TOP FIVE: CRAZY DICTATORS

THE MOST EVIL RULERS OF ALL TIME:

5. The Emperor Nero. In A.D. 59 he murdered his mother and in A.D. 62, his wife Octavia. He later married Poppaea. When half of Rome was burned in a fire (A.D. 64), Nero accused the Christians of starting it and began the first Roman persecution. In A.D. 65 there was a plot to make Caius Calpurnius Piso emperor. The detection of this plot began a string of violent deaths, e.g., of Seneca, Lucan, and Thrasea Paetus. Nero had ambitions to be a poet and artist. In A.D. 68 a series of revolts, including one by his own Praetorian Guard, caused him to commit suicide. Among his last words were, “What an artist the world is losing in me!” His memory was publicly execrated.

4. Maximillien Robespierre. Robespierre was the mastermind of the Reign of Terror (1793–1794), the dark underside of the French Revolution that perverted its lofty ideals of democracy with fanaticism and inhumanity. Robespierre, leader of the infamous Committee of Public Safety, turned France into a police state, sending "enemies of the nation" to the guillotine without benefit of a public trial or legal representation. About 40,000 French men and women were executed or died in prison, and another 300,000 were imprisoned. Only Robespierre's own beheading ended the slaughter.

3. Ivan the Terrible. On January 16, 1547, Ivan became the first czar of Russia, ruling until 1584. His early reign was primarily spent in battle in an effort to expand Russian land. His tyrannical cruelty only developed later in life, when he turned increasingly paranoid and vindictive—historians suspect mental instability. In 1570, Ivan formed a troop of personal bodyguards called oprichniki, who answered only to him and became the vehicle for massacring his perceived enemies over a seven-year period (1565–1572). The landed gentry was Ivan's particular nemesis, and he unleashed his oprichniki upon thousands of them. He was equally guilty of domestic violence, killing his son and heir, Ivan, in a state of fury, as well as several of his wives—he is believed to have had seven of them.

2. Joseph Stalin. Totalitarian leader of the U.S.S.R. from 1929–53, Stalin crushed the Soviet peoples with his megalomania and repressive version of communism. His adopted name meant "man of steel," and the term Stalinism has become the definition of a cruel, draconian socialism. He sent millions of Soviets not conforming to the Stalinist ideal to forced-labor camps, and he persecuted his country's vast number of ethnic groups—reserving particular vitriol for Jews and Ukranians. Soviet historian Roy Medvedev estimated that about 20 million died from starvation, executions, forced collectivization, and life in the labor camps under Stalin's rule. Another 20 million survived imprisonment and deportation.

1. Adolf Hitler. History's most chilling tyrant, Hitler controlled Germany from 1933–45. His fascist maneuverings for world domination, his dream of a Teutonic master race subjugating all non-Germanic peoples, led to a criminality unmatched by any leader this millennium. Responsible for the genocide of six million Jews, the slaughter of Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Communists, and other "undesirables" and "decadents," as well as the invasion of Europe and the preposterous ambition to rule the world, Hitler defies any more sophisticated explanation than categorical evil.

On the bubble: Caligula, Tamerlane, Saddam Hussein, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Napoleon III, and Nicolae Carpathia (that last one's a joke).

Note: all of the information was taken from infoplease.com. I had no desire to research and write this on my own.