Stalin's Genocides (16 page)

were separated out from the rest of the Soviet national groupings and deemed inherently dangerous to the Soviet state. In particular, the actions against the Poles, start-ing with mass deportations to the special settlements in 1934 and culminating in the arrests and deportations of 1939–40 and the Katyn massacre of June 1940, can be thought of as genocidal. In 1944, during the war, the Muslim peoples from the northern Caucasus and the Crimea were deported en masse to special settlements in Central Asia. In the process of deportation and resettlement a substantial percentage of these peoples (Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars, in particular) died. The peoples involved consider Stalin’s actions genocidal. There is certainly evidence that the Soviet regime took these actions in order to have these peoples disappear, if not physically as human beings, though that happened in untoward numbers, then as members of a distinct nationality. At the very least, the attacks against the Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars should be considered attempted cultural genocide.

136

conclusions

7. The Great Terror of 1937–38 also had genocidal qualities, if it cannot be labeled genocide itself, at least according to the letter of the U.N. genocide convention and to most historical criteria as well. Stalin and the Soviet regime created invented groups of alleged political enemies and everyone associated with them and had them tried, interrogated, tortured, and executed or exiled to the Gulag. Stalin understood at the time that many tens of thousands of innocent people would be killed in the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks, the communist elite, the officers’ corps, and the
nomenklatura
, along with their families, friends, and associates. He did nothing to stem the spread of suspicion and denunciation that constantly produced new victims. On the contrary, he encouraged the terror, showed no concern for its innocent victims, and brought it to an end only when war seemed imminent.

8. Stalin and his lieutenants at the time and subsequently, often decades later, defended their attacks on all levels of Soviet society by claiming that the country needed to prepare for war. Nationalities, kulaks, and social outcasts were assailed as members of a potential fifth column. Stalin and his deputies accused their alleged political opponents of working for foreign governments and Trotsky, and of being ready to assassinate government officials and overthrow the Soviet government at the first sign of war. This book suggests that the “war fear” argument, though inherent in Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology, was both exaggerated and exploited by the Stalinists to justify their murderous actions throughout the 1930s.

Of course, Soviet security was increasingly endangered by conclusions 137

the rise of Nazi Germany and the aggression of the Japanese in Asia. But the Soviet leadership did not prepare for war by their mass killing actions. In fact, just the opposite is true: they critically weakened the country by engaging in them and may have caused even more deaths during the war as a result.

9. Stalin’s culpability for mass murder is not unlike that of Hitler’s. Without Stalin it is hard to imagine the genocidal actions of the 1930s, just as without Hitler the Holocaust is historically unimaginable. This does not mean that violence was not built into the Soviet system, or that anti-Semitic attacks would not have occurred if—in a wistful counterfactual—Hitler had died in 1936. For a number of reasons the Holocaust should be thought of as the worst case of genocide in the modern era. Nevertheless, the points of comparison between Stalin and Hitler, Nazism and Stalinism, are too many to ignore. Both were dictators who killed vast numbers of people on the European continent. Both chewed up the lives of human beings in the name of a transformative vision of Utopia. Both destroyed their countries and societies, as well as vast numbers of people inside and outside their own states. Both—

in the end—were genocidaires.

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Notes

acknowledgments

1. Norman Naimark, “Revolution, Stalinismus, und Geno-zid,”
Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte
44–45 (October 27, 2007): 14–20; Naimark, “Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide,”
Telos
, no. 136 (Fall 2006): 10–25; Naimark, “Stalin and the Question of Soviet Genocide,” in
Political Violence, Behavior, and Legitimation
, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 39–49.

introduction

1. See, for example, Dan Diner,
Cataclysms: A History of the
Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge
, trans. William Templar (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), pp. 182–186.

2.
Sto sorok besed c Molotovym: Iz dnevnika F. Chueva
(Moscow: “Terra,” 1991), pp. 390, 416.

3. On the dearth of foreign intelligence as a result of the re-call and arrest of agents in the field, Z. I. Passov, chief of the NKVD’s foreign intelligence service, wrote: “in the period of the

[Nazi] preparations for actions regarding the seizure of Austria [and] Czechoslovakia, the foreign section did not receive a 140

notes to chapter 1

single agent’s report from Germany, not any information whatsoever.”
Lubianka: Stalin i glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti
NKVD 1937–1938
, ed. A. N. Iakovlev, comp. V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, N. S. Plotnikova (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond

“Demokratiia,” 2004), p. 7.

4. Alexander N. Yakovlev,
A Century of Violence in Soviet
Russia
, trans Anthony Austin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 234.

chapter 1. the genocide issue

1. Cited in Samantha Power,
A Problem from Hell: America
and the Age of Genocide
(NewYork: Basic Books, 2002), p. 521, n. 6. Some of the material here on the history of genocide comes from Power and from my essay “Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide,” pp. 10–25. See also Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty” (comment on Eric Weitz),
Slavic Review
61, 1

(Spring 2002): 45–46.

2. Raphael Lemkin,
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws
of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for Inernational Peace, 1944), p. 79.

3. Robert Conquest,
Reflections on a Ravaged Century
(New York: Norton, 2000), pp. 150–152.

4. Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide’,”
Journal of Genocide Research
7, 4

(December 2005): 551–559.

5. Power,
A Problem from Hell
, p. 51.

6. Donald Bloxham,
Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials
and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 203.

7. Francine Hirsch, “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,”

notes to chapter 1 141

American Historical Review
(June 2008): 714. I owe many of the observations about Nuremberg to Hirsch’s research.

8. Arkady Vaksberg,
Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky
, trans. Jan Butler (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 259.

