Stalin's Genocides (4 page)

groups.”18 Here, too, it is clear that the Soviets were thinking about the Nazis and the terrible destruction wrought on churches, museums, and monuments in Soviet territory, not about their own similar crimes perpetrated in the northern Caucasus, among other places. The United States and its “satellites” (in the words of one Soviet scholar) successfully blocked the Soviet initiative because of American concerns about being indicted for racism and the repression of native cultures at home.

The Soviets did not get “national-cultural genocide”

included in the convention, but on the issue of political groups they did in the end wear down the Sixth Committee, in charge of the comprehensive redactions of the convention. A compromise was reached for the purpose of achieving unanimous approval of the convention. “It was for that reason,” the American delegate stated, “that it had agreed to the omission of political groups among the groups to be protected by the convention.”19 In the name of getting the convention passed at this point, Lemkin and a number of Jewish groups also lobbied against including

“political groups” in its language.20 As a consequence, the final genocide convention, unanimously adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1948, with Lemkin in the gallery, famously defined genocide as a variety of “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

What this brief rendition of the origins of our use of

“genocide” makes clear is that the Soviet Union and its allies in the United Nations eliminated any social, economic, 24

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or political groups from the genocide convention—and, I would add, made it very difficult for scholars to talk about genocide as a product of the Soviet system. The Soviets made the self-serving argument, both in the U.N. committees and in contemporary scholarly works on the subject, that social and political groups were too fluid and too difficult to define for them to be included in the convention.21

At the same time, in many cases of Stalinist mass killing, the Soviet leaders tended to create just such categories in their own rhetoric and by their own actions. In Stalinist lore, the more than thirty thousand “kulaks” who were shot and the two million who were deported to the Far North, Siberia, and Central Asia during collectivization and after constituted an allegedly identifiable social and political category of rich peasants, in contrast to poor and middle peasants. In fact, this was an invented group of opponents and alleged opponents of collectivization. In the history of genocide, writes Mark Levene, not enough attention has been paid to the ways “a perpetrator can conceive a group as an organized collectivity in spite of itself.” In some ways, this was as true of the “Jews,” especially fully assimilated German Jews, who were targeted for elimination by the Nazis, as it was of the “kulaks.”22

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Baltic states, the legal questions regarding Stalin and genocide have taken a decidedly contemporary turn. In their desire to bring to justice perpetrators of crimes against their peoples, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania passed their own national laws on genocide, which, though deriving from the 1948 U.N. convention and its subsequent legal history, have broadened the definition the genocide issue 25

of genocide to include specific crimes perpetrated in the Baltic region such as forced deportation and the execution of groups of resisters and their supporters. As a result, numbers of alleged Soviet perpetrators of crimes against the Baltic peoples have been indicted, tried, and, in some cases, convicted of genocide. These crimes include the NKVD murder and deportation of citizens of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia during the occupation period, 1940–41. They also include crimes committed during the reconquest of these countries after World War II; the NKVD’s brutal attacks in 1944–45 on the “forest brethren” (local resistance groups) and their supporters in the population; and dekulakization, deportation, and campaigns against “enemies of the people” and “nationalists” primarily in the period 1948–49, during the collectivization drive in the Baltic states. Those who were convicted, both Balts and Russians, were essentially cogs in the Stalinist repressive regime, though often active and murderous cogs. Interestingly, as far as I know these are the first and only servants of the Stalinist state to have stood trial and been convicted for “crimes against humanity” or genocide perpetrated anywhere in the former Soviet Union.23

A number of important insights into the problem of Soviet genocide are illuminated by the evolution of the law in the Baltic cases, despite their partly politicized origins.24 For example, the legal codes in the Baltic states recognize that it is often difficult to prove the intention of the perpetrator, in this case Stalin, to commit mass murder.

Was there intent to kill so many Balts during the periods of occupation and reconquest? The courts in the region 26

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conclude—using precedents in international law—that intent can be deduced from the actual events themselves, how many died, and how organized the actions were.

The courts note in addition that the atmospherics of the crime are also important: whether the acts of arrest and deportation were conducted according to standard legal procedures at the time, whether they were surrounded by hateful language and demeanor, and whether there was gratuitous brutality during the process. Much like first-degree murder, premeditation and intent in genocide are extremely difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

What the courts have said—both in the Baltic countries and internationally—is that intent can be inferred from the specifics of the crimes themselves.

The cases against Soviet genocidaires in the Baltic countries have also concluded that exterminating part of a group can be viewed as genocide when the attack places the existence of the entire group in jeopardy. These rulings refer back in particular to the Srebrenica case, where the international courts decided in landmark rulings that the murder of nearly eight thousand Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb military units was genocide because it was an attack on the entire people, using the crucial modifier of the genocide convention, “as such.” In this legal context, one could conclude in retrospect that Stalin’s assaults on many peoples in the course of the 1930s and early 1940s constituted an attempt to eliminate them “as such.” The Ukrainian killer famine and the deportation and murder of Poles in the Soviet Union certainly fit this current of legal thinking.

the genocide issue 27

Finally, the Baltic cases shed light in interesting ways on the question of whether genocide has to be carried out only against “other” ethnic, national, racial, or religious groups, as designated in the genocide convention, versus social and political ones. Since regaining their independence, the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians have tended to ignore the unpleasant historical reality that native communists and local Baltic NKVD officers were sometimes directly responsible for the deportations, dekulakization, and the murderous attacks on the “forest brethren” and their supporters in the region. But the courts certainly understand this fact, since many of the defendants who have stood trial are Balts themselves and not Slavs. Does this make these attacks on the Baltic nations any less genocidal than if they were carried out solely by Russians or Ukrainians?

