Graziosi in REAPPRAISING MASS TERROR, REPRESSION, AND RESPONSIBILITY IN STALIN’S REGIME Perspectives on Norman Naimark’s Stalin’s Genocides

Rubenstein, Reassessing Stalin’s Hollander, Crimes, Graziosi, Terror,Hardy, and Repression Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark FORUM REAPPRAISING MASS TERROR, REPRESSION, AND RESPONSIBILITY IN STALIN’S REGIME Perspectives on Norman Naimark’s Stalin’s Genocides Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. 163 pp. $26.95. Editor’s Introduction: The term “genocide” was coined in the mid-1940s by Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish Jewish origin who escaped from Poland after the Nazis occupied it in September 1939. In November 1944 he published a lengthy book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, that exhaustively documented the legal basis of the Nazis’ policies of mass extermination, deportations, and slave labor. The book is best remembered nowadays for Lemkin’s use of the new word “genocide.” He settled on that term after much deliberation and deªned it as “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” Because the word became indelibly associated with the Nazi Holocaust, it promptly gained wide currency as the standard by which to judge human murderousness. Lemkin himself, however, never believed that the term should refer only to carnage and atrocities of the magnitude perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews. He wanted it to encompass all attempts to destroy cultural or ethnic identities, regardless of whether the perpetrators were seeking to exterminate every individual member of the targeted group. From the time Lemkin’s book appeared, the term “genocide” has stirred controversy both in the public arena and among scholars. Lawyers, scholars, and political leaders have differed over the scope and nature of the crimes involved. Some, like Lemkin, have sought as broad a deªnition as possible, not limiting it to large-scale killing. Others, including many prominent historians and political scientists, have advocated a more restrictive deªnition, limiting it to clear-cut cases of mass slaughter and attempts at systematic extermination. Still others have questioned whether genocide necessarily requires the targeting of a speciªc cultural, ethnic, racial, or linguistic group. Scholars who express reservations about this last point have argued that if genocide depends Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 14, No. 3, Summer 2012, pp. 149–189 © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 149 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark on the targeting of a particular cultural or ethnic group, slaughters like those perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1977–1978—with a death toll as high as 2 million—would not be covered. By the same token, many of the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under Iosif Stalin or in China under Mao Zedong would not be classed as genocide if the target has to be a speciªc ethnic or cultural group. Although Stalin did carry out mass deportations of nationalities in the 1930s and 1940s, most of his other violent abuses, affecting tens of millions of people, were not directed against ethnic groups per se. The same is true of most of the slaughters and systematic atrocities that occurred in China under Mao. By excluding many of the worst abuses and crimes perpetrated by tyrannical regimes in the twentieth century, the requirement of a targeted cultural or ethnic group has arguably been the most controversial aspect of the concept of genocide. Norman Naimark’s highly acclaimed book Stalin’s Genocides delves into this controversial area by looking at the origins of the Genocide Convention and then laying out a systematic case for regarding Stalin’s long series of crimes not only as genocide but as multiple genocides under the terms of the Convention. The book had its roots in an essay Naimark wrote for a book edited by Paul Hollander as a festschrift for Robert Conquest, Political Violence: Belief, Behavior, and Legitimation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). (I was among the contributors to the festschrift.) We asked seven prominent scholars of Soviet history—Joshua Rubenstein, Paul Hollander, Andrea Graziosi, Roman Szporluk, Jeffrey Hardy, Michael Ellman, and Jeffrey Rossman— to write commentaries about Naimark’s book. Most of the commentators extol the book but raise questions about speciªc points and themes. Two of the commentators are more critical, arguing that the use of “genocide” in regard to Stalin is inappropriate. By contrast, the longest commentary, by Graziosi, posits that Naimark could have made the case for genocide even stronger by bringing in certain events. The seven commentaries are published here, and we gave Naimark an opportunity to respond to the commentators. His response appears after the seven essays. Although debate about these issues will persist for many years to come, Naimark deserves great credit not only for having written a crisp, concise book but also for sparking a discussion that historians far too often are reluctant to have. —Mark Kramer 150 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression Commentary on Stalin’s Genocides Joshua Rubenstein It is not difªcult to compare the crimes of Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin. Both men piled up corpses wherever they controlled territory, either within their own homelands or in the territories they conquered. Stalin’s serial purges included mass killings so numerous and overwhelming that the numbers alone—often in the millions or hundreds of thousands for each succeeding wave of his scythe—make the charge of genocide long overdue. Nevertheless, as Norman Naimark argues in his book, scholars have to make a solid case when they apply the charge. The crime of genocide as deªned by the Genocide Convention would seem to exclude Stalin’s regime from its purview because of the status of most of his victims. When the Genocide Convention was being drawn up by a committee of the United Nations (UN) in 1947 and 1948, both Stalin’s regime and others successfully pressed for a narrow deªnition of genocide that would exclude attacks on social or political groups. Stalin, in this way, was seeking to be absolved of the most terrible of crimes. Naimark has little patience for such ªne distinctions. As he argues near the outset of Stalin’s Genocides, “the obligation of protecting ethnic and national groups, as well as religious and racial ones, from mass murder should not obviate the need to protect political and social groups from the same horrendous crime, especially when the Soviet Union insisted that these groups not be included in the Genocide Convention.” Nearly six decades after Stalin’s death, historians can now conªrm that several groups of Stalin’s victims fall within the convention’s narrow deªnition. “The Ukrainian killer famine of 1932–1933 or the forced deportations of the so-called punished peoples in 1944”—referring to the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachais, Kalmyks, Khemshins, and Meskhetian Turks within the USSR— or the “‘Katyn forest massacre’ of twenty-two thousand Polish army ofªcers and government ofªcials in the early spring of 1940” all involved victims of a particular national group who were targeted because of their origins. Naimark, however, insists that it is not sufªcient to categorize only these “discrete murderous events as genocide” because, as his argument makes clear, the Soviet regime, particularly in the 1930s, carried out mass murder in a systematic way. It was a government bent on genocide. In the mid-1930s, for example, the regime sought to transform the social composition of the country. Hundreds of thousands of “socially harmful people” (sotsvredniki)—“whether kulaks, indigents, vagrants, prostitutes, homeless, or others”—were regarded as “dangerous to state security.” In 1935 and 1936, Soviet security forces removed 800,000 of these “harmful elements” 151 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark from major Soviet cities and packed them off into internal exile. But this cleansing operation was not over. Nikolai Ezhov, who succeeded Genrikh Yagoda as Stalin’s security chief in 1937, revived the urban purge with the use of Order 00447, which called for the “rounding up of any remaining ‘extraneous’ outsiders in Soviet towns and cities.” Ezhov’s plans included the setting of quotas for arrests region by region, resulting in the arrest of over 760,000 people to be tried by troika courts, “of whom 386,798 were condemned to death and executed.” The victims were singled out “for no other reason than the perception that they were . . . potential enemies” of the regime. This “Terror by Quota” did not have a distinctly national or racial dimension. Yezhov threw a wide net over the country’s urban landscape, then dragged his prey into oblivion. The authors of the Genocide Convention had enough nightmarish visions to deal with. How would this crime ªt within their imaginations? But we are still left with a surmountable challenge: Put yourself on the banks of the Volga River during the winter of 1942–1943. You are there to observe the battle of Stalingrad between the armies of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The struggle is protracted, and although you view with horror the full measure of destruction and know full well what each regime has done to its own people and, in the case of the Germans, to the Jews and the Poles in particular, you have been given the power to decide who will emerge victorious from the battle. The victor will determine the fate of Europe, as well as the future viability of the Soviet state. Western civilization, which has been under assault from both dictators—the Scylla and Charybdis of the twentieth century—hangs in the balance. I believe I may safely assume that every reader of this review would have wanted to see the Red Army defeat the Wehrmacht, in spite of all that was known and all that would later be known about Stalin’s crimes. Those crimes were no less horrible than Hitler’s, and Stalin was no less of a mass murderer. In today’s parlance, they were both “genocidaires.” Nonetheless, European civilization would not have survived the ultimate triumph of Nazi Germany; it did survive Stalinism. The right side won the battle of Stalingrad and went on to play the decisive role in the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany. This is a paradox we will have to accept. The outcome is not a credit to Stalin but to the courage and determination of the Soviet people. 152 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression Commentary on Stalin’s Genocides Paul Hollander Why should a distinguished historian take the trouble to write a book to prove that the Soviet mass murders—which had far more victims than the Holocaust—also constituted genocide? And why does it matter whether these colossal moral outrages are deªned as genocidal or not? Ever since the concept of genocide was introduced and applied—for the most part to the Holocaust, but also to the Armenian victims of the Turks and more recently to the mass murders in Rwanda—strenuous efforts have been made to deny its applicability to the mass murders Communist systems carried out. After World War II and in response to the Nazis’ systematic annihilation of Jews, genocide came to be deªned by various international bodies (including the United Nations General Assembly) as premeditated and systematic action aimed at the extermination of national, ethnic, or religious groups. Norman Naimark correctly argues this was a deeply ºawed deªnition that excluded extermination based on political and social criteria that claimed the lives of tens of millions of people in recent times. Many such groups were regarded by Communist authorities as mortal enemies obstructing the building of a superior social system and thus appropriate victims of purifying class struggles. They were unhesitatingly eradicated not only in the Soviet Union under Iosif Stalin but also in China under Mao Zedong, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and other Communist states. As the title of the book indicates, Naimark’s key contention is that the mass murders orchestrated by Stalin can and should be classiªed as genocides. Readers may wonder why the terminology used in deªning or characterizing the great moral outrages of our times is so important. The reason that terminology matters a great deal is that the usage (or avoidance) of the term “genocide” has been associated with important distinctions among political systems as well as the moral judgments about their character and misdeeds. Hence there are excellent reasons for Naimark’s undertaking. The original, internationally ratiªed deªnition of “genocide” was unreasonably narrow, excluding the multitudes who were massacred for political or social reasons. Perhaps more important, the Soviet (and other Communist) mass murders failed to generate substantial moral indignation and condemnation at least in part because they were not perceived and deªned as genocidal or as similar in kind to the Holocaust. The reluctance to consider the Communist mass murders as genocidal is rooted in the apprehension that such a deªnition would create a commonal153 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark ity, or moral equivalence, between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and thereby tarnish a political system (Soviet Communism) that pursued idealistic goals associated with the persisting appeal and respectability of the theories of Karl Marx. I should note that Naimark and I have disagreed in the past (on friendly terms) about the differences between certain attributes of Nazi and Soviet mass murders. These disagreements have some bearing on the deªnition of the Soviet mass murders as genocidal. As Naimark recalls in the book (pp. 125–128), I have questioned the moral equivalence between the two types of atrocities by pointing out (in both writing and at a conference) that there were speciªc and morally signiªcant differences between the Nazi and Soviet policies of extermination. I have written (and Naimark quotes) that “Communist states did not attempt to eradicate, in a premeditated, systematic fashion any particular ethnic