At dawn on 30 December 2006, Saddam Hussein was hanged in a former intelligence headquarters in the Baghdad district of Kadhimiya, convicted by an Iraqi tribunal of crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 men and boys from the Shia town of Dujail a quarter of a century earlier. The execution, filmed on a smuggled phone and circulated within hours, was the legal endpoint of a regime that had already collapsed: in April 2003 a United States–led invasion had toppled his government in three weeks, and in December of that year American soldiers had pulled him, dishevelled and armed but unresisting, from a camouflaged pit near a farmhouse outside his home city of Tikrit. He had ruled Iraq, a country of some 25 million people sitting atop the world’s then fourth-largest oil reserves, for 24 years.
Saddam rose through the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, which seized power in Iraq in 1968. As vice president and security enforcer under the ailing Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, he was the regime’s real strongman for a decade before formally taking the presidency on 16 July 1979. He marked his arrival with a televised purge: scores of senior Ba’athists were named as traitors before a stunned party congress, dragged out, and shot. It set the pattern. Power flowed through a narrow circle of kin and clansmen from the Tikrit region, enforced by overlapping secret-police agencies and a pervasive cult of personality, and rested on the proceeds of nationalized oil.
His rule was defined by catastrophic wars and mass atrocity. In September 1980 he invaded revolutionary Iran, beginning an eight-year war that killed an estimated half a million people or more on both sides and in which Iraq used chemical weapons. In the war’s final phase his regime turned poison gas and mass executions on Iraq’s own Kurds in the Anfal campaign of 1988, killing tens of thousands and razing thousands of villages; the gas attack on Halabja alone killed thousands of civilians in hours. In August 1990 he invaded and annexed Kuwait, provoking a US-led coalition that expelled his army in 1991, after which he drowned Shia and Kurdish uprisings in blood.
The regime that survived 1991 and a decade of crippling sanctions did not survive 2003. Saddam fell to external force, not internal revolt, but the structure he had built — personalist, sectarian, hollowed of institutions — left no orderly successor and a society primed for the insurgency and civil war that followed. His victims, at Dujail, in the southern marshes, at Halabja and across Kurdistan, remain the measure of what his rule cost.
On the afternoon of 28 April 1945, with German forces in Italy days from surrender, Italian partisans shot Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci against a villa wall at Giulino di Mezzegra, on the western shore of Lake Como. They had been captured the day before while trying to slip across the Alps into Switzerland, Mussolini reportedly disguised in a German greatcoat in a retreating convoy. The next morning the bodies were trucked to Milan and strung up by the heels from the girders of a half-built petrol station in the Piazzale Loreto, where a crowd that had suffered twenty years of his rule kicked, spat at, and reviled the corpse of the man who had invented Fascism and ruled Italy as its Duce.
Mussolini had come to power more than two decades earlier through a mixture of street violence and constitutional theatre. A former socialist agitator turned nationalist, he founded the Fascist movement in 1919 and built it on squads of black-shirted militants who beat and murdered socialists, trade unionists, and political rivals while a frightened liberal establishment looked away. In October 1922 his followers staged the March on Rome; rather than resist, King Victor Emmanuel III invited Mussolini to form a government, and on 30 October 1922 he became, at 39, the youngest prime minister in Italian history. He owed his office to a constitutional appointment underwritten by the threat of force.
From 1925 he dismantled what remained of Italian democracy, banning opposition parties, muzzling the press, and ruling by decree as a one-party dictator wrapped in a cult of the all-knowing Duce. His regime crushed dissent, conquered Ethiopia in a brutal colonial war that used poison gas, intervened in Spain, imposed antisemitic racial laws in 1938, and bound Italy ever tighter to Nazi Germany. The 1939 Pact of Steel and his decision to enter the Second World War alongside Hitler in June 1940 were the fatal commitments. Italy was militarily and economically unready, and a chain of defeats — in Greece, North Africa, and finally on Italian soil — destroyed both the war effort and the dictator’s authority.
The collapse came in two stages. In July 1943, after the Allies landed in Sicily, the Fascist regime’s own Grand Council voted Mussolini out; the king dismissed and arrested him. Rescued by German commandos, he was installed as the figurehead of a Nazi puppet state in the north, the Italian Social Republic, presiding over a savage civil war against the partisans until the German position collapsed and he was caught and shot. He died not in battle but at the hands of the Italians his regime had oppressed, and the manner of it — the public display in the Piazzale Loreto — was both vengeance and a deliberate erasure of the cult he had built.
At about ten minutes to three on the afternoon of 25 December 1989, in a courtyard of an army barracks at Târgoviște, north of Bucharest, a firing squad shot Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena against a wall. A military tribunal hastily convened that Christmas Day had tried them in roughly an hour on charges including genocide and the theft of the nation’s wealth, found them guilty, and ordered their immediate execution. Soldiers reportedly opened fire before the order was fully given. The footage of the bodies, broadcast within hours, confirmed to a country and a watching world that the most rigid of the Soviet bloc’s dictatorships had fallen. Ceaușescu had ruled Romania, a nation of some 23 million people, for 24 years.
He had risen through the Romanian Communist Party, taking its leadership in 1965 on the death of his predecessor and adding the new post of president in 1974. His early years brought a brief liberalization and a foreign policy that distanced Romania from Moscow — most visibly his 1968 refusal to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia — which won him popularity at home and praise in the West. That opening soon closed. Ceaușescu built one of the most extreme personality cults in the communist world, styling himself the “Genius of the Carpathians” and elevating Elena to the second position in the state, while the secret police, the Securitate, wove an informant network so dense that Romanians lived in chronic fear of one another.
The regime’s defining catastrophe was self-inflicted. In the 1980s Ceaușescu resolved to pay off Romania’s entire foreign debt by exporting the country’s food, fuel, and goods, imposing brutal austerity on his own people. Romanians endured rationed bread, dark and freezing winters, and bare shops while the regime poured resources into grandiose projects — above all the colossal House of the People in Bucharest and a “systematization” scheme that bulldozed villages and historic city districts. The debt was cleared by 1989; so was whatever legitimacy the regime retained.
The end, when it came, was sudden and violent. In December 1989 protests in the western city of Timișoara, sparked by the attempted eviction of a dissident pastor, were met with gunfire. Within days the unrest reached Bucharest, a mass rally turned against Ceaușescu before live television, the army changed sides, and the dictator and his wife fled by helicopter only to be captured, tried, and shot. Alone in the Eastern bloc’s revolutions of 1989, Romania’s was bloody, and its ruler did not survive it. His victims — those shot in the streets, the families broken by the Securitate, the people ground down by a decade of needless deprivation — are the measure of what his rule cost.