9.
New York Times
, April 7 and 13, 1948.

10. A. N. Trainin,
Bor’ba progressivnykh sil protiv unich-tozheniia natisonal’nykh grupp i ras
(Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo po rasprostraneniiu polit. i nauchn. znanii, 1948), p. 11.

11. Cited in Victor Zaslavsky,
Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn
(New York: Telos Press, 2009), p. 23.

12. Nehemiah Robinson,
The Genocide Convention: A Com-mentary
(New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1960), pp.

17–18; see Resolution 96 (I) in appendix 1, pp. 121–122. My emphasis.

13. Ibid., appendix 2, p. 123, “Draft Convention Prepared by the Secretariat.” My emphasis.

14. William A. Schabas,
Genocide in International Law: The
Crimes of Crimes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 136, n. 219. My emphasis.

15. UN General Assembly, Sixth Committee, Third Session, Sixty-fourth Meeting, October 1, 1948, “Continuation of the Consideration of the Draft Convention on Genocide,” pp. 12–19.

16.
New York Times
, November 19, 1948.

17. Ibid., October 16 and 21, 1948.

18. M. N. Andriukhin,
Genotsid—tiagchaishee prestuplenie
protiv chelovechestva
(Moscow: Gosud. Izd. Iuridicheskoi liter-atury, 1961), pp. 85–86.

19. “Report of the Sixth Committee on the Draft Convention on Genocide,” December 6, 1948,
Foreign Relations of the
United States
(
FRUS
), vol. 1 (1948), “Human Rights” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office), p. 298.

20. Schabas,
Genocide in International Law
, pp. 134–135.

142

notes to chapter 1

21. See A. N. Trainin, “Bor’ba s genotsidom kak mezhdu–

narodnym prestupleniem,”
Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo
, no.

5 (May 1948): 1–16; and Andriukhin,
Genotsid-tiagchashee
prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva
, pp. 72–93.

22. Mark Levene,
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State
, vol. 1:
The Meaning of Genocide
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 80.

23. Some of these convictions have been successfully appealed in the European Court of Human Rights. See: Antonio Casses, “Balancing the Prosecution of Crimes against Humanity and Non-Retroactivity of Criminal Law: The
Kolk and Kislyiy v.

Estonia
Case before the ECHR,”
Journal of International Criminal Justice
4 (2006): 410–418.

24. I take much of this material from the research of Lauri Mälksoo, “Soviet Genocide? Communist Mass Deportations in the Baltic States and International Law,”
Leiden Journal of
International Law
, no. 14 (2001): 757–787. See also John B.

Quigley,
The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis
(Derbyshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006).

25. Daniel Feierstein, “National Security Doctrine in Latin America: The Genocide Question,” in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds.
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies
(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 500–

501. Here, in a case against Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, the Court provided a compelling analysis of why the genocide label should be used: “This [crime] was not done in a random or in-discriminate fashion, but with the intention of destroying a section of the population. . . . composed of those citizens who did not fit the type pre-established by the promoters of the repression as necessary for the new order to be installed in the country.” Thanks to Donald Bloxham for sending me pre-publication proofs of the book chapter.

26. Ben Kiernan,
The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and
Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge 1975–1979
, notes to chapter 2 143

3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 460–

464.

chapter 2. the making of a genocidaire

1. Cited in Dmitri Volkogonov,
Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1991), p. 310.

2. Robert Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 53–60.

3. Svetlana Alliluyeva,
Twenty Letters to a Friend
, trans.

Priscilla Macmillan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).

4. Martin Malia, “The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia,” in
Stalinism: The Essential Readings
, ed. David Hoffmann (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 68.

5. Cited in Ronald G. Suny, “Stalin and the Russian Revolution: From Koba to Commissar,” manuscript, chap. 1, p. 17. My thanks to Suny for allowing me to read and cite his manuscript.

6. Donald Rayfield,
Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant
and Those Who Killed for Him
(New York: Random House, 2004), p. 9.

7. This romanticism emerged later in Stalin’s ideas of the heroic in mass mobilization. See David Priestland, “Stalin as Bolshevik Romantic: Ideology and Mobilization, 1917–1939,”

in
Stalin: A New History
, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 181–201.

8. Hiroaki Kuromiya,
Stalin: Profiles in Power
(Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 8.

9. Suny, “Stalin and the Russian Revolution,” chap. 1, p. 19.

10. Miklos Kun,
Stalin: An Unknown Portrait
(Budapest, CEU Press, 2003), p. 43.

11. Feliks Chuev,
Tak govoril Kaganovich: Ispoved’ stalin-skogo apostola
(Moscow, “Otechestva,” 1992), p. 81.

144

notes to chapter 2

12. Norman M. Naimark, “Cold War Studies and New Archival Materials about Stalin,”
Russian Review
61 (January 2002): 11–15.

13. Boris Souvarine,
Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), pp. 224–225.

14. On Lenin, see the introduction to Richard Pipes, ed.,
The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 1, 8, 11. Pipes depicts Lenin as a

“heartless cynic” and “a thoroughgoing misanthrope,” who had an “utter disregard for human life.” He also cites Molotov’s assertion that Lenin was “more severe” than Stalin. See also Gellately,
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler
, pp. 53–57.

15. Jörg Baberowski,
Der Rote Terror: Die Geschichte des
Stalinismus
(Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2003), p. 42.

16. Robert Service,
Stalin: A Biography
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 185.

17. Jeremy Smith,
The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), pp. 173–175.

18. See Service,
Stalin
, p. 245.

19. Cited in Simon Sebag Montefiore,
Young Stalin
(New York: Random House, 2007), p. 295.