Who's the Most Important Person of the Twentieth Century?
I want to scream out "Gavrilo Princip!" Here's a man who single-handedly sets off a chain reaction which ultimately leads to the deaths of 80 million people.
Top that, Albert Einstein!
With just a couple of bullets, this terrorist starts the First World War, which destroys four monarchies, leading to a power vacuum filled by the Communists in Russia and the Nazis in Germany who then fight it out in a Second World War. Considering that all Princip wanted was to bring Bosnia under Serb control, it's a bit ironic that after a century of very messy history, it isn't. Everything about the world has changed drastically over the last century, except that.
Most historians consider this century to have begun in 1914, so in essence, Gavrilo Princip is the man who created the 20th Century.
Some people would minimize Princip's importance by saying that a Great Power War was inevitable sooner or later given the tensions of the times, but I say that it was no more inevitable than, say, a war between Nato and the Warsaw Pact. Left unsparked, the Great War could have been avoided, and without it, there would have been no Lenin, no Hitler, no Eisenhower. Princip is one of the few individuals ever to make history.
My vote for number two VIP would go to Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who brought the century to an end.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20c-vip.htm