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Forum: Russia's War on Ukraine

Ukraine, Russia, and Genocide of Minor Differences

Pages 384-402 | Published online: 07 Jun 2022
 

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Dirk Moses for stimulating my interest in the subject and for his hugely helpful comments; to Diana Dumitru for great questions; to Shpend Kursani and Douglas Irvin-Erickson for fruitful discussions; to Kornelia Kończal for sharing a valuable source; to Pål Kolstø for inspiring influence and exemplary works; and to the anonymous reviewer for good advice and generosity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See reports by Shaun Walker in the Guardian, consistent work of the Proekt Media, and op-eds by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic, among others. For the earlier academic research on the subject, see Nicolas Dreyer, “Genocide, Holodomor, and Holocaust Discourse as Echo of Historical Injury and as Rhetorical Radicalization in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict of 2013–2018,” in The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe, ed. Ljiljana Radonic (London: Routledge, 2020), 63–82; Georgiy Kasianov, “Holodomor and the Holocaust in Ukraine as Cultural Memory: Comparison, Competition, Interaction,” Journal of Genocide Research (2021): 1–12; Alexander Etkind, “Stalin’s Intention and Lemkin’s Silence,” Contemporary European History 27, no. 3 (2018): 456–9; Douglas Irvin-Erickson, “Genocide Discourses: American and Russian Strategic Narratives of Conflict in Iraq and Ukraine,” Politics and Governance 5, no. 3 (2017): 130–45; see also the recent wartime statements: A. Dirk Moses, “The Ukraine Genocide Debate Reveals the Limits of International Law,” Lawfare Blog, 16 May 2022, https://www.lawfareblog.com/ukraine-genocide-debate-reveals-limits-international-law; Eugene Finkel, “What’s Happening in Ukraine Is Genocide. Period,” Washington Post, 5 April 2022; Alexander Hinton, “Putin’s Claims that Ukraine is Committing Genocide Are Baseless, But Not Unprecedented,” The Conversation, 25 February 2022, https://theconversation.com/putins-claims-that-ukraine-is-committing-genocide-are-baseless-but-not-unprecedented-177511; Norman M. Naimark, “Ukraine and the Cloud of Genocide,” Defining Ideas: Hoover Institution, 10 May 2022, https://www.hoover.org/research/ukraine-and-cloud-genocide.

2 Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 12.

3 Interestingly, Nadson was also a favourite poet of Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938), the Warsaw-born Soviet-Jewish poet. In his memoirs, Noise of the Time, Mandelstam wrote about Nadson as “the idol of the student youth” of his generation. On Russian Populism as a movement of anti-imperial protest, see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

4 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

5 About Lemkin’s lifelong Zionism, see James Loeffler, “Becoming Cleopatra: The Forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 3 (2017): 340–60.

6 Frieze, Totally Unofficial, 15.

7 Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn, “Introduction,” in The Power and Problems of the Concept of Genocide, ed. Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) discuss how Lemkin’s ideas on ethnicity were taken from Weber.

8 Marek Kornat, “Rafał Lemkin’s Formative Years and the Beginning of International Career in Inter-War Poland (1918–1939),” in Rafał Lemkin: A Hero of Humankind, ed. Agnieszka Bieńczyk-Missala and Sławomir Dębski (Warsaw: Polski Instytut Spraw Międzynarodowych, 2010), 59–73.

9 Douglas Irvin-Erickson, “From Geneva to Nuremberg to New York: Andrei Vyshinsky, Raphaël Lemkin, and the Struggle to Outlaw Revolutionary Violence, State Terror, and Genocide,” in Stalin’s Soviet Justice: ‘Show’ Trials, War Crimes Trials, and Nuremberg, ed. David Crowe (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 222; Irvin-Erickson, “Raphaël Lemkin, Genocide, Colonialism, Famine, and Ukraine,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 193–215.

10 Timothy Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Roman Wysocki and Philip Redko, “Reactions to the Famine in Poland,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 30, no. 1/4 (2008): 49–67; Holodomor: The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933. Unknown Documents from the Archives of the Secret Services (Warsaw–Kiev: Institute of National Memory, 2009).

11 Holodomor: The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932–1933, 231.

12 Ibid., 197.

13 Ibid., 201.

14 Ibid., 206.

15 Ibid., 231.

16 Ibid., 321.

17 Ibid., 438.

18 Wysocki and Redko, “Reactions to the Famine in Poland,” 51.

19 Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 53.

20 Wysocki and Redko, “Reactions to the Famine in Poland,” 51–2.

21 Douglas Irvin-Erickson notes that Lemkin’s descriptions of “barbarism” and “vandalism” were close to his descriptions of Soviet legal practice, “as if Lemkin were attempting to create an international law in 1933 that would apply to the political and legal conditions in the USSR” (Irvin-Erickson, “Raphaël Lemkin, Genocide, Colonialism, Famine, and Ukraine,” 204).

22 Norman Naimark, Niccolo Pianciola, Tanja Penter, J. Arch Getty, Alexander Etkind, Sarah Cameron, Stephen Wheatcroft, Andrea Graziosi, and Ronald Grigor Suny, “Roundtable on Soviet Famines,” Contemporary European History 27 (2018): 432–81.