group or class of people . . . unlike the Nazis [they] did not seek to murder children . . . and thirdly the Nazi racial categories were immutable . . . [whereas] Soviet categories constantly shifted and changed” (p. 126). Although Naimark questions some of these distinctions, his book, on the whole, suggests that in the ªnal analysis our views about these matters converge. Thus he acknowledges that “the Holocaust is the most extreme case of genocide in human history” (p. 122; as I also believe) and that “the child in the Gulag had a chance to survive; the Jewish child in the death camps was condemned to death” (p. 123). In turn I concur with Naimark that if the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica was deªned by an international tribunal as constituting genocide (p. 9), the same applies to the Soviet massacre of 23,000 Polish ofªcers at Katyn. I also agree with him that many other Soviet mass murders can be characterized as “genocidal”—if not exactly genocide, perhaps a ªne distinction. He applies the adjective to the man-made Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, the prolonged campaigns to eliminate the kulaks “as a class,” the deportations of certain minorities (e.g., Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Karachais, Balkars) as well as the campaigns of extermination and non-lethal mistreatment of the clergy. Whatever the moral emphasis we place on the differences between Nazi and Soviet policies of extermination, they need not lead to a more charitable view of the Communist mass murders. Notwithstanding prevailing conventional wisdom, it is far from obvious that the less clear-cut, or more questionably genocidal, character of the Communist mass murders makes them less reprehensible. Another distinction often made between Nazi and Communist atrocities is the proposition that the atrocities of Communist systems were committed in the service of lofty ideals and aspirations, that impure means were em154 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression ployed to attain glorious ends. I strongly believe (as does Naimark) that this argument deserves little sympathy for the following reasons: (1) it is hard to know how pure these aspirations actually were and hard to distinguish them from attachment to, or thirst for, power; (2) it is questionable that the goals were necessarily desirable or realizable; and (3) even if they were, such goals do not justify or compensate for the vast amounts of suffering and mass murder that resulted from their pursuit. The arguments of Naimark’s book are especially important because genocide has become the yardstick, the gold standard for identifying and measuring political evil in our times. The label “genocide” confers moral distinction on its victims and indisputable condemnation on its perpetrators. The attractions of the concept have been reºected, especially since the 1960s, in its grotesque extension and misapplication to grievances and injuries far more trivial than what the concept was originally envisaged to include. This volume and the understanding of Soviet mass murders might have beneªtted from some reference to the doctrine of class struggle that has done much to legitimate the political violence pursued by Communist states and movements. Likewise the concept of totalitarianism might have shed further light on the roots of the concentration and ruthless exercise of power in both the Nazi and Communist systems and the important part played by (different types of ) ideological certainties in the legitimation and use of political violence, genocidal or not. Finally, the question remains whether and why we need the concept of genocide for the unconditional condemnation of the kind of political violence that cost the lives of tens of millions of people and created a political system “in which every Soviet citizen . . . could potentially be arrested, tortured, exiled or executed” (p. 99). Although Naimark contends that Soviet political violence was genocidal, his book helps to entertain the notion that genocide, as currently deªned, need not be the touchstone or singular determinant of moral judgments made of exceptionally abhorrent and murderous political systems. Commentary: Stalin’s Genocides, and . . . Andrea Graziosi In this small but important book, Norman Naimark raises a fundamental question: can Iosif Stalin’s mass killings be classiªed as “genocide?” Should we consider pre-1953 Soviet history “an important chapter in the history of genocide?” (p. 2). 155 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark This question affects the sentiments of millions of human beings, as well as of entire peoples, and has been at the center of many countries’ political debates. It also has a direct bearing on the verdict that has been passed, and will be passed, on Europe in the twentieth century. Naimark bravely raises the question, yet at times he does not take into full account Soviet historians’ latest research and neglects to deal with language and religion, as well as with the different roles Russia played over the course of Soviet history. Once these factors are brought in, the picture that emerges has the effect of strengthening Naimark’s case. After a short look at the category’s genealogy, I will show why Naimark could have presented an even stronger case and will raise in the conclusions some general problems. These are heated matters, yet—as far as possible—we should deal with them as historians called to understand and explain, which also means to pass judgment, albeit indirectly. What the Category’s History Tells Us Naimark knows that his argument is not an easy one because in the Soviet case we are faced not with a single act of genocide but with “a series of interrelated attacks on ‘class enemies’ and ‘enemies of the people’” (p. 1). He therefore decides to start from a reconstruction of the history of the “genocide” category, showing that the term was not “designed primarily to describe the Holocaust” (p. 2). Yet, as Naimark recognizes, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) Raphael Lemkin coined the word to give a name to the “practices of extermination of nations and ethnic groups” carried out by the Nazis (p. 16). Lemkin thus excluded the crimes against social and political entities, making it difªcult to apply the category to some of Stalin’s crimes. Naimark’s answer is that Lemkin did so because he was inºuenced by what the Nazis were doing and that he later changed his mind. This hypothesis is conªrmed if, as I have done elsewhere,1 we explore the term’s genealogy, which points to a much wider meaning inspired by the necessity to deal with phenomena that would not ªt even a soft deªnition of “genocide” and that were not solely linked to “modernity,” as the association with Nazism came famously to indicate. The process of deªning “genocide” began with the notion of “crimes against humanity,” adopted in 1907 to condemn behaviors contradicting the principles of customary law, deªned as humankind’s common heritage. In 1919 the victors of World War I tried to give the category a legal deªnition, 1. Andrea Graziosi, “Why and in What Sense Was the Holodomor a Genocide?,” in Lubomyr Luciuk, ed., Holodomor (Kingston, ON: The Kashtan Press, 2008), pp. 139–158. 156 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression but the United States and Japan opposed the proposal to prosecute the instigators of the Armenian massacre for such crimes. Yet, it was the Armenian tragedy, and the shock caused by the massacre of approximately 3,000 Assyrians (Aramaic-speaking Christians) in northern Iraq, that pushed Lemkin to propose at the 5th International Conference for the uniªcation of penal law (Madrid, 1933) the inclusion in international law of a new crime, which he then called “barbaric acts.” In the text presented to the conference, which rejected his proposal, Lemkin deªned such acts this way: les actions exterminatrices dirigées contre les collectivités ethniques, confessionnelles ou sociales quels qu’en soient les motifs (politiques, religieux, etc.); tels p. ex. massacres, pogromes, actions entreprises on vue de ruiner l’existence économique des membres d’une collectivité etc.2 Ten years later, under the impact of the news coming from the Eastern Front, he replaced “barbaric acts” with “genocide.” Yet, the new category continued to cover a large territory: Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. . . . It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.3 The term thus “covered not just massacres and mass killings, but also ‘ethnic cleansing’ and policies of cultural denationalization.”4 As Naimark recalls, at the end of 1943, Soviet ofªcials were also independently groping for a new crime under which the Germans could be prosecuted. They came up with “methodically striving for the extermination of the Slavic peoples,” and at Nuremberg they supported the idea of a convention on genocide against Soviet peoples (pp. 18–19). The very enormity of what had happened was pushing for a way to name it, and this explains the success of Lemkin’s term, its wide scope of application, and the ambiguity with which it was immediately loaded. The United Nations General Assembly’s ªrst genocide resolution of De2. Ibid., emphasis added. 3. Ibid., emphasis added. 4. B. Mantelli, “Genocidio,” Contemporanea, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2009), pp. 105–156. See also, A. WeissWendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide,’” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2005), pp. 551–559. 157 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark cember 1946 gave the category, as Naimark notes, a very wide meaning “as a crime under International law . . . whether it is committed on religious, racial, political or any other ground” (p. 21, emphasis added). This line was followed until the Soviet and Polish representatives objected that to include politics meant to undermine the scientiªc soundness of the term, which was to be strictly linked to theories preaching racial and national hatred. Given the meaning of “genos,” the argument, albeit politically motivated, was not devoid of sense, and the same could be said of the objections directed against the “social” qualiªcation. As Naimark correctly notes, however, in line with Stalin’s reading of the “national question,”5 the Soviet leaders did not construe “genos” in a biological way and thus pushed to include in the deªnition of “genocide” “nationalcultural” elements—that is, “premeditated actions taken with the intention of destroying the language, religion, or culture of any national, racial, or religious group”—giving as examples the destruction of “libraries, museums, schools, historical monuments, [and] buildings used by religious groups” (p. 22), something the Bolsheviks had done on a huge scale in the early 1930s. The Genocide Convention text, approved on 9 December 1948, thus adopted a lopsided (no political, no social) but very wide deªnition of the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inºicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.6 Soviet History’s Complications Naimark’s proposal to call dekulakization a genocide thus rests on the widening of the concept to encompass social groups, a difªcult task in view of the term’s legal deªnition. Although it is true that in the European “Middle East”—to use Lewis Namier’s expression for the lands between Germany and 5. See my essay in Istoriia Stalinizma: Itogi i perspektivy obshchestvennogo osmysleniia. Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, Moskva, 5–7 dekabrya 2008 g. (Moscow: Rosspen, Fond “Prezidentskii tsentr B.N. Eltsina,” 2011). 6. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” For the full text and an extended commentary, see Paola Gaeta, The UN Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 158 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression Russia7—social and ethnic groups often coincided (kulak-poliak we read in Ukrainian secret police reports from the Stalin era), the category was unquestionably a social (and ªscal) one, and Russian kulaks were hit as hard as Polish or Ukrainian ones.8 Furthermore, as Naimark remarks, it is difªcult to call the special settlements “genocidal.” Initial death rates were horriªc, and “men and women were turned into animals by the Soviet state” (p. 62), yet spetsposeleniya were designed to remove kulaks temporarily from society and, in principle, to reeducate them.9 The estimate of 10 million kulaks “forced from their homes” in 1929–1932 (p. 57) seems too high, even if self-dekulakized families are counted. (By contrast, the number of executed kulaks is underestimated: if 1937–1938 is included, the total is in the hundreds of thousands, not the scores of thousands). Although kulaks “were deªned in terms of families, not as individuals,” their sons carried the mark of Cain only up to a certain point. From the latter part of the 1930s on, and even before, some did have careers.10 Dekulakization thus was an intentional, mass-murderous policy relying on category-based reasoning to reshape the Soviet “people” by cutting away a piece of it, previously recast as “alien.” Yet, dramatic as this was, it seems to point toward the need for a term related, but not identical, to “genocide.” The 1932–1933 “passportization,” though certainly a consequence of the anti-peasant war, cannot be treated as part of dekulakization (p. 62). This is even truer for the 00447 decree of July 1937: former kulaks did prominently ªgure among the categories that were to be liquidated, so that—as Naimark maintains—kulaks, like Armenians and Jews, were attacked in waves. However, that order signaled the beginning of the Great Terror and was to remain for months its main operative tool. The same applies to the 00485 decree, the “Polish” order, that served as a model for the 1937–1938 antinational operations. Naimark discusses the decree in the chapter devoted to “Removing Nations,” but it should instead occupy a central part in discussions of the Great Terror. As with the German operation, Stalin was not then removing a “nation” but preparing for war by 7. See for example Lewis Namier, Vanished Supremacies (London: Hamilton, 1958); and Lewis Namier, Conºicts (London: Macmillan, 1942). I discussed Namier’s views in “Il mondo in Europa: Namier e il ‘Medio oriente europeo,’ 1815–1948,” Contemporanea, No. 2 (2007), pp. 193–228. 