05 Apr Did the Soviet Union Commit Genocide in Ukraine (And Can Law Help Answer This Question)??
Russia’s lower house of Parliament has passed a resolution denying that the Soviet Union committed “genocide” in Ukraine during the 1930s. The resolution states:
“There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were million of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country.”
Interestingly, the resolution does not appear to deny (as it could not credibly do anyway) that the Soviet Union leadership was responsible for a great famine in the 1930s Ukraine that led to millions of deaths. The defense (which seems very honest and credible to me is: we may have adopted policies that killed millions, but it was not targeted toward a particular ethnic group, so it was not genocide. It was just a tragedy.
The resolution appears to respond to efforts by Ukraine’s government to treat the famine as a genocide (and the U.S. government’s semi-support of those efforts). The resolution is drawing support from an unlikely source: Soviet-era dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide doesn’t help much: “[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. . .”
The intent language is key here, and it really is a question of historical fact. Is there any evidence that Stalin intended to wipe out Ukrainians? This may be unanswerable, but maybe not. It strikes me that the Ukrainians have the burden to demonstrate this element and that the Russians are right to take umbrage here. No doubt the mass murder that occurred in the 1930s was a horrible thing which deserves as much attention as genocide. But not all mass murders are genocide. And the law can help us remember that key fact.
The Genocide Convention was drafted with Russian input. In fact, Stalin was probably the main reason that political groups are not protected. He almost certainly intended to wipe out his political opponents, or those he felt to be such. Thus, the Genocide Convention was designed so as not to touch Stalin. How ironic would it be if it now covered his crimes anyway?
On a more serious note: assuming he intended to wipe out Ukrainians, he probably would have wanted to do it because he perceived them as political enemies (the man was undoubtedly paranoid). His more direct intent was therefore that of destroying a political group, with the destruction of a national or ethnic group a necessary consequence covered less directly by that intent. In other words, he would not have wanted to exterminate Ukrainians because he hated the national group as such; his overall concept was not that of ethnic cleansing, but it would have entailed just that.
Is that enough for the purposes of the Convention? (and does not a similar problem arise on Kevin’s question about genocide in Battlestar Galactica here?)