Comment on Competent Elites

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 07:11:41 GMT

Interesting. The man most famous for being a short leader may not have been as short as he's rumoured to have been.

Despite the fact that I seem to have picked a bad example, there are still a number of short leaders in history; height is a factor, and perhaps an important one, but hardly the only one. There's a list of a few short Russian leaders over here - and, incidentally, if one puts "Lenin height" into Google, Google will actually display Lenin's height above the search results. (Google's heights indicate that the heights on the Yahoo question seem to be a few centimetres short - Lenin was 165cm according to Google, Stalin was 173cm, Putin was 165cm. No result shown for Kruschev.) Average male height in Russia, around 2006-2008, seems to be 176.2cm.

And all of them are tall compared to Benito Juárez, the shortest world leader ever at 137cm, or 4ft 6in.

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