8. Graziosi, “Il mondo in Europa,” pp. 193–228; and Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 9. See, for instance, M. Gorky et al., eds., Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea (New York: H. Smith and R. Haas, 1935). Whether one can speak of a “war of the city against the village” (p. 58) is also questionable: most city dwellers were former peasants who had plenty of relatives in the villages. 10. The Soviet poet and Novyi mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovskii belonged to a kulak family, which he refused to help, and Vasilii Grossman could present an important tank unit commander in Life and Destiny as a kulak son. 159 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark eliminating adult men whom he considered “enemy aliens” in spite of their being Soviet citizens.11 Again, he was sculpting a “Soviet people” to his liking. The ªrst people Stalin targeted as such were Soviet Koreans, who were deported en masse to Central Asia for security reasons in 1937. They were not accused of anything but living in the wrong place, and their fate, tragic as it was (many died), was thus comparatively better than that of the peoples preventively deported during World War II (Soviet Germans, mostly from the Volga German Republic) and the “punished peoples” (Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and other Caucasus peoples) targeted for harsh treatment precisely because of their nationality. As Naimark notes, the republics of the deported groups were annulled, their land distributed to others, and their culture sentenced to vanish. Chechens, for instance, maintain that they lost in the deportation and new settlements approximately 40 percent of their population. The Soviet ªgure is 20–25 percent, and we ªnd similar orders of magnitude in the cases of the other punished peoples. Clearly the UN deªnition of “genocide” can be applied here without hesitation. Problems do exist, however, with cases such as those of the Baltic peoples. They, too, claim to have been victims of genocide, and after 1991 they brought to trial former Soviet ofªcials, accusing them of genocide based on the deportations and repressions that followed the Soviet occupation. In fact, the Baltic peoples for a short period of time were subjected to the “categorybased” repressions that had struck the Soviet population from 1917 to 1939: More than 40,000 people in the three Baltic countries, many of whom died, were deported in the 1940–1941 period alone. Yet, even though the Genocide Convention says “in whole or in part” (this is why the Srebrenica massacre could be classiªed as genocide), and the Baltic governments may thus legally have a point, one wonders whether from a historical, interpretive perspective, certain relative proportions of a targeted population must be reached before the term becomes applicable. Suffering is always suffering, but if orders of magnitude are not involved, we risk qualifying as “genocides” far too many events, thus depriving the category of its force. Regarding the Great Famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine, for example, scholars have reached a consensus over the number of victims. Estimates now range from 3 million to 4 million deaths of starvation in Ukraine. The polemics and wild variations (from pure denial to estimates of more than 10 million dead) of the past are fortunately gone. 11. I am proªting here from lively discussions with Gia Caglioti, who is completing a major research project on the treatment of enemy aliens in World War I. 160 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression We also know more about the relationship between the Holodomor and the terrible famine in Kazakhstan, proportionally the most tragic episode of the early 1930s. As Sarah Cameron has observed, Naimark’s account risks obscuring “some of the important similarities between the Kazakh and Ukrainian cases. . . . Kazakhs, like Ukrainians, were at times prevented from escaping famine-struck regions or seeking aid in cities or towns.”12 Similarly, as Niccolò Pianciola demonstrates, compulsory “sedentarization”—which, as a mass campaign, was never implemented—had little to do with the Kazakh famine, which was instead caused, as in Ukraine, by grain and livestock procurements.13 Naimark’s treatment of the Great Terror (pp. 99–120) suffers from contradictions deriving from his choice to deal with mass operations, which were the Great Terror’s true essence, in earlier chapters. He thus presents a Terror much closer to Robert Conquest’s pioneering study than to the picture drawn by recent research.14 For instance, he devotes far too much space to the elite purge, which accounted for, at most, a few scores of thousands of victims out of approximately 1.5 million. Although he correctly states that the “purges” worked according to a plan and that victims were “mostly ordinary people,” he does not seem to realize that this plan was outlined by the mass operation decrees (00447, 00485, etc.) and that victims also included “internal enemy aliens” such as Soviet Poles and Germans. For the same reason, contradictions emerge in the description of the Great Terror’s nature. On the one hand, we read of a random Terror in which, following the classic “totalitarian” scheme, anybody could be “tortured, exiled or executed” (p. 99). On the other hand, he quotes Oleg Khlevniuk’s rendering of the Terror as a “centrally organized punitive action, planned in Moscow,” and we read that “there was method in Stalin’s madness. . . . Biography and genealogy . . . mattered a lot” (p. 118). In fact, although people were randomly targeted because of the chaotic nature the Great Terror quickly assumed in the provinces, Stalin’s Terror was a rational, if paranoid, operation directed against speciªc categories, secretively listed in the mass decrees. The claim that “the purges of 1937–1938 are hard to classify as genocide because 12. Sarah Cameron, “The Hungry Steppe: Soviet Kazakhstan and the Kazakh Famine, 1921–1934,” Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 2011, p. 16n. 13. Niccolò Pianciola, “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen, 1928–1934,” Cahiers du monde russe (Paris), Vol. 45, Nos. 1–2 (2004), pp. 137–192. 14. Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the GULag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Oleg Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Andrea Graziosi, L’Urss di Lenin e Stalin (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007); and Nicolas Werth, L’ivrogne et la marchande de ºeurs: Autopsie d’un meurtre de masse, 1937– 1938 (Paris: Tallandier, 2009). 161 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark no particular ethnic, social or political groups were attacked” (p. 100) is therefore not true. On the contrary, such attacks were the purges’ very essence. The difªculty of treating them as “genocide” (with the “national mass operations” a possible exception) rests with the text of the Genocide Convention. As Naimark correctly claims, Stalin was thus a crucial factor, perhaps the crucial factor in Soviet genocides, to which his death put a sudden stop. As we have learned, historians were wrong to have ever treated Stalin as a mediocre ªgure. He was never the “errand boy of the revolution” (p. 34), nor was his “role in the Great October Revolution . . . generally that of a follower and not a leader” (p. 42), unless we reserve the leader status to just Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Stalin was immediately placed in charge of the national question, which politically was the most important issue aside from the question of the military and the status of the peasantry. After Yakov Sverdlov’s death in 1919, Stalin became the leader of the Leninist faction of the Bolsheviks and Lenin’s most trusted man. To be sure, Stalin came to the fore “in the excesses of the civil war” (p. 44), a war Moshe Lewin terms “quasi-genocidal”—and not just because of the 1919 pogroms. In 1920 Crimea, for instance, more that 10,000 young White Army ofªcers, most of them former students, were asked to register in exchange for amnesty and were then arrested and executed en masse in an operation clearly anticipating Katyn.15 More importantly, as Oleg Khlevniuk pointed out years ago in a letter to this writer, Stalin’s mind worked along “genocidal” lines: “No matter what problem arose in the country, it was solved through the application of violence directed at speciªc and well-deªned socio-cultural or national groups of the population.” These groups, and their treatment, varied over time according to the internal and international situation, the despot’s own beliefs, and the evolution of his paranoia and thus of his cruelty. Other factors must also be considered, from the anti-peasant war of 1928–1933, which repeated the civil war’s formative experience, to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, whose role Naimark rightly underlines. Although the Marxist discourse has many components and does not inevitably lead to mass killings, it provided personalities such as Stalin with a rationale to explain history, politics, and crises on the basis of the actions of friendly or inimical collective categories whose behaviors could be deduced from general principles, independently of their individual members’ actions. Marxism itself is a huge “plot theory” (history, after all, is the product of class struggle, and crises are the results of hostile classes’ machinations), or at least it can be interpreted 15. Graziosi, L’Urss di Lenin e Stalin, pp. 151–152. 162 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression this way by the powerful yet sick minds it attracts because of its paranoid potential. “Stalin’s culpability for mass murder” is thus indeed “not unlike that of Hitler’s” (p. 136). Indeed, Stalin’s culpability is perhaps even more direct, considering that Hitler was an aloof dictator whom followers tried to please, whereas Stalin was obsessively involved. Their crimes are also quantitatively comparable, and Katyn does indeed resemble the Tannenberg operation. We also now know, despite what Conquest thought and what Naimark reports (p. 126), that Stalin did kill minors, and not just the countless kulak, starving, or Chechen children who died en masse because of his policies. In 1934– 1935 the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) liquidated hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vagrant homeless children, the product of collectivization and famine, who lived by preying on the Soviet railroads. Soon afterward the death penalty was legally extended to minors.16 The Missing Elements The introduction of some missing elements also strengthens and alters Naimark’s case. The ªrst concerns the role Russians, as a people, played in the story. Naimark writes that they, like the Turks, should “openly acknowledge and conscientiously investigate the crimes of the past” (p. 8). However, although it is certainly true that the current Russian government should more openly deal with the Soviet past, there is ample reason to claim that Russians, too, suffered because of the Bolshevik “genocidal” policies, and that parallels with the Ottoman Empire under the Young Turks or with Nazi Germany are improper. Pro-Russian policies and Russian nationalism were not always at the core of the regime’s propaganda and discourse, although they progressively became so in the 1930s, as a consequence of the necessity of dealing with the crisis ignited by the First Five-Year Plan and of “taming” Ukraine. Before that time, and even later on, the Russian elite was exterminated, Russian culture was crippled, Russian intellectuals were decimated, Russian peasants were de16. The scandal caused by the mass death of kulak children spurred the Soviet Politburo to form the special commission that eventually decided to “give” the deported kulaks to the security organs, thus instituting the political police “forced-labor empire.” See Grant M. Adibekov, “Spetspereselentsy zhertvy ‘sploshnoi kollektivizatsii,’” Istoricheskii arkhiv, No. 4 (1994), pp. 145–180. On 4 August 1932, Stalin sent Lazar Kaganovich a note asking him to instruct the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) to shoot on the spot the besprizorniki caught stealing on the railroad. See Oleg V. Khevniuk et al., eds., The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). In his Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes (New York: Random House, 1953), pp. 39–40, Aleksandr Orlov (Leiba Lazarevich Felbing) as early as 1932 had disclosed the mass executions of homeless children ordered by Stalin (Yves Cohen kindly reminded me of it). 163 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark stroyed, and the Russian Orthodox Church was annihilated (70–80 percent of its clergy were killed and many churches were destroyed). In view of the UN deªnition and of previous Soviet proposals, the actions taken against the Orthodox Church alone fully qualify as genocide. Moreove, similar measures hit rabbis and synagogues, imams and mosques, and other religious creeds. If we add to the destruction of synagogues and the repression of their rabbis the fact that at least in the former Pale of Settlement most of the nepmeny (artisans, shopkeepers, traders) repressed in 1928–1929 were of Jewish origins, one wonders whether the neglected operations against them could not also be grouped under the soft UN genocide category. I have dealt with the question whether the Holodomor can be treated as genocide elsewhere and fully agree with Naimark’s positive answer.17 The case can be strengthened by remembering that after the summer of 1932 a de facto illegal government and party center (comprising Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Pavel Postyshev, and V. A. Balitskii) was substituted for the regularly elected organs, thus proving Stalin’s intent to operate in the republic along extraordinary lines. Stalin’s theories, directly linking the peasant question to the national one, provide us with an even stronger argument.18 As he wrote in 1925, criticizing a Yugoslav Communist leader, the national question [is], in essence, a peasant question. Not an agrarian but a peasant question, for these are two different things. It is quite true that the national question must not be identiªed with the peasant question, for, in addition to peasant questions, the national question includes such questions as national culture, national statehood, etc. But it is also beyond doubt that, after all, the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, nor can there be. That is what is meant when it is said that, in essence, the national question is a peasant question.19 Without a clear grasp of the way in which this combination of the social— that is, the peasant—and the national factor worked in Stalin’s mind, we cannot fully understand his 1932 decision to use famine, thus transforming it 17. Andrea Graziosi, “The Soviet 1931–33 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?” in H. Hryn, ed., Hunger by Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 1–20; originally published in Ukrains’kyj istorychnyj zhurnal, No. 3 (2005), pp. 120–131. See also, Graziosi, “Why and in What Sense Was the Holodomor a Genocide?” 