In perhaps the most celebrated case in the Baltic states, Arnold Meri, a cousin of the esteemed first president of Estonia, Lennart Meri, was put on trial in May 2008 for genocide in connection with the forced deportation of some 251 Estonians from the island of Hiiumaa to Siberia in March 1949. Forty-three of the deportees died in exile.

Meri, who was the first Estonian to win the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union in World War II, pleaded innocent to the charges, insisting he was simply carrying out orders. Meri died in March 2009, before the trial concluded; the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev posthumously awarded him a medal for his service during the war.

It is important to note that the rhetoric of the campaigns carried out against the Baltic peoples by Moscow at 28

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the time was not directed against the particular nationalities themselves but against “bandits,” “counterrevolutionaries,” “kulaks,” and “enemies of the people,” similar to the rhetoric of Stalinist campaigns in the 1930s. The cases in the Baltic countries reflect a broader acceptance in international jurisprudence of political groups as legitimate victims of genocide, even if the 1948 convention implicitly excluded them from consideration. At the same time, in Argentina, a number of generals and high-ranking police officials were tried for genocide in connection with crimes of mass killing committed against their own “nation”

in the period 1976 to 1983.25 With this said, the Baltic cases also demonstrate that sometimes what appears to be a class genocide can have strong ethnic or national elements. In his important work on the Cambodian genocide, Ben Kiernan has demonstrated that social and ethnic criteria are not so easily separated from each other and often mix. From his research it is apparent that one cannot distinguish the Cambodian events from the normal pat-terns of genocide by using terms such as “autogenocide”

or “social genocide”—there were too simply many ethnic components involved in the killing.26

We could say the same about Soviet attacks on Poles, Germans, Koreans, Ukrainians, and the peoples of the northern Caucasus, where—ostensibly—these actions were not, as best we know, initially intended to crush these peoples’ collective identity as nations but in fact ended up attempting to do pretty much just that. The obverse is also true, as mentioned earlier. “Kulaks” became a “people,”

as did, in some fashion, “asocials” and the “Bloc of Rights the genocide issue 29

and Trotskyites.” Their families were drawn into the vor-tex of execution, exile, and death; their alleged social and historical afflictions were to some extent or another seen as inheritable. They were to be cleansed from society as alien “elements” or “contingents.” Political and social groups became “invented nations.” The argument about whether the Ukrainian killer famine was directed against peasants or Ukrainians in this sense misses the point that these categories blended so easily with each other. At the very least, Stalin was determined to destroy their culture and traditional way of life.

By any objective understanding of international law, then, the kinds of attacks that Stalin’s regime perpetrated against the Soviet people might well have been included in the genocide convention. That those kinds of murderous Stalinist initiatives involving substantial social and political groups were not included in the convention against genocide for essentially political reasons provides little justification for scholars to exclude these crimes from their definitions.

2 The Making of a Genocidaire

No serious observer doubts any more that Stalin was a cruel and brutal figure, one who supervised the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens without the least hesitation or self-doubt. Given the publication of relatively systematic research on the 1930s over the past fifteen years, there can also no longer be any question that Stalin was fully responsible for the mass killing during this period and knew the details of all of the major actions involved. We now have scores of declassified documents demonstrating that Stalin himself signed hundreds of arrest lists, checked off on the death sentences in most of them, constantly encouraged his underlings to carry out the “highest penalty”

(death), and criticized others for misplaced softness and lack of vigilance against so-called enemies of the people.

Dmitri Volkogonov relates a revealing story about Stalin reviewing an arrest (and death) list: “Stalin muttered to no one in particular: ‘Who’s going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one. . . . Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one. . . . The people had to know he was the making of a genocidaire 31

getting rid of all his enemies. In the end, they all got what they deserved’.”1

Like a cat playing with mice, Stalin dangled the lethal prospects of deportation, life in the Gulag, torture, and execution in front of his subordinates, watching their reactions to his baiting, taunting, and sadistic humor. He sometimes set them up, supervised their arrests, gave them hope for reprieves, and then had them taken away to be interrogated, tortured, and shot. He even had the wives, children, and siblings of his closest confederates imprisoned or deported, while watching to see if they flinched or broke under the intense pressure. Neither Molotov nor Kaganovich did. When Stalin’s comrades episodically committed suicide, sometimes leaving behind personal notes to him protesting their innocence, he was unmoved.

Suicides simply proved that the accused were guilty, and in killing themselves they had tried to escape facing the just penalty for their crimes. Those who refused to confess were considered excessively proud and acting in defiance of the party. Those who confessed in order to save themselves and their families were simply executed or sent into exile because they admitted to their guilt. Their families were usually punished whether they confessed or not.

Stalin enjoyed the power of life and death that he held over a country of 170 million people (in 1938), and he exercised it without restraint. That he knew many of his victims personally only seemed to increase his jaundiced sense of play, even when the consequences were deadly serious. It was as if he was missing the frontal lobe of the 32

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brain in which empathy for his victims would have been found. There was absolutely no sense of regret at the number of the dead and broken, even when he called off the purges and killing or finally provided relief for the famines. Countless reports to him about the costs of forced deportation in the lives and welfare of Soviet citizens evoked no actions on his part and no expressions of remorse. The descriptions of the death agony of the Ukrainian killer famine of 1932–33, including widespread cannibalism, left him cold and unmoved.