Raphaël Lemkin’s Concept of Soviet Genocide in Ukraine
Author:
Gennadi Poberezny
Editor: Clemens Poole
The way genocide is conducted is often opportunistic, and mass murder is not a critical feature of its commission, but rather only a “chance variation”. Hence, it follows from its definition in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Article II) that such a crime, in principle, can be committed without killing a single person. One of the Convention’s acts — the “forcible transfer of children of a protected group to another group” for their assimilation does not anticipate killing at all [2]. Under the Convention, for the charge of genocide, three simultaneous conditions must be met: at least one of the five acts enumerated by the Convention must be established, a protected group must be identified, and the intent to destroy the group, as such, must be proven.
In his 1953 speech Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine commemorating the victims of the 1933 Great Famine, Lemkin condemned not only the brutality of this fundamental violation of international law but also offered a perspective on Soviet genocide in Ukraine as a colonial crime with the goal of the disappearance of Ukrainians as a separate national group and their forced assimilation into a single Russified Soviet nation. This destructive policy was aimed at the Ukrainian nation — a political community of diverse (though largely ethnic Ukrainian) origins, not just a particular social class (such as the peasantry), or even the entire Ukrainian ethnicity. He explicitly stated that it was “the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification — the destruction of the Ukrainian nation” [3].
Lemkin described the plan for this destruction as consisting of four “prongs” of a systematic strike aimed at certain prominent components of the nation. Despite the Ukrainian nation being “too populous to be exterminated completely with any efficiency, […] its leadership [is] quite small and therefore easily eliminated [through] mass murder, deportation and forced labor, exile, and starvation” [4]. Thus, the first prong was pointed at the intelligentsia — the leading intellectuals and professionals who formed and articulated the separateness of Ukrainian identity and the need for an independent state to protect it. “As long as Ukraine retains its national unity [and] its people continue to […] seek independence, so long Ukraine poses a serious threat to the very heart of Sovietism” [5]. The second one was directed against the Ukrainian churches and their clergy, who were offered the opportunity to join the Russian Church before their liquidation.
The third was directed at the independent farmers, the most productive, organized, conscious stratum of society — the “repository of the tradition, folklore and music, the national language and literature, the national spirit of Ukraine” — to be completely exterminated through terrible starvation [6]. However, Lemkin dismissed “this highpoint of Soviet cruelty as [just] an economic policy connected with the collectivization” and instead insisted that the peasantry was sacrificed to “eliminate [Ukrainian] nationalism, to establish the horrifying uniformity of the Soviet state” [7]. It necessitated very specifically the destruction of the Ukrainian nation due to its location, size, history, and salience for Moscow.
Notably, to Lemkin, the nature of the Soviet genocide was not the complete annihilation of the Ukrainians as people, but the removal of their select parts that opposed the creation of the new Soviet Man and the Soviet Nation — the objective of the Soviet government for its entire rule in Ukraine. “And yet, if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people” [8].
The fourth prong was explicitly colonial and consisted of “the fragmentation of the Ukrainian people […] by the addition to the Ukraine of foreign peoples and by the dispersion of the Ukrainians” abroad for “ethnic unity [to] be destroyed and nationalities mixed” [9]. The foreign settlers — primarily Russian bureaucrats, soldiers, and professionals (especially educators) were enticed by higher wages, positions of authority and prestige; they held leading and respectable roles in the colonial society ruled over by the Soviet imperial policy that was only “the logical successor” to “the long-term policy of liquidation of non-Russian peoples” that had “ample precedent” in the operations of Imperial Russia [10].
It was Ukraine's lasting colonial subordination that made this policy possible, as it left it unprotected against the threat of the “destruction of the pattern of the oppressed group” — indigenous foundations of its autonomous being, and the “imposition of the pattern of the oppressor” — alien rules of existence and consciousness [11]. The essential feature of structural colonial dependency is that all the most important strategic decision-making directly affecting the population of a colonial state is made outside its borders in an imperial metropol. These decisions are often made at the expense of a colony and contrary to its interests. Lemkin emphasized the colonial condition of power asymmetry between the dominant and the subordinate groups for the commission of genocide in those two concurrent phases leading to the elimination of the cultural diversity of humankind, the deracination of protected groups, whose way of life, beliefs, identity, and other aspects of culture were meant for eradication.
It follows from Lemkin's concept that genocide in Ukraine cannot be reduced simply to the Holodomor as an aberration of the Soviet regime [12]. While it was important, it was only one component of a genocidal policy that went far and beyond famine, and whose victims were the country’s entire population, not just those who were starved and perished. Equating genocide exclusively with the Holodomor is a manifestation of the common misunderstanding of the nature of Sovietism (which was simultaneously totalitarian, colonial, and genocidal), causes and consequences of the Soviet policy of genocide, as well as the denial of this policy, and obstacles to overcoming its legacy. Lemkin’s concept is the foundational and unmatched methodology for comprehensive and systematic analysis of the past and present of Ukrainian society.
Endnotes
02. Lemkin Raphaël. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in Serbyn R. and O. Stasiuk (eds), Soviet genocide in Ukraine (in 33 languages), Marko Melnyk Publishing: Kyïv, 2020, p. 41.
03. Lemkin Raphaël. Soviet genocide in the Ukraine, in Serbyn R. and O. Stasiuk (eds), Soviet genocide in Ukraine (in 33 languages), Marko Melnyk Publishing: Kyïv, 2020, p. 47.
04. Ibid, p. 48
05. Ibid, p. 47
06. Ibid, p. 49
07. Ibid, pp. 49–50
08. Ibid, p. 51
09. Ibid, p. 50
10. Ibid, p. 47
11. Lemkin Raphaël, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, 1944, p.79.
12. Закон «Про Голодомор 1932–1933 років в Україні».
For further reference
Lemkin Raphaël. Soviet genocide in the Ukraine, in Serbyn R. and O. Stasiuk (eds), Soviet genocide in Ukraine (in 33 languages), Marko Melnyk Publishing: Kyïv, 2020, pp. 47-52 — https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/publikacija/raphael-lemkin-soviet-genocide-in-ukraine-article-in-33-languages/
Lemkin Raphaël. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in Serbyn R. and O. Stasiuk (eds), Soviet genocide in Ukraine (in 33 languages), Marko Melnyk Publishing: Kyïv, 2020, pp. 41-43 — https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/publikacija/raphael-lemkin-soviet-genocide-in-ukraine-article-in-33-languages/
The Great Famine Project at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute — https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/great-famine-project
Author
Gennadi
Poberezny
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