18. I quote here passages from my essays cited in the previous footnote and my “‘Nezruchnyj klass’ u modernizacijnykh proektakh,” Ukraina moderna, No. 6 (2010), pp. 9–17. 19. I. V. Stalin, “Concerning the National Question in Yugoslavia,” Bol’shevik, No. 7 (15 April 1925), pp. 69–76 (emphasis added) 164 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression into a Holodomor, not to destroy but to emasculate the Ukrainian nation by breaking its peasantry and crippling its intellectual and political elite. Once this is properly understood, the polemics between the “peasant” and the “national” interpretation of the famine become a moot point. This is also why, as Terry Martin has argued, Stalin was the ªrst to give the famine a “national interpretation,” anticipating Ukrainian nationalists, an interpretation that at the end of 1932 Balitskii invoked in launching a mass terror campaign.20 In one month alone (from 15 November to 15 December), the Ukrainian GPU arrested almost 16,000 people to squeeze grain from the villages and to destroy underground organizations of its own making that were accused of proªting from food difªculties in order to start an insurrection in league with Poland and émigré Ukrainian nationalists. On 14 and 15 December 1932, while Balitskii worked at full speed, the Soviet Politburo passed two secret decrees that are crucial to our understanding of the Holodomor’s meaning. According to these decrees, korenizatsiya, as it had been implemented in Ukraine and in the Kuban, far from having disarmed nationalistic feelings, had helped them grow, producing enemies with a party card in their pocket. Peasants therefore were not the sole culprits of the crisis but shared responsibility with the Ukrainian political and cultural classes. On these premises, Ukrainization programs in the Russian republic were abolished. Several million Ukrainians living in the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics thus lost the education, press, and self-government rights that other nationalities continued to enjoy. This in itself could make for a case of genocide according to the UN deªnition. More importantly, however, an attack on the Ukrainian language was also aggressively launched in Ukraine, where Stalin was not content with the indirect consequences of his policies. The outcome of this attack was a rerussiªcation of Ukrainian cities. The aim was not just the transformation of Ukrainian into a second-rate, subordinated language, one that people wanting to progress in life would have to abandon. In addition, direct policies were adopted to bring the language closer to Russian and to repress the thousands of cadres who had promoted it in previous years. For instance, as Yurii Shapoval found out, Andrii Khvylia, a deputy commissar of education, attacked former commissar Mykola Skrypnyk (who soon after committed suicide) in April 1933 because “not only did he fail to wage a struggle against . . . the bourgeois-nationalist line on the questions of creating 20. Terry Martin, An Afªrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923– 1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Yuri Shapoval, “The Holodomor and Its Connection to the Repressions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932–1934,” in Andrea Graziosi and Lubomyr A. Hajda, eds., After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 165 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark Ukrainian scholarly terminology, he also facilitated this distortion of the line on the linguistic front.” Such distortion was equated with “separating the Ukrainian language from the Russian language.” The publication of dictionaries was suspended; new ones were prepared, favoring Russian terms; the orthography adopted in 1928 was abolished; and in 1933 alone 100 percent of the heads of oblast directorates of public education were dismissed for political motives. Meanwhile, hundreds of mid-ranking and local cadres, intellectuals, and other elites were sentenced to death for having organized the famine (as in 1930, the accusations in the show trials reºected reality much better than the ofªcial propaganda, which denied the Five-Year Plan crisis and, in 1933, the famine’s very existence). And scores of Ukrainian writers were repressed before the Great Terror.21 In 1932–1934 Ukraine, the Ukrainian peasants and intelligentsia, its language and culture, thus suffered because of policies that, taken together, fully ªt the genocide category adopted by the UN. Conclusions One can thus maintain that Stalin did commit genocides as deªned by the 1948 Genocide Convention, and that Naimark is therefore right, even though his arguments could, and at times should, have been different. Yet research on the Stalin era also clearly shows that the adoption of a legal and therefore rigid category to interpret historical events has its drawbacks and that these drawbacks are not few and insigniªcant. This is why some historians refuse to use the genocide category and propose substitutes for it. Their choice is not unfounded, but I believe that, problematic as it may be, “genocide” is by now an inescapable term. We must use it, albeit with both intelligence and great caution (and, because of its moral and political implications, not just for scholarly reasons), trying to make it serve our purpose; that is, to describe, interpret, and account for historical developments in the best possible way. Naimark’s solution is to include in the genocide category the mass planned elimination of social and political groups, thus reversing the UN’s 1948 decision. We should, he writes, “think about and apply the U.N. Convention . . . in a broader and more ºexible pattern of cases,” following the lead of Lemkin, who advocated “a broad and ºexible view of genocide . . . including premodern as well as modern episodes” (pp. 9, 16).22 21. Shapoval, “The Holodomor and Its Connection to the Repressions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932– 1934.” 22. In the 1950s, for instance, Lemkin maintained that the Ukrainian famine could be classiªed as 166 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression To strengthen his points, Naimark quotes Ben Kiernan’s remark that “social and ethnic criteria are not so easily separated from each other and often mix” (p. 28), a point substantiated by the entire history of Central-Eastern Europe, where the social, the ethnic, and even the religious pyramids often coincided. Yet this was not always the case, kulaks were deªned along social lines, and most of the categories targeted in the Great Terror or in passportization were social and political rather than ethnic, religious, or national. Furthermore, a legally deªned category is not easy to change, and genocide carries in its root component (“genos”) a rather precise meaning. Finally, to widen the term’s scope further strengthens the contradictions implicit in the UN’s soft deªnition. If Srebrenica was genocide, if all mass killings are genocide, what was the Shoah? The Genocide Convention does not say so, but public opinion identiªed genocide with the Nazi extermination of the Jews, thus pointing to a widespread, spontaneous preference for a stricter, not broader, meaning of the term. I thus fear that Naimark’s proposal is unappealing and could create additional problems. What can therefore be said? The Soviet case, with its multiple genocides and mass killings, points to a much wider problem. In recent years, the study of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has revealed an extraordinary number of forms of liquidation of ethnic, racial, religious, and social groupings. Most of these phenomena stemmed from the fact that the past two centuries were the period in which our planet was reorganized into states. The movement, which had important precedents, started with decolonization in both Northern and Latin America at the end of the eighteenth century, extended to Central and Eastern Europe, and culminated with decolonization in Asia and Africa 150 years later. Most of these states pretended to be “national,” but in reality they used the term in its European nineteenth-century meaning, which was an ethnic one. Others, like the USSR and Yugoslavia, did not use that self-deªnition, though their component republics did. Yet others, like Pakistan, claimed a religious basis. All, however, identiªed with a “people” and tried somehow to make this true by shaping and at times cutting themselves a people of their choice, along political, cultural, religious, linguistic, and social lines, from the relatively harmless “nationalization” of peasants to the removal of groups deªned as alien—as in the Greek, or Armenian, case in the Ottoman Empire (the treatment of the French nobility after 1791 also makes for a good illustration). genocide. See R. Serbyn, “Lemkin on the Ukrainian Genocide,” Holodomor Studies, No. 1 (2009), pp. 1–8. 167 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark This wide spectrum of phenomena cannot be subsumed into the genocide category, and not just because they often were the reverse side of “peopleshaping” efforts. Their variety and varying intensity make it impossible to group and interpret them using only one category. Take the Soviet case: we have unquestionable genocides such as the Holodomor and the Kazakh and Chechen tragedies; forced deportations; mass religious and intellectual persecutions; total or partial physical liquidation of social and political groups (kulaks, the Great Terror categories, Katyn, etc.), the gulag and the spetsposeleniya, the persecution of religious and “bourgeois” Jews in the late 1920s and of “Soviet” ones after 1945, and so on. The thorny problem of assigning these phenomena, if classiªed together as genocide, to a ladder descending from the worst to the less horrendous cases, to use Naimark’s terminology, also suggests that we would perhaps be embarking on an impossible enterprise. Besides, the Shoah would continue to present huge difªculties. Although the annihilation of Germany’s own Jews can be thought of as a case of “people-shaping,” what about the extermination of millions of Jews elsewhere in Europe? Are we not dealing here with something very different, something that makes the Shoah, once more, exceptional? We need different concepts and categories to cover and interpret an extraordinary variety of category-based liquidations of groups, deªned on the basis of this or that criterion. Genocide satisfactorily ªts some of them, but we also need a term to indicate the purposeful elimination of intellectually built “classes” of human beings. Exercises in category and word creation are, of course, often futile (Lemkin was an exception), but were I to propose a term, I would choose “demotomy,”23 from the Greek “demos,” people, which was and should be understood as a political construct, and from “tomè,” cut, as in anatomy, to indicate surgical operations aimed at removing in various ways (from forced deportation to extermination) different aggregates of “alien” elements to make the “people” conform to a desired image. Different kinds of states, including proto-states (i.e., militias) ªghting for their own afªrmation, have practiced demotomy in the name of a wide range of ideologies and their various hybrids: nationalism, socialism, national-socialism, Communism, religious fundamentalisms, and so on. Beside genocides and demotomy stands the Shoah, which represents their purest, most horrible expression; it is the apex of a multilayered pyramid, 23. The term “demotomy” is the result of discussions with Gia Caglioti, Niccolò Pianciola, and Antonio Ferrara. Ferrara and Pianciola recently published what is, in my judgment, by far the best study of forced deportations in Europe in any language: L’età delle migrazioni forzate: Esodi e deportazioni in Europa, 1853–1953 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012). 168 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression whose steps are represented by as many tragedies. Yet at the same time it belongs in a category of its own. Acknowledgments I want to thank Gia Caglioti, Antonio Ferrara, and Niccolò Pianciola for reading and wisely criticizing this essay’s ªrst draft. Commentary on Stalin’s Genocides Jeffrey S. Hardy In August 2008 Georgian troops ªred on Russian peacekeepers and entered South Ossetia in a bid to reclaim the breakaway enclave. Russia quickly responded with overwhelming force and with a verbal barrage to match the ferocity of its military counterattack. Describing atrocities reportedly committed by Georgian soldiers against South Ossetian civilians, Vladimir Putin pointedly asked, “What was this if not genocide?” Although Russian authorities later backtracked from this charge, South Ossetia embraced its victimhood, creating a Museum of Genocide to commemorate the 162 civilian deaths out of a population of some 70,000. What is genocide? This question has been discussed endlessly over the past decades, and Norman Naimark’s Stalin’s Genocides is among the latest to enter the debate. The generally accepted deªnition is the one codiªed by the 9 December 1948 resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, but from the outset Naimark makes clear that he rejects this ofªcial formulation. Arguing that had it not been for Soviet pressure, the deªnition would have included social and political groups as potential targets of genocide in addition to national, ethnic, racial, and religious communities, Naimark proposes that genocide be deªned as “systematic mass murder . . . intentionally perpetrated by the political elite of a state against a targeted group within the borders of or outside the state” (p. 4). This idea is certainly not new. From the time Raphael Lemkin coined the term in the 1940s, many legal scholars, historians, and social scientists—not to mention victims of alleged genocide—have adopted a more expansive deªnition of genocide to include almost any, in Peter Drost’s words, “human collectivity.” Nonetheless, this is a crucial point of departure for Naimark’s discussion of Stalinism. Although no one disputes that Stalin committed mass murder, applying the label of genocide to his crimes has proven more difªcult. 