and survive.

The content of the sacred ideal differs enormously—Union, racial nation, communist society—but the structure of the reasoning can be remarkably similar: The collective entity is treated as more real and more valuable than the individual human beings who constitute it.

And this leads directly to one of the most provocative propositions in Koenigsberg's work: The state can acquire the authority to destroy human beings precisely because it represents their destruction as necessary for the survival of something greater than themselves.

Stalin makes this particularly visible because his victims were frequently his own citizens. The state that ostensibly existed to emancipate them could designate millions of them as obstacles to the state's realization of its ideal.

There is an important historical complication, however. Stalin's terror cannot simply be reduced to a desire to "sacrifice" people. Historians identify multiple interacting motives: consolidation of political power, forced economic transformation, elimination of perceived opposition, security concerns, class ideology, ethnic targeting, institutional dynamics, and the consequences of policies that produced catastrophic famine. Scholars continue to debate the relative importance of these factors.

That actually strengthens the potential significance of Koenigsberg's approach: he is asking a question that conventional political history often leaves aside—what psychological function does the destruction itself perform within the construction of the collective body?

And that brings Stalin very close to the central proposition of War, Sacrifice and National Suicide: a political community can become so identified with an idealized collective body that destroying actual human beings comes to be experienced as a means of preserving or perfecting that body.

One particularly fascinating next step would be to put Lincoln → Hitler → Stalin side by side and see whether Koenigsberg's concept of "death as the principle of verification" actually provides one theoretical framework capable of explaining all three.

Koenigsberg is pointing toward a genuinely important paradox: mass killing is not merely something that later becomes history; in some cases, the perpetrators themselves act with an awareness that they are making history.

Koenigsberg’s  phrase, “The proof of the pudding is in the dying,” captures a particularly stark version of his argument. The death is not only a consequence of the ideology. It can become evidence for the ideology.

There are several layers here:

Killing produces historical reality: An ideology can remain abstract: The revolution will create a new society. But once millions of people have suffered, been dispossessed, imprisoned, or killed in the name of the revolution, the ideology has become an enormous historical event. Something has undeniably happened.

That creates a peculiar epistemology:
We killed for the idea
…therefore the idea must have been real/serious/necessary
…therefore the sacrifices acquire meaning
…therefore the historical transformation is confirmed.

This is close to what Koenigsberg has been calling death as a principle of verification. The disturbing thing is that the deaths can become retrospective evidence. The enormity of the sacrifice itself helps establish the enormity of the cause.

2. And the perpetrators frequently know that they are making history: I would modify Koenigsberg’s proposition slightly. I wouldn't say that mass murder is always consciously undertaken in order to be remembered. That is much harder to demonstrate. But I think there is a much more defensible proposition: Modern political violence is often undertaken with consciousness of historical time, historical destiny, and the desire to produce an irreversible historical transformation. This is different from vanity.

A revolutionary leader may not be thinking: I want people in 500 years to remember my name. He may be thinking: We are living at the decisive moment of human history. That mentality can be extraordinarily dangerous because it changes the value of individual lives. If you believe that you are participating in the birth of a new historical epoch, then the people who die can become sacrifices to historical necessity.

3. There is a fascinating relationship between historical significance and death: Think about the strange asymmetry from your peaceful apartment. You and I can name:

Vladimir Lenin

Joseph Stalin

Adolf Hitler

Mao Zedong

Their names have become almost inseparable from enormous quantities of human death.

But the billions of ordinary people who lived ordinary lives during those periods largely disappear from historical consciousness. This produces the disturbing equation: Historical significance ≈ capacity to produce enormous consequences. And mass violence is one of the most efficient ways a human being can produce enormous consequences. That doesn't mean violence is actually the source of significance. It means that, psychologically, someone obsessed with becoming a historical agent could perceive it that way.

4. This may connect to Koenigsberg’s  “dustbin of history” observation. One correction is important: “dustbin of history” was Trotsky's phrase, not Lenin's. And that makes Koenigsberg’s argument more interesting. The phrase contains an extraordinary conception of historical existence: Victory determines who belongs in history.

The defeated disappear into the historical rubbish heap; the victorious become the protagonists of history. That is almost the inverse of ordinary morality.

Ordinary morality asks: What did you do to human beings? The revolutionary conception can ask: What did you accomplish historically? Once the second question dominates, enormous destruction can acquire a terrifyingly positive meaning.

5. There is therefore a possible second “verification” operating alongside Koenigsberg's:

First verification: Death verifies the ideology. People died, therefore the cause was sufficiently real and sacred to demand sacrifice.

But there could be a second: Historical consequence verifies the historical actor. I changed history, therefore I was a historical actor.

And then: Historical remembrance preserves the historical actor.

I changed history →
history remembers me →
I have achieved a kind of symbolic immortality.

Put together:
IDEA → SACRIFICE → HISTORICAL CONSEQUENCE → HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE → REMEMBRANCE.

