Worse than North Korea?
Worse than Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge/Pol Pot.
Worse than the USSR under Stalin/Lenin? Land of the Gulag Archipelago?
#36. YES! The famines in No. Vietnam during the 50’s cost an estimated 1 million lives. That in No. Korea over time, millions. Under Stalin, the Holomador (Ukraine) and elsewhere (the mines, gulags, slave labor camps), possibly up to 10 million or more. Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - a total death toll including killings/genocide, working people to death, diseases, and famine - around 1.5 to 2.0 million.
See: R. J. Rummel, “Death By Government”, Routledge, 1994, chapters on each of the above, plus the smaller but informative (esp. on Cambodia), “The World’s Bloodiest History: Massacre, Genocide, and the Scars They Left On Civilization” Joseph Cummins, Crestline/Book Sales Inc., 2010.
For Vietnam, see: “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, 1972, Sen. Jud. Com., (it is online), “Sen. Internal Security Subcommittee”, 1972 ( a compendium study that I created and worked on) and companion studies by SISS on “The Human Cost of Soviet Communism”,1970, Robert Conquest, and “The Human Cost of Communism in China”, 1971, Prof. Richard Walker.