169 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark In defense of this broader deªnition of genocide, Naimark intersperses his text with references to recent international case law dealing with genocide and to comparative historical examples. He argues that the current trend in jurisprudence, witnessed in particular in the prosecution of former NKVD ofªcers in the Baltic states and the deliberations at the International Criminal Tribunal and International Court of Justice over the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, points to a more inclusive view of genocide. Naimark’s interdisciplinary approach to understanding genocide is commendable, but treated in cursory fashion in such a slim volume it raises questions of selectivity. More depth would have also been appreciated in comparative examples; the Holocaust occupies a few pages, the Armenian, Balkan, and Cambodian genocides receive brief mention, and other prominent examples are omitted. The title Stalin’s Genocides leaves the reader with little doubt about the overall argument of the book: Iosif Stalin was a “genocidaire.” The book’s chapters are organized around Stalin’s alleged genocides: dekulakization, the Holodomor (and Kazakh famine), the forced deportation of ethnic groups, and the Great Terror. Yet despite the title and ultimate conclusion that Stalin did perpetrate genocide against several national, political, and social groups, Naimark’s language is often guarded. In the introduction he rightly acknowledges that the distinctions among “mass murder,” “crimes against humanity,” “political violence,” “genocide,” and other such terms are “tricky and elusive” and that some of Stalin’s crimes “bear more clearly than others the taint of genocide” (p. 13). This caution can be found in individual chapters as well. When discussing dekulakization, for instance, he proposes merely that “a good argument can be made” for genocide (p. 63). Regarding the ChechenIngush mass deportations, Naimark allows that this may be only “a case of attempted cultural genocide” (p. 96). These qualiªcations in no way detract from his thesis; indeed, they redound to Naimark’s credit as a scholar well aware of and sensitive to the politically charged mineªelds through which he is treading. One of the primary challenges that Naimark faces and does not fully resolve is that of categorization. Even allowing for the inclusion of political and social groups in addition to national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities, Stalin’s victims can be difªcult to deªne. Dekulakization is a prime example here. Naimark readily acknowledges that the term “kulak” as employed in the dekulakization campaign was malleable to the point of being nearly meaningless. The only commonality among the many people labeled and repressed as kulaks was their shared status as perceived enemies of Soviet power in the countryside. But if “kulak” was an artiªcially constructed group that existed perhaps only in the imaginations of those carrying out the campaign, 170 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression can genocide have occurred? Naimark insists that kulaks became “a people” and should therefore qualify as victims of genocide, yet if any shared identity among kulaks occurred it was born out of their experience of repression, not from a preexisting trait that led to their repression. Curiously, given his expanded deªnition of genocide, both here and in the Holodomor chapter, Naimark declines to argue that Stalin waged genocide against the Soviet peasantry as a whole; rather, for Naimark, genocide was directed only at distinct subgroups: kulaks, Ukrainian peasants, and Kazakh nomads. A ªnal quibble may be raised with Naimark’s exclusive focus on Stalin. Intent on portraying Stalin as “malevolent and murderous” (p. 35), the book includes a lengthy section pressing the issue of Stalin’s upbringing and personality. Yet in the midst of this, two key issues go unresolved: the culpability of Vladimir Lenin and the role of the Communist Party. Was Lenin guilty of genocide? Naimark brieºy acknowledges his employment of mass murder as a ruling strategy, but he does not analyze these crimes for genocidal intent or result under his broader deªnition of genocide. There may well be good reasons for exculpating Lenin of genocide while condemning Stalin, but unfortunately these reasons are not made clear. Also left unanswered is the role of party and state functionaries in Stalin’s genocides. Naimark occasionally mentions the many people who supported Stalin’s policies and carried out his orders, but he does not address the question of whether they, too, should be considered complicit in genocide. Although in one instance Naimark characterizes the entire Stalinist system as genocidal, this seems to be directed at Stalin himself rather than the regime as a whole. One gets the sense that with the exception of Stalin, the atrocities of the Soviet 1930s occurred without speciªc perpetrators—a possibility supported by the Srebrenica case law cited by Naimark. Needless to say, this is quite a controversial proposition. In sum, Stalin’s Genocides is a well-written volume that has much to recommend it. Relying on the latest scholarship, it concisely relates the most heinous of Stalin’s crimes and provides a provocative framework for assessing Soviet repression from roughly 1928 to 1945. As such it could serve as a valuable tool in both undergraduate and graduate courses devoted to genocide, Communism, the Stalin era, or the Soviet Union as a whole. Whether or not one agrees with the ultimate conclusions, Stalin’s Genocides is a worthy contribution by one of our ªeld’s eminent scholars. 171 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark Commentary on Stalin’s Genocides Michael Ellman This short book, basically an extended essay, argues that Stalin’s mass killings of the 1930s should be classiªed as genocides. Norman Naimark ªrst argues for a liberal interpretation of genocide, in line with recent decisions of international tribunals, and then considers the various episodes of Stalinist mass killing in the 1930s to explain why they qualify as genocides. He begins with dekulakization (1929–1938) and the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 and goes on to ethnic cleansing and the mass terror of 1937–1938. He also includes a chapter comparing the crimes of Iosif Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The originality of the book is its argument that in 1929–1945 Stalin was guilty of a series of genocides. The book contains a number of mistakes or one-sided formulations. It is not true that 500,000 Poles and Germans were deported from the Western frontier regions in 1932–1933 (p. 84). In discussing the “Polish operation,” Naimark quotes the words of an internal affairs (NKVD) ofªcer that the Poles were to be “completely destroyed” (p. 85), but he fails to point out that the majority of the Soviet Poles were not arrested. It is misleading to give the impression (p. 63) that our knowledge of the Nazino tragedy comes from an NKVD report discovered by Nicolas Werth in the archives. It actually comes from a report by the then junior party ofªcial Vasilii Velichko, written in 1933 and reproduced in 1933 g. Nazinskaya tragediya (Tomsk: Volodei, 2002). The fact that it was written in 1933 is a favorable reºection on the cultural level of some party ofªcials at that time. It is also the case, not mentioned by Naimark, that in its decision of 10 March 1934 about the report, the Politburo approved the punishment of eighteen of the ofªcials concerned and instructed the state security police (OGPU) to ensure that deportees received adequate food and medical care. Nikolai Bukharin was not ªnally arrested on 27 January 1937 (p. 105). Naimark’s discussion of the USSR’s Polish policy in World War II (pp. 89–93) neglects to mention the permission given to the Anders army and its civilian dependents in 1942 to leave the USSR. The notion that Soviet ofªcials were able to “convince their Western allies that this [the accusation that the USSR was guilty of the Katyn massacre] was all a Nazi hoax” (p. 91) is doubtful. It would be more accurate to write that at a time when the United States and United Kingdom were ªghting a desperate war against the Nazis and when the USSR was a valued member of the anti-Hitler coalition, Western governments considered it undesirable to support Nazi propaganda, even if it was truthful. When analyzing Soviet ethnic cleansing, Naimark fails to point out that during World War II 172 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression the internment of enemy nationals was practiced in the United Kingdom (where Germans and Italians were interned in 1940) and the United States (where Japanese and Japanese-Americans were interned in 1942). In addition, Naimark (p. 33) refers to the rumor about a planned mass deportation of Soviet Jews in 1953 without pointing out that the leading expert on Soviet antiSemitism regards this as an unfounded myth.24 Moreover, it is confusing to read on p. 74 that Soviet leaders took no steps to lessen the effects of the Ukrainian famine (a claim repeated on p. 134), only to read on p. 75 about some of the measures taken to alleviate the crisis. Naimark is correct in describing this help as “too little too late” (p. 75)—it was grossly inadequate— but his claim that in 1932–1933 Soviet leaders made “no efforts to provide relief ” (p. 134) is incorrect. Moreover, Naimark’s arithmetic is problematic. His ªgure of ten million kulaks removed from their homes in 1929–1932 (p. 57) is too high, as is his estimate (p. 77) of 20 million deaths from Stalinist terror. The number of Koreans arrested or deported in 1937 was 184,000 not 175,000 (p. 87). The chapter on 1937–1938 is old-fashioned in that it begins with Robert Conquest and the three notorious Moscow public trials rather than concentrating on the “mass operations” (order 00447 and the “national operations”). It is confusing to give precise and unqualiªed ªgures on p. 109 for NKVD arrests and killings and then follow them up with the statement that the actual number of victims “was likely to be much higher.” It would have been better to explain that the ªgures come from central NKVD documents compiled in the fall of 1938 that seem to have underestimated actual arrests and killings and that these ªgures exclude various kinds of deaths resulting from the Terror (e.g., deaths en route to, or in, prisons and camps, as is correctly mentioned on pp. 131–132). Naimark is right to stress the suffering of the children of the repressed (pp. 127–128), but he might also have drawn attention to the sharp decline in infant mortality in the postwar years—an important achievement of late Stalinism. In comparing Hitler and Stalin, Naimark writes that both “destroyed their countries and societies” (p. 137). Actually, Stalin bequeathed a powerful state with well-developed educational and industrial systems and a population with a substantially higher life expectancy and literacy rate than when he came to power. The liberal interpretation of genocide that Naimark favors is, as he correctly points out, in line with recent jurisprudence. However, he fails to point out the boomerang effect of such an interpretation. According to a recent book by a U.S. specialist on genocide, which also adopts a liberal interpretation, the massacres of some of the native Americans by European settlers, the 24. Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov”: Vlast’ i evreiskaya intelligentsiya v SSSR (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), appendix 2. 173 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark Atlantic slave trade, the use of a nuclear bomb against Nagasaki, and economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s through 2003, should all be considered genocides.25 This would make the United States a country founded on two genocides and guilty of two more. In view of this boomerang effect, my advice to Western governments is to stick to a strict constructionist interpretation of genocide. Hence, I disagree with Naimark’s wish to classify Stalin’s mass murders as genocide. They were certainly mass murder and crimes against humanity, but they qualify as genocide only according to an interpretation of the term that makes many Western countries also guilty of that crime. Furthermore, I doubt whether the introduction of criminal law categories into history helps historical understanding; it certainly harms international amity. The enserfment of most of the English population after the Norman invasion of 1066 would no doubt count as a crime against humanity today, but the use of this category is not of much help in understanding the eleventh century. Neither would it improve relations between Britain and France. The main purpose of introducing criminal law categories into Soviet history seems to be to contribute to state-building (as in Ukraine and the Baltic countries) or to feelings of moral superiority (as in the United States). This book, like much Western writing, is fond of comparing Stalin and Hitler. But why not compare Stalin and Winston Churchill? Both were guilty of mass killings of civilians (Churchill by area-bombing of German cities). Both were indifferent to millions of famine victims (Churchill with respect to the 1943 Bengal famine). Both recognized that in war large numbers of people will die and that this is unavoidable. Both believed in realpolitik and thus were able to make deals with each other (e.g., the percentages agreement of 1944). Both ate much better during the war than did the masses in their respective countries. Both made serious military errors. Nevertheless, both were victorious war leaders and are regarded as outstanding national leaders by many citizens of their countries. There is a danger that this kind of book will encourage an “orientalist” interpretation of Russia and Russians. Of course we should remember the victims of Stalinist terror and condemn the leader who organized it. However, we should also remember that the number of victims of Stalin’s terror, although huge, was much lower than the number of victims of the main mass killing of the twentieth century: World War II. Many people in both Europe and North America seem to be unaware of the huge population losses suffered during that war by the USSR, Poland, Yugoslavia, Germany, and China, the smaller losses suffered by many other countries, and the wartime famines in 25. