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Khmer Rouge is the one that came to mind first, when I just read the thread title.
Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar (mid 1800s) would have to be a contender. During her three decades of rule, the population of Madagascar was thought to have been reduced by half.
In the 1450s there lived a prince known as Vlad the Impaler. He was ruler of Walachia, a small principality in what is now Romania. He ruled with an iron hand and had no mercy for those who disobeyed him. He impaled people by the thousands, and sometimes washed down his meals with their blood.
In 1459, an invading Turkish army came across a gruesome warning left by Vlad; the decaying bodies of perhaps twenty thousand Turkish captives, impaled on stakes. But Vlad also impaled his own subjects as punishment for almost any crime. One estimate says he may have personally authorized the killing of as many as a hundred thousand of the half a million people of his principality.
Vlad's father was known as Dracul,which in Romanian means "Dragon" or "Devil." Vlad was the son of the Devil. Dracula Legend has it.
Oh, you can't have this kind of thread without bringing up Stalin, "The Butcher in Blood." He ordered the forced starvation of 6 million Ukrainians, besides instituting the Gulag and the Purges. No one knows how many died under Stalin, but 27 million of his countrymen dead from his policies is a reasonable estimate.
The Kim Dynasty in North Korea. Between the routine famines and the fact that the standard of living in North Korea is lower then it was perhaps even under the Korean Monarchy over 100 years ago. I think they take the cake.
His people actually did pretty well under his leadership, from what I've read. He could be harsh. He liked to pour molten silver into the ears of certain captives, for example.
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