23 Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Quian, “The Political-Economic Causes of the Soviet Great Famine, 1932–33,” July 2021, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29089; Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Surgei Guriev, and Andrei Markevich, “New Russian Economic History,” Social Science Research Network, 27 December 2021, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3962960, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature (2022).

24 Excellent studies of Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s ideas have left their early Ukrainian context under-researched: Philippe Sands, East West Street: Personal Stories about Life and Law (New York: Knopf, 2016); James Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

25 A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 46.

26 Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide as a Crime under International Law,” American Journal of International Law 41, no. 1 (1947): 146–7.

27 Ibid., 151.

28 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for the idea of this table.

29 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79, 93.

30 Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide,” The American Scholar 15, no. 2 (Spring 1946): 227–30.

31 Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide,’” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 551–9.

32 American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), Lemkin Collection, Box 2, Folder 2, Lemkin to McMahon, 17 December 1949, courteously provided by Dirk Moses.

33 AJHS, Lemkin Collection, Box 2, Folder 3, Lemkin to Constantine Jurgella, 2 January 1950, provided by Dirk Moses.

34 R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publications, 1994).

35 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

36 Moses, Problems of Genocide, 27.

37 Lemkin, “Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Crimes under International Law,” cited in Moses, Problems of Genocide, 162.

38 Mark von Hagen, “Wartime Occupation and Peacetime Alien Rule: Notes and Materials toward a(n) (Anti-) (Post-) Colonial History of Ukraine,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 34, no. 1/4 (2015): 183.

39 Anson Rabinbach, “The Challenge of the Unprecedented: Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 397–420.

40 Andrey Vyshinsky, Introduction to A. N. Trainin, Ugolovnaia interventsiia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1935), 3.

41 Irvin-Erickson, “From Geneva to Nuremberg to New York,” 217–32.

42 Frieze, Totally Unofficial, 15.

43 Douglas Irvin-Erickson, “The Lemkin Turn in Ukrainian Studies,” in Graziosi and Sysyn, The Power and Problems of the Concept of Genocide, 149.

44 Anton Weiss-Wendt, The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017); Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (London: Penguin, 2017).

45 Apologists of famine and terror such as Walter Duranty were far more successful in the postwar US. See Sally J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and some details in Alexander Etkind, Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

46 The speech, preserved in the New York Public Library, is published by Roman Serbyn in “Lemkin on Genocide of Nations,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 7, no. 1 (2009): 123–30. See also Viktoria Malko, The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide: The Struggle for History, Language, and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2021).

47 James Loeffler, “The First Genocide: Antisemitism and Universalism in Raphael Lemkin’s Thought,” Jewish Quarterly Review 112, no. 2 (2022): 159.

48 This is all consistent with his comparative views on genocide in world history, but it is also clear that the Ukrainian situation he knows uniquely well. See A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology,” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 272–89.

49 Serbyn, “Lemkin on Genocide of Nations,” 126. This Lemkin essay, “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” (1953), was declared “extremist” by the Moscow Court of Mytishchi district on 20 May 2015, and forbidden for circulation in Russia.

50 Roman Serbyn, private communication, 16 March 2019.

51 Loeffler, “The First Genocide,” 149.

52 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117.

53 Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (New York: Doubleday, 2012).

54 On the academic “alienation” of the political historians that were critical of the Soviet regime (Conquest, Pipes, Ulam, etc.) during the Cold War and Détente periods, see David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 269–73.

55 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79.

56 Moses, Problems of Genocide, ch. 6; Etkind, Internal Colonization, ch. 5.

57 Viktor Shklovskii, Zoo, or, Letters Not about Love (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).

58 Pål Kolstø, “The ‘Narcissism of Minor Differences’ Theory: Can It Explain Ethnic Conflict?” Filozofija i Društvo (2007): 154, https://doi.org/10.2298/FID0702153K.

59 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 5th ed. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), 55.

60 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 114.

61 Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging (London: BBC Books, 1994), 14.

62 Irvin-Erickson in his Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide discusses a major role of economic factors in Lemkin’s studies of genocide, which was a result of the influence of Otto Bauer and Austrian Marxists on the early Lemkin (242). I think that Lemkin’s influence on his readers is rather connected to the complexity of his thought, which combined cultural, economic, and juridical factors smoothly and indistinguishably.

63 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79.

64 “Transcript: Vladimir Putin’s Televised Address on Ukraine,” Bloomberg News, 24 February 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-transcript-vladimir-putin-s-televised-address-to-russia-on-ukraine-feb-24.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Etkind

Alexander Etkind is a Senior Fellow at Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, and teaches at the Central European University in Vienna. Previously he was a Professor and Chair at the European University Institute at Florence, and Professorial Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. Etkind was born in St. Petersburg and defended his PhD in Helsinki. He is the author of Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (1996); Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (2011); Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (2013); Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt (2017); and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (2021). He co-edited Remembering Katyn (2012), Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (2013) and Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (2017).

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