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 23–26, 73– 76. 174 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression Bengal, Greece, Leningrad, and the Netherlands. Although state terror is dramatic, deserves strong condemnation, and is something that some people like to gloat about when it occurs in countries they wish to cast in a dark light, war and disease have been the main causes of avoidable deaths in the past hundred years. Nor should we forget that the Wehrmacht was defeated mainly by the Red Army—largely armed and directed by Stalin—which by its efforts saved the lives of huge numbers of American, Canadian, and British young men who otherwise might have lost their lives ªghting the Nazis. We should be grateful for that. Commentary on Stalin’s Genocides Roman Szporluk Norman Naimark’s book demonstrates the need for historians to reexamine fundamental and common views about the Soviet record from 1917 to Iosif Stalin’s death in 1953. This short book, which Naimark suggests is a long essay, examines the actions of Stalin that he considers to be genocides. In developing his case, Naimark discusses the origins of the UN convention’s legal deªnition of genocide. He points out that Stalin’s actions could have ªt into earlier deªnitions proposed in the UN discussions in the 1940s: “the kinds of attacks that Stalin’s regime perpetrated against the Soviet people might well have been included in the genocide convention” (p. 29). But for “essentially political reasons,” “murderous Stalinist initiatives involving social and political groups were not included in the convention against genocide” (p. 29). The convention deªned genocide as “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such” (p. 23). However, this is no reason, Naimark argues, for scholars to exclude Stalin’s crimes from consideration as genocide. After a general discussion of genocide, Naimark presents a brief sketch of Stalin’s life (“The Making of a Genocidaire”), and in chapters 3–6 he examines four cases of genocide: dekulakization in 1929–1931; the Holodomor (i.e., the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933); “Removing Nations” (i.e., the mass deportations of non-Russian nationalities before and during World War II); and the Great Terror of 1937–1938. Dekulakization was one of the results of Stalin’s decision to launch the First Five-Year Plan, which included industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. The aim, as Stalin saw it, was “to save the Bolshevik Revolution— and his guidance of it—from what he feared was its potential disintegration” (p. 53). 175 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark The “Second Revolution” (as it was often called at the time to stress its importance as a counterpart of 1917)—brought attacks on the peasantry that were especially brutal against peasants branded as “kulaks,” whom the Bolsheviks falsely called village capitalists. These (relatively) better-off farmers were dehumanized, their property was seized, and large numbers of them were killed or exiled. “Between late 1929 and 1932, some ten million kulaks were forced from their homes,” Naimark writes (p. 57). The program of collectivization was intended “to break the back of the independent peasantry” (p. 54) Naimark writes that “a good argument can be made that Stalin intended to wipe out the kulaks physically as a group of people—not just metaphorically as a class—and that therefore the result can be considered genocide” (p. 63). The Ukrainian killer famine should also be considered an act of genocide, Naimark believes. (p. 134) The Ukrainian Holodomor followed the dekulakization and collectivization campaigns. “The argument about whether the Ukrainian killer famine was directed against peasants or Ukrainians . . . 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.” (p. 29) Stalin’s hostility to Ukrainians came not only from their resistance to collectivization but from “their attempts to maintain their form of ‘home rule’” (p. 135); that is, from what Stalin considered to be nationalism. Victims included the intelligentsia and “national Communists.” “Removing Nations” treats the actions against Soviet Poles and Germans in 1932–1933 and in 1937–1938. Naimark estimates that more than 100,000 Poles—Soviet citizens living mainly in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic—were shot. Foreign Communists living in the USSR were another target. The Koreans were another ethnic group in the USSR targeted by Stalinist persecution. During World War II Soviet persecution affected the Baltic peoples, as well as Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars, Kalmyks, and Crimean Tatars. Finally, Naimark compares the Katyn forest massacre of Polish ofªcers in 1940 with the massacres of the Polish intelligentsia by the Nazis in German-occupied Poland. “Hitler’s idea was to decapitate the Polish nation by destroying its leadership. . . . Stalin’s idea was pretty much the same: to destroy the ability of the Poles to resist the Soviet takeover of their eastern territory” (p. 91). Finally, the Great Terror of 1937–1938 “also had genocidal qualities, if it cannot be labeled genocide itself, at least according to the letter of the U.N. convention and to most historical criteria as well” (p. 136). This time the victims included “the Old Bolsheviks, the communist elite, the ofªcers’ corps, and the nomenklatura, along with their families, friends, and 176 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression associates” (p. 136). In the ªnal stage the makers of the Great Terror themselves were killed: the leaders and lower-rank personnel of the security police led by Genrikh Yagoda were purged under Nikolai Ezhov and, after Yezhov’s downfall, by Lavrentii Beria, who “proceeded to purge the entire NKVD organization” once again (p. 88). (Beria’s turn to be executed came only in 1953—after Stalin’s death.) Thus, Naimark tells us that in the purges of 1937–1938 both perpetrators and victims were Communists, and the latter included participants in Stalin’s earlier genocides—the dekulakization, Ukrainian famine, and “removing” of nations—as well as members of the old party leadership, who were the makers of the 1917 Russian Revolution and victors in the Russian Civil War. Nearly ªfty years ago, in The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929–1940, Isaac Deutscher stated that “the terror of the Yezhov period amounted to political genocide: it destroyed the whole species of the anti-Stalinist Bolsheviks. During the remaining ªfteen years of Stalin’s rule no group was left in Soviet society, not even in the prisons and camps, capable of challenging him.”26 Why and how did the makers of the Bolshevik revolution end up as victims of a terror that was carried out in the name of the same ideology they had followed twenty years earlier? Did something “go wrong” at the very start? When did the revolution enter a genocidal course? Naimark says, “before Stalin’s dictatorship . . . one should not use the appellation of genocide for the mass killing that took place, despite its horriªc character, especially during the Civil War of 1918–1921” (p. 14). (“The Civil War in the countryside was brutal and lethal”: “Millions of peasants died in the conºict, some ªghting on one side or the other. . . . A terrible famine raged . . . across Russia and Ukraine, as the policies of the Soviet government destroyed the productive capabilities of rural Russia”; p. 52.) In that war Stalin “was no less violent than [Vladimir] Lenin himself, who was known to call for the demonstrative hanging of hundreds of peasants from hilltops (“hang without fail, so the people see”) as a way to quell uprisings, and to shoot supposed White opponents on the spot” (p. 44). When the extent of the damage became evident to Lenin and his comrades, they “had no choice but to exercise retreat in the countryside, a so-called peasant Brest, a temporary compromise with the economic realities of the Soviet countryside. In 1921 the Bolsheviks introduced what was called the New Economic Policy,” or NEP (pp. 52–53). Contemporaries called this new course “the peasant Brest,” thus comparing it to the peace Soviet Russia had been forced to con26. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 418. 177 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark clude in February 1918. For the Bolsheviks the peasants at home in the early 1920s were an enemy comparable to the kaiser’s Germany and the AustroHungarian monarchy during the revolution of 1917. Whatever Lenin’s long-term plan was, Stalin did not like NEP. According to Jörg Baberowski and others, it was “in the excesses of the Civil War [that] Stalinism was brought to the world” (p. 44). Other historians to whom Naimark refers see the war against the peasantry as a single process lasting from 1919 to 1933. Naimark acknowledges that “many historians consider this [NEP] simply a pause between the ªrst major Bolshevik war against the peasantry (1919–22) and the second and ªnal one to follow (1928–33)” (p. 53). One of these historians is Andrea Graziosi, who has written a history of the “Great Soviet Peasant War,” which he says began in 1917 and did not end until 1933. If Graziosi and others who share his view are correct, Stalin’s genocidal dekulakization and collectivization continued a policy that already exhibited some “proto-genocidal” features in the civil war period and then was temporarily suspended under NEP. Stalin viewed his post-1928 peasant war as a continuation of Lenin’s program, calling it a “Second Revolution” that was equal in importance to, or even more important than, the ªrst. This made possible the view of post-1928 policy as a continuation of the agenda of 1917. The anti-peasant course was not uniquely Stalin’s. Naimark notes that Stalin’s war against the kulaks had the support of many members of the Central Committee and Politburo (p. 55). “Many Bolsheviks were nervous about NEP and unwilling to compromise with the countryside” (p. 55). Stalin and his associates concluded that building Communism as understood by Karl Marx and Lenin required a policy of mass slaughter if the Bolsheviks were to remain in power in a country in which peasants formed a majority of the population. What mattered was the goal: Communism was impossible without the liquidation of the peasantry as a class and the abolition of private property. Historians will continue to argue about the use of the word “genocide” in describing what happened in the former Russian empire after 1917. While agreeing with Naimark’s use of the term in this book, I would like to suggest another term that might be useful in characterizing the “Soviet experiment” from 1917 through the late 1930s. Peter Struve (1870–1944), an advocate of Russian nation-building along Western lines and an active participant in politics up to and including the Civil War, called the revolution of 1917 “the political suicide of a political nation.”27 Had the word “genocide” been in27. Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 301. 178 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression vented in his time, Struve might have called 1917 a Russian “geno-sui-cide” or “sui-geno-cide.” For reasons easy to understand, Marxists ªnd it very difªcult to draw on Karl Marx’s historical materialism in interpreting the history of post-1917 Russia. But, strange as this may seem, Naimark’s account of Stalin’s genocides, including that in which Communists killed their fellow Communists, may be “located” in Marx’s view of what happened in history. As all readers of The Communist Manifesto know, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” They also know that in those struggles “oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, [and] carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open ªght.” However, most readers of the Manifesto, while noticing that each ªght ended “in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large,” ignore the fact that Marx allows for another ending to class struggles: for Marx, “a ªght . . . each time ended either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”28 Stalin’s Genocides convincingly shows us the Bolshevik revolution as a specimen of Marx’s second alternative. Commentary on Stalin’s Genocides Jeffrey J. Rossman Stalin’s Genocides is a powerful and timely book in which Norman Naimark argues “that genocide is the appropriate appellation for [the] killing” that took place under Iosif Stalin from 1929 to 1953 (p. 132). Despite repeated use of the term “killing” in the book, Naimark includes within his purview a range of actions beyond one-sided mass killing, such as forced relocations. Topically, he focuses on four well-known “episodes” of Stalinist mass violence: dekulakization, the Ukrainian terror-famine, the Great Terror, and the attacks on “enemy nations.” First, Naimark focuses on the dekulakization campaign of 1929–1932, in which several tens of thousands of “kulaks” were executed and hundreds of thousands of others—and often their relatives—were stripped of their rights and possessions and forcibly relocated to “special settlements,” where the state forced them to work for the building of the new “socialist” society. In this section of the book, Naimark underscores the fact that mortality among deported “kulaks” and their relatives was high during the relocation process and 28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. by Samuel Moore (London: n.p., 1888), p. 7, emphasis added. 