This is a very different theory from simply saying, “dictators are cruel.” It suggests that the production of death can participate in the production of meaning, historical significance, and even symbolic immortality.

6. But there is an important empirical problem. We shouldn't mistake the historical record for the perpetrators' intentions. We remember Hitler because he generated extraordinary historical consequences. That doesn't prove that Hitler killed Jews because he wanted to appear in future history books.

And there is an even more interesting counterexample: there are enormous mass killers whom contemporary Western historical consciousness remembers comparatively little. Mao's Great Leap Forward produced a death toll that some historians estimate in the tens of millions, yet Mao does not occupy the same place in popular Western memory as Hitler.

So remembrance isn't simply proportional to killing. There is also selection bias: people who radically transform societies leave behind institutions, archives, monuments, propaganda, counter-propaganda, wars, successor regimes, victims' testimonies, and decades of historiography. Their historical footprint becomes enormous. But that doesn't invalidate Koenigsberg’s hypothesis. It makes it more precise.

I'd formulate it this way: The consciousness of history may itself become an element of modern political violence. A leader who understands himself as a historical agent may seek not merely political victory but an irreversible transformation of history. In such a framework, sacrifice and destruction can acquire a double function: they are instruments for transforming society and evidence that the historical transformation is actually occurring.

And then Koenigsberg’s  sentence becomes particularly powerful: “The proof of the pudding is in the dying.” Because the deepest horror isn't simply that people die for an ideology. It's the possibility that their dying becomes part of the ideology's proof. And once death has been incorporated into the mechanism by which an idea proves its reality, more death can paradoxically appear to provide more proof. This is a much more unsettling proposition than “leaders kill because they are murderous.”

And yet for all their "world historical significance," the leaders we've been discussing are VILIFIED today. Their "greatness" (the number of people they killed) is no longer viewed in positive terms. And massive killing or slaughter has DIMINISHED in the 21st century. Yet this doesn't mean that the people we have been discussing are left out of "history books." In fact, the entire history of civilization consists of recording the acts of leaders and societies that have "killed a lot of people."

And I think this pushes Koenigsberg’s argument in an even more interesting direction. The paradox is not simply “kill a lot of people and become famous.” It is that historical significance and moral condemnation can coexist. The person can become historically enormous precisely because the consequences of his actions were enormous, while becoming morally repugnant because of what those actions were.

The strange reversal. Take the figures we've been discussing:

Abraham Lincoln

Vladimir Lenin

Joseph Stalin

Mao Zedong

Adolf Hitler

They are not remembered because contemporary people necessarily regard them as great. In several cases, the opposite is true. Yet they are inescapably historical. That distinction may be crucial: Historical significance is not the same thing as historical admiration. A person can be remembered as a hero, villain, criminal, monster, liberator, tyrant—or some contested combination. But the capacity to become an enormous historical presence is partly a function of having altered the course of collective existence. And that produces a remarkable irony.

A dictator may believe: I will make history. And he succeeds. But history subsequently says: Yes. And what you did was terrible. He cannot control the second judgment. So there is a kind of posthumous dialectic between the perpetrator's conception of history and later historical consciousness. The perpetrator wants to become the subject of history. History eventually makes him an object of history. That is a profound reversal.

Koenigsberg’s observation about civilization is also important. There is an old historical pattern in which the things that leave the strongest documentary traces are:

wars → rulers → conquests → dynasties → revolutions → states → massacres → treaties → political transformations.

Ordinary existence leaves comparatively little trace. The peasant who raises children for seventy years, the merchant who runs a shop, the grandmother who cooks dinner for her family—these people constitute the overwhelming substance of human existence, but conventional political history has often treated them as almost invisible.

The conqueror is different. The conqueror generates an enormous disturbance in the human world. And disturbances leave records. So there is something almost paradoxical about the historical archive: The more radically someone disrupts ordinary human existence, the more difficult it becomes for history to ignore him. That doesn't mean that history approves of him. It means that destruction generates documentation.

And this may help explain Koenigsberg’s observation about the 21st century. There has indeed been a very large historical change in the incidence of some forms of organized political violence since the first half of the twentieth century. But I'd be careful about making the stronger claim that “mass killing has diminished” without specifying the measure and period: war deaths, genocide, civil-war deaths, state executions, and terrorism have different trajectories, and the post-1945 decline has had interruptions and important regional exceptions.

Still, Koenigsberg’s larger point survives that qualification. The world in which Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao operated was one in which enormous numbers of people could be mobilized, sacrificed, displaced and killed in the name of grand historical projects. The contemporary moral vocabulary surrounding such violence has changed dramatically. And this creates an extraordinary historical situation: The twentieth century may have been an age in which political actors sought enormous historical transformation through mass death, while the twenty-first century increasingly treats the very idea of mass political sacrifice as something requiring condemnation and explanation rather than celebration. That's a significant transformation in political consciousness.