179 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark in the period following their resettlement in undeveloped regions of the USSR, such as Central Asia. Second, Naimark analyzes “[t]he Ukrainian killer famine” (p. 134) in which several million Ukrainian peasants perished in what is known to have been a man-made, though not necessarily intentional, famine that resulted from the disastrous effects of dekulakization and forced collectivization. Naimark considers only Ukrainian casualties of the famine to have been victims of genocide. He does not consider the several million non-Ukrainian casualties of the famine to have been genocide victims because only in Ukraine, he claims, did the regime adopt special measures that exacerbated the suffering and led to a higher death toll. Third, Naimark examines “the attack on certain enemy nationalities” (p. 135) that began in 1932 and continued through 1944, in which Poles, Germans, Baltic peoples, and almost the entire population of Soviet Koreans, Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and other Muslim peoples were forcibly relocated from their homes—and, in some cases, their homelands—to undeveloped parts of the USSR, especially in Central Asia. Naimark emphasizes that the policy toward “enemy nationalities” included, in addition to forced relocation, campaigns of mass murder—most notoriously, against the military and political elite of Soviet-occupied Poland (the Katyn massacre). Naimark also includes in the list of genocide victims the tens of thousands of “class enemies” and resisters to Soviet occupation killed by the regime in the Baltic states, western Ukraine, and Bessarabia as a result of the Soviet occupation of these territories during and after the war. Finally, Naimark explores the series of repressive measures known as the Great Terror. Although the Great Terror encompassed many actions—and debate exists over what measures should be included in the term—Naimark focuses on the execution of Old Bolsheviks, such as Nikolai Bukharin, and the 1.3 million arrests that occurred from the middle of 1937 to the end of 1938. Of those arrested, about half were executed and half were sent to the Gulag, usually on trumped-up charges of counterrevolution. Naimark appears to include all victims of the Great Terror under the genocide rubric, whether they were executed or imprisoned. There is much to admire in Naimark’s book, including its boldness and clarity. It is indisputable that there were millions of victims of the Stalin regime, including those killed outright and those who suffered premature death as a result of ofªcial policies. (Many, though by no means all, of these deaths were unintentional in the sense of not having been planned or even necessarily desired by the regime.) Also indisputable is the fact that Stalin’s regime engaged in killings and forced relocations that exacted a profound human, social, cultural, and economic cost on the so-called kulaks and enemy nations. 180 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression Naimark is on solid ground in identifying Stalin as the central ªgure responsible for the mass violence. Moreover, he draws persuasive comparisons between Stalinism and Nazism. Despite its strengths, the book suffers from shortcomings. Naimark claims “genocide” is the most accurate term for the mass violence that took place under Stalin. He makes the case in several ways, not all of which support his thesis. Most persuasively, he claims that particular episodes of mass violence—such as the Katyn massacre—would be considered genocide by present-day international criminal tribunals. Given the genocide jurisprudence of the past two decades, he is on ªrm ground with regard to Katyn. Second, he identiªes the Ukrainian dimension of the terror-famine as genocide. This remains a matter of endless debate, but many scholars now concur that special measures adopted in Ukraine—especially the sealing off of famine regions and the refusal to provide relief to Ukrainian famine victims—shift the Ukrainian terror-famine from the category of crime against humanity to the category of genocide. In short, Stalin intended Ukrainian peasants to starve to death at least in part because they were ethnically Ukrainian. The evidence is not clear-cut, but it is sufªcient to have persuaded this reader. Naimark is on weaker ground when it comes to dekulakization, the Great Terror, and some of the policies adopted toward “enemy nations.” To call dekulakization an act of genocide is problematic for several reasons. First, kulaks were a socioeconomic and/or political group that existed only in the minds of perpetrators and, perhaps, bystanders. The Genocide Convention does not apply to political or socioeconomic groups, nor has the jurisprudence of the past two decades expanded the sphere of protected groups. Even if the jurisprudence were to shift to include political and socioeconomic groups—an unlikely occurrence given the deªnition of “genocide” in the statute of the International Criminal Court and the objections to a more expansive deªnition of protected groups made during the drafting of the Convention, it is unlikely that the coverage of genocide will be stretched by the international courts to include “groups,” such as kulaks and class enemies, that exist only in the minds of the perpetrators. Naimark is aware of the problem of identifying kulaks as victims of genocide, which is apparently why he refers to their persecution as “genocidal” (p. 133), by which he means “genocide-like” (p. 13). Naimark’s use of the adjective “genocidal” throughout the book has the unfortunate effect of conºating acts of genocide with acts, such as dekulakization, that are more properly understood as crimes against humanity. Naimark is also on shaky ground when he categorizes attacks on “enemy nations” as genocide. He inadvertently acknowledges the weakness of the argument when he states that such attacks in “some cases took on genocidal 181 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark characteristics” (p. 135). Here, again, the use of the adjective “genocidal” has the effect of conºating repressive measures that should be distinguished by historians and that are distinguished in international criminal law. The forced relocation of “enemy nations” was a crime against humanity. Although Naimark cites evidence showing the Stalin regime’s hostility toward these groups, he ignores evidence from equally high levels of the party-state (e.g., telegrams from Beria to Stalin) suggesting that the security police made efforts to reduce casualties during the process of forced relocation. This evidence needs to be taken into account when determining whether relocations constituted genocide or instead should be seen as crimes against humanity. Stalin forcibly relocated the entire Soviet Korean population to Central Asia. As in the case of other forced relocations, the goal was not the physical destruction of the group. There is some evidence that such relocations were acts of ethnocide, or “cultural genocide.” Still, ethnocide is not genocide according to the Convention and the jurisprudence of the past two decades. Naimark concedes that The Great Terror “cannot be labeled genocide.” He is correct in this assessment. Nonetheless, he states as he does with regard to several other episodes of mass violence that it “had genocidal qualities.” As in the case of forced relocations, the conºation of discrete phenomena obscures more than it reveals. If genocide were the only conceptual category scholars had to work with to characterize the myriad forms of one-sided mass violence that regimes engaged in during the twentieth century, we would have no choice but to use the term “genocide” or to invent new terms. Fortunately, we are not in that situation. A rich vocabulary of mass violence has emerged in recent decades that enables scholars to draw distinctions among the multiple ways that Communist and non-Communist regimes persecuted internal and external populations. Scholars of mass violence should employ this vocabulary, whether it derives from the ªeld of genocide studies or from the statutes and cases of international criminal courts. Naimark believes that genocide is the key category for understanding Stalinist mass violence. This reader is not persuaded that the writings of Raphael Lemkin, the travaux préparatoires of the Genocide Convention, the role of the USSR in shaping the legal deªnition of genocide, or the insistence by many victims of Stalinist repression that they be identiªed as genocide victims leaves the historian no choice but to categorize Stalinist mass violence as genocide or “genocidal.” Naimark’s book is important and deserves to be widely read, but it does not achieve its goal. Stalin committed a wide range of what legal scholars such as David Scheffer have begun to refer to as atrocity crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against peace. Stalin also committed democide, politicide, sociocide, and eliticide—terms that 182 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression carry meaning among scholars of genocide, albeit not among jurists of international criminal courts. These are terms that students of Stalinism—indeed, students of all murderous regimes—should draw on to categorize and distinguish types of mass violence. International criminal law acknowledges no hierarchy when it comes to atrocity crimes. Episodes of Stalinist mass violence are no less deplorable when categorized as crimes against humanity or as war crimes. As scholars, we should resist rather than succumb to the magnetism of the “G-word.” Reply to the Commentaries Norman Naimark I want to thank the editor of the Journal of Cold War Studies for initiating this discussion and the seven distinguished scholars who contributed to it for taking their tasks seriously. Far too rarely does a writer have the opportunity to respond to his or her reviewers in this fashion. My goal in writing Stalin’s Genocides, an extended essay rather than a scholarly monograph, was precisely to engage colleagues and students—especially those in the Soviet ªeld—and ask them to consider thinking about the Soviet mass killings during the 1930s as genocide. Many of the reviewers seem to agree that this argument has some merit. Others agree with the thrust of the argument but would like to change the terms of the debate. One rejects this kind of thinking altogether. Roman Szporluk provides an excellent summary of what I tried to say in the book. For those who have not read it and want to understand the responses, I suggest they start with his concise and intelligent recapitulation of my argument. He adds an important component that I touch on but do not explore at length, and that is the question of how Marxist ideology, not to mention Leninism and Bolshevism, ªt into the larger question of how to understand mass killing in the 1930s. (This issue is also broached in the essays by Paul Hollander, Andreas Graziosi, and Jeffrey Hardy.) Clearly, Marxism lies at the core of Leninism, and even what we know as Marxism-LeninismStalinism. But Marxism also serves as the theoretical backbone for social democracy, which few would suggest is a murderous political movement. The rhetoric of class struggle permeates the campaigns of mass killing in the 1930s, as do the incessant Communist attacks on the traditional peasant economy. Equally lethal were the harangues against “enemies of the people” along with exhortations to unmask “hidden” enemies who could not be identiªed simply by class or nationality. The origins of the rhetorical and physical attacks on peasants, nationalities, and “enemies of the people” can be linked 183 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark directly to Vladimir Lenin and early Bolshevik policies, as can other examples of Communist genocide in Mao Zedong’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Still, leaving aside the Russian Civil War, which Szporluk correctly points out could be considered “proto-genocidal” and Graziosi (citing Moshe Lewin) calls “quasi-genocidal,” the sheer scope and intensity of the killing under Iosif Stalin is unprecedented in Soviet and Russian history. I do not presume to resolve the Lenin-Stalin continuity debate, which will continue, as it has for more than a half century, to animate discussions in academia about the Soviet past. But I do maintain that the structure, rationale, implementation, and effects of Stalin’s campaigns of mass killing in the 1930s were different enough from Lenin’s to justify the appellation of genocide as I deªne it; in short, a qualitative as well as quantitative difference separates them. In response to Hardy’s legitimate question about whether I place too much emphasis on the role of the vozhd’, I should note that I do stress that Stalin could not manage the campaigns of genocide by himself. Among other hierarchs, his security police chiefs, particularly Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Ezhov, and Lavrentii Beria, were perpetrators of the ªrst rank. In the contemporary classiªcation of the international tribunals, numerous others could have been convicted of complicity in genocide. In addition, there must have been a couple of hundred thousand police, party, military, and state ofªcials, who participated in one fashion or another in mass murder. As Joshua Rubenstein indicates in his perceptive comments about my intentions in the book, the similarities between Stalin’s and Adolf Hitler’s role in history, which the genocide question inevitably raises, are unsettling to many observers of the Second World War and, in particular, of the Holocaust. I am not quite as certain as Rubenstein that all of our readers would share his view of the Stalingrad question: that everyone “would have wanted to see the Red Army defeat the Wehrmacht, in spite of all that was known and all that would later be known about Stalin’s crimes.” One could predict a different answer— preferring a victory of Hitler to Stalin—from even well-informed scholars and students in the Baltic lands or parts of East Central Europe. I agree, though, with his conclusions: (1) that “the right side won the war at Stalingrad,” (2) that both Stalin and Hitler should be considered genocidaires, and (3) that “victory” in World War II can be attributed in the main to the people of the Soviet Union, but not necessarily to Stalin. Michael Ellman notes in his critique of my book that we should be “grateful” for the Soviet victory over Hitler in the war. Of course. But this does not mean, as he implies, that we should be grateful for Stalin or that the deaths he caused were therefore more acceptable. I want to thank Paul Hollander not only for his thoughtful contribution to this discussion but in general for being such a wise and sensitive interlocu184 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression tor about the problems of comparing Nazism and Stalinism. As he emphasizes here, one of the major reasons for thinking about Stalin’s crimes within the context of genocide is precisely that so many historians and commentators refuse out of hand to consider such a possibility. In that rejectionist stance, he demonstrates, resides an unwillingness to deal with the moral baseness of Stalinism. One need only read Ellman’s comments to realize the cogency of Hollander’s insights. For Ellman, comparing Churchill and Stalin makes as much sense as comparing Hitler and Stalin, which strikes me as untenable historically and morally. Even if one accepts Ellman’s assertions that genocide was committed by settlers against American Indian tribes, as no doubt was sometimes the case, or that the U.S. government was responsible for genocide by dropping a nuclear bomb at Nagasaki, which is a much more dubious proposition, this does not necessarily undermine, as he seems to think, the argument for genocide in the case of Stalin’s mass killing. Jeffrey Hardy points out that I tried to be careful with the use of the term “genocide” and he understands why I use “genocidal” as a way to describe episodes of Soviet mass killing that were “like genocide” but could not be considered to carry the full jurisprudential meaning of the term “genocide” itself. Indeed, I tried to be as careful as I could with my language without sacriªcing the essential point that the discrete episodes of mass killing in the USSR from the 1930s into the war—from dekulakization through Katyn—were related to one another, were based on the same ideological premises, and were carried out by the same institutions at the behest of the same supreme leader, Stalin. Jeffrey Rossman is less happy with the way I use “genocidal” and believes that the adjective confuses rather than enlightens readers’ understanding of the discrete events of mass killing that I describe. Like some other scholars of mass killing, Rossman prefers such terms as “democide,” “politicide,” “sociocide,” or “eliticide.” His suggestion that scholars use more fully the judicial categories of atrocity crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, in addition to genocide, to deal with Stalin’s mass killing of the 1930s has some merit. Rossman notes that “‘genocide’ is by now an inescapable term,” and he is ready to apply it to “the Holodomor or the Kazakh and Chechen tragedies,” among others in the Soviet case. However, for dekulakization or other attacks on Soviet political or social groups, he might well be receptive to Graziosi’s suggestion of a new term, “demotomy,” which would “indicate the purposeful elimination of intellectually built ‘classes’ of human meanings.” My view remains that new terms developed by social scientists and historians to classify mass killing of the sort that genocide represents neither add to the clarity of what we mean by “genocide” nor do they serve the crucial need for unimpeded communication among academics, the legal community, and the public as a whole. 185 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark Rossman also challenges my characterization of genocide as “the crime of crimes.” The international courts have not, as he rightly indicates, adopted an unambiguous stance on this issue of the “hierarchy” of the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. However, in both the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the judges often operate under the assumption that genocide deserves more severe punishments and should be judged by different criteria—a “higher bar”—than crimes against humanity. This has been the case in various trials and among a variety of judges, as has been pointed out in the legal literature.29 As David Luban, a professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown correctly states, “To everyone in the world other than a handful of international lawyers, genocide is the crime of crimes.”30 On a different issue, Rossman states that the Beria-Stalin telegrams offer evidence that the authorities made efforts to reduce casualties during what Rossman calls the “forced relocation” (better “forced deportation,” “forced removal,” or “ethnic cleansing”) of the “punished peoples.” I closely read these communications a decade or so ago regarding the deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, and Crimean Tatars, and I do not recall ªnding a single instance of attempts by the security police to deal with the staggering death toll that the militarized removals and resettlement entailed, though Beria was enormously proud that there were very few casualties and only limited resistance during the actual deportations. One also ªnds, as Ellman points out in his comment, various reports from some OGPU and NKVD observers that rued the lethal conditions of the transports and in the “settlements” where the deportees ended up. Andreas Graziosi’s review raises a host of interesting and important facets of the Stalinist 1930s, many of which, as he notes, make the case for genocide more complete and more convincing. He appropriately includes the elimination of the Russian elite, the decimation of the Russian intelligentsia, and, especially, the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church. (Graziosi writes that 70–80 percent of the clergy were liquidated.) He makes the argument, as well, that attacks on synagogues, rabbis, and Jewish nepmeny in 1928–1929 29. A former judge at the ICTY, Patricia Wald, writes: “And though none of the international tribunals have sentencing tariffs which put different ranges on the two crimes [genocide and crimes against humanity], in my time there was a feeling among at least some judges that genocide lay at the apex and deserved the highest level of sanction—indeed there was a notion among some that some space would be left at the top level for as yet untried genocidieres. Such factors may enter into the prosecutors’ charging calculus along with the accessibility of evidence, the differences and levels of proof between genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.” See Patricia M. Wald, “Genocide and Crimes against Humanity,” Washington University Global Studies Review, Vol. 6, No 3 (2007), p. 629. 30. David J. Luban, “Calling Genocide by Its Rightful Name,” Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Summer 2006), pp. 1–307. 186 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression might be seen, using the broad 1948 Genocide Convention deªnition, as genocide. He adds important evidence to the argument that the killing of children and their deaths in forced labor were an integral part of Stalin’s genocidal campaigns. He agrees that dekulakization was “an intentional, massmurderous policy relying on category-based reasoning to reshape the Soviet ‘people’ by cutting away a piece previously recast as ‘alien,’” though he is not ready to use the term “genocide” to describe the process. He also struggles with deªning in appropriate ways the relationship of the Holocaust, the Shoah, to genocide as a category of mass killing. (Pace Graziosi, I did write that the term “genocide” was originally “designed primarily to describe the Holocaust”; p. 2). His conclusion that the Shoah was central to the history of genocide, and thus comparable to such events as the Armenian genocide and the Holodomor, yet “belongs in its own category,” strikes me as a useful way to think about the extraordinary lack of limits on Hitler’s murderous ambitions regarding the Jews. Graziosi’s admirable work on the Ukrainian famine was important to my own thinking about classifying the Holodomor as genocide. In his commentary, he points to the signiªcance of the fact that after the summer of 1932, “a de facto illegal government and party center” was set up in Ukraine, “proving Stalin’s intent to operate in the republic along extraordinary lines.” To me, however, this observation strengthens the argument for making a clear distinction between the Holodomor and the horriªc Kazakh famine as cases of genocide. Graziosi also appropriately underlines the importance of considering a broader spectrum of Stain’s anti-Ukrainian policies—against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, against the Ukrainian language, and against Ukrainian culture— as completing the picture of a Moscow-centered policy of genocide. Michael Ellman’s commentary is hard to respond to, in good measure because he is not interested in my argument and does not respond to it. Instead he seeks to undermine it by nitpicking about supposed right versus wrong numbers and right formulations (his) versus wrong formulations (mine). He is annoyed that I use NKVD ªgures as baseline ªgures for many of my estimates of arrested and dead and that I then suggest these ªgures are un reliable and the actual number of victims “was likely to be much higher.” That is exactly what I think; that is what Aleksandr Yakovlev, who should have known, warned us is the case; and that is how historians, in my view, should deal with what I consider the vexing numbers issue, which is not resolved by the publication of data from OGPU and NKVD sources. At times, he also distorts what I say as a way to make his own facticity appear stronger. For example, I clearly say in my larger discussion of the Holodomor that at the beginning of 1933 the Soviet authorities provided some famine relief to Ukraine and that grain exports were cut back substantially, noting at the same time that these 187 Rubenstein, Hollander, Graziosi, Hardy, Ellman, Szporluk, Rossman, and Naimark measures were “too little, too late” (p. 75). When in the summary conclusion I say they made no efforts to provide relief, it will be clear to most readers, given what I said earlier, that this means the aid was not provided until it was too late for it to have a beneªcial effect, a point that comes at the end of that same sentence (p. 134). I also do not estimate the number of Soviet deaths from the terror at 20 million, as he writes. As I note throughout the book, the number of people who died as a consequence of Stalin’s genocides is impossible to know. What I wrote is framed clearly in the conditional—“if as many as twenty million Soviet citizens may have died at the hands of the regime,” then there are certain conclusions that can be drawn (pp. 77–78). To argue, as Ellman wants to, about whether the number of Koreans deported was 184,000, as he states, or 175,000, when these and other roughly similar ªgures are used by reliable historians and are based on various state estimates, strikes me as petty and unresolvable. Behind Ellman’s focus on ªgures is a view of the history of Stalinism that is both questionable and disturbing. He wants to argue that because some OGPU and NKVD ofªcers reported the truth about the horrible depredations in the camps, and because the Politburo sanctioned the punishment of some prison camp ofªcials, this lessens, somehow, the brutality of the system. He wants to say that the amnesty and departure from the Soviet Union of the majority of the Polish deportees from 1939–1941, prompted by the desperate straits of the Soviet Union after the Nazi attack and the military-diplomatic necessity to come to an agreement with the London Poles, ameliorates the horrors of the deportations and abysmal lives (and deaths) of the Poles in Soviet exile. He wants me to compare the internment of Japanese nationals and some Japanese-Americans in the United States—where, no matter how reprehensible the policy, very, very few died of hunger or were grossly mishandled or brutalized—with the internment of Germans, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and the other “punished peoples” in the Soviet Union during the war, where hundreds of thousands expired in horriªc conditions. He wants me to share his view that Gennadii Kostyrchenko’s Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov” puts to rest the still controversial question of the possibility that Stalin would have deported the Jews after the conclusion of the Doctors’ Plot affair. Ellman objects to the comparison between Hitler and Stalin and is particularly disturbed that I write that both “destroyed their countries and societies.” He adds that “actually” Stalin should be admired for creating a “powerful state” with an advanced educational system and positive health and literacy programs. The real question should be at what cost and how to think about those costs, which I suggest have been enormous, and not just in the numbers of lives lost and destroyed in the process. Plenty of right-wing Germans claim Hitler did much the same and more for the German state and 188 Reassessing Stalin’s Crimes, Terror, and Repression people, before, unfortunately in their view, the missteps of the war against the Soviet Union ruined the Third Reich. But, again, at what cost to the Germans, not to mention the tens of millions of others. Perhaps most crucially, Ellman misses the point of comparing Stalin and Hitler, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, and trying to think about genocide in the context of both. He decries it as a form of “orientalism,” as a way to tout Western superiority and denigrate Russia. But it is just the opposite— and that is to demystify the Russian past and use categories of analysis that cross national borders and apply to different political systems. One can sensibly argue that the categories are not the right ones and do not apply, or that other categories are more precise and appropriate, as some of the other commentators do. Still, the comparative enterprise is not only legitimate but absolutely necessary. 189