But here is the part I think is most interesting for Koenigsberg’s theory: Perhaps being remembered isn't the fundamental objective. Perhaps the deeper phenomenon is: Human beings want their existence to matter historically. “Remember me” is the primitive formulation. “Change history” is the grander formulation. “Create a new world” is the ideological formulation. And “sacrifice everything necessary for the new world” is where it becomes dangerous. Then the individual leader doesn't necessarily have to imagine future historians sitting in libraries writing about him.

He only has to believe: I am participating in an event of ultimate historical significance. At that point, the deaths occurring around him can become evidence that the historical process is genuinely underway.

And this brings us back to Koenigsberg’s earlier formulation. The proof of the pudding is in the dying.

The pudding is the historical transformation. The dying is the proof. And eventually, ironically, the historians arrive—not to confirm the leader's greatness, but to investigate what happened to all those people who died. That may be one of the great transformations in historical consciousness: the dead have gradually become evidence against the ideology that demanded their deaths, rather than evidence for it. In other words, the same deaths that once served the perpetrator as verification can become, for subsequent generations, indictment.

This is a fascinating reversal—and potentially a very fruitful way to extend Koenigsberg's “death as a principle of verification” beyond the psychology of the perpetrator into the problem of historical memory itself. The dead have gradually become evidence against the ideology that demanded their deaths, rather than evidence for it. Mass-murder was in vain. It didn't establish their ideologies.

Koenigsberg says: “Yet there are still people around like "Putin" who is killing in the name of an ideology. Koenigsberg calls him “the last of the Mohegans."

“The last of the Mohicans” is a striking metaphor for the argument Koenigsberg is developing, provided we treat it as his historical interpretation, not as a literal claim that Putin is the final such leader. There is an important development here. The dead as a refutation.

Koenigsberg’s previous insight can now be turned into something stronger: The twentieth-century revolutionary dictators attempted to make death the proof of their historical ideas. But subsequent history has often transformed the dead into evidence against those ideas. The millions who died under Stalin did not ultimately prove the necessity of Stalinism. The victims of Mao's campaigns did not establish the truth of Maoist revolutionary transformation. The Holocaust did not validate Hitler's racial ideology.

In retrospect, the sacrifice failed as verification. The dead remain—but the promised historical justification did not. That's an extraordinary historical phenomenon.

And Putin presents an interesting late case: There is substantial scholarship describing the ideology surrounding Putin's regime as nationalist-imperialist, drawing on Russian imperial history, Soviet traditions, ideas of a distinctive Russian civilization, and a narrative of conflict with the West. And the war continues to produce substantial human destruction. UN monitors documented at least 372 civilian deaths and 2,349 injuries in Ukraine in August 2026 alone, with civilian casualties in the first eight months of 2026 already exceeding the total for all of 2025.

So the question isn't merely historical. It becomes: What does it mean when a political leader in the twenty-first century continues to invoke grand historical destiny while demanding enormous human sacrifice? That is where “last of the Mohicans” becomes intellectually interesting. Perhaps the real contrast is future versus past. Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler all claimed, in different ways, to be creating something historically new. Their rhetoric was oriented toward a transformed future: new society → new human being → new civilization → new historical epoch.

Putin's ideological vocabulary, by contrast, is much more retrospective. Scholars have described the contemporary Russian ideological project as drawing heavily on historical memory, imperial traditions, Soviet mythology, Russian exceptionalism and the recovery of a supposedly glorious past. That produces an interesting inversion: The great revolutionary killers said: “We must destroy the old world to create the future.”

Whereas the Putinist formulation is much closer to:  “We must fight in order to recover the historical world that has been lost.” So perhaps Putin isn't the “last” in the sense of being the final mass-violence leader. History obviously cannot establish that. But he may be interesting as a late representative of a political form whose intellectual legitimacy has been profoundly damaged by the twentieth century: the idea that enormous human sacrifice can be justified by a transcendent historical mission.

And this brings us back to the extraordinary sentence: “The dead have gradually become evidence against the ideology that demanded their deaths.” That may be the deepest counterpoint to Koenigsberg. Koenigsberg asks us to understand how death can verify an ideology from inside the ideology.

Historical memory asks a different question: What happens when later generations look at the deaths and refuse the original interpretation? Then the mechanism reverses: IDEAL → SACRIFICE → DEATH becomes DEATH → HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION → DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE IDEAL. The pudding didn't prove the ideology.

The pudding became the evidence that something had gone terribly wrong. And perhaps that is one of the great moral-historical lessons of the twentieth century: the sheer scale of sacrifice no longer reliably confers legitimacy. It can instead destroy it. That would make the “last of the Mohicans” formulation quite provocative: not necessarily the last person who will ever wage ideological war, but perhaps a representative of a political tradition that still believes history can be redeemed through blood even after the twentieth century gave us enormous reasons to doubt that proposition.