I’m not making any judgment in this series of posts about whether the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 amounted to genocide. What I will try to do here is look at the considerations involved in whether the Holodomor should be considered genocide.
Defining genocide
Genocide is a topic that deserves to be taken very seriously. The term “genocide” was invented by a Polish-Jewish jurist name Raphael Lemkin, who lived and studied in the city of Lemberg, now known as L’viv, which is currently part of Ukraine. His book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944) established the term and became the basis for the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which took formal effect in 1951.1
This is one of a series of posts about some of the issues raised by Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine (2017) on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 in the context of competing national narratives in present-day eastern Europe. The first post can be found at this link.
However, though Lemkin himself supported the Genocide Convention, it did not use exactly the same definition he did. And the term has been developed for decades since by scholars and legal cases. In the 1990s, conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda were evaluated by the International Criminal Court were adjudicated as examples of genocide. Scholars and activists have used the concept in researching historical events like the slave trade and colonial wars.
Jeffrey Ostler in his book Surviving Genocide (2019) has taken a careful scholarly look at evaluating the settlement of what is now the United States to evaluate to what extent the genocide concept applies.2[2] The book is an excellent example of the challenges of evaluating from a scholarly perspective what kinds of atrocities qualify as genocide.
The Holocaust committed by Hitler Germany against Jews (a large number of them in Ukraine) and other targeted groups is generally recognized as genocide, as was the Armenian genocide that began in 1915. The general impression of what constitutes genocide is probably something along the lines of deliberately wiping out large groups of people who were targeted as part of a specific ethnic group. Those two events were particularly important for Lemkin’s definition of genocide:
Although the crime of genocide is associated above all with Hitlers Final Solution, this was not the first campaign of extermination that would qualify as genocide. The systematic extermination of Armenians by the Young Turks beginning in April 1915-an episode that loomed Large in Lemkin's early thinking about the need to criminalize what he later termed genocide - was the first genocide in the twentieth century. Emboldened by the world's acquiescence in the slaughter of Armenians - over 1 million are estimated to have been put to death-Hitler is famously reported to have reassured doubters in his ranks by asking, "Who after all is today speaking of the Armenians?"3[3]
But it’s also the case that the official International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 to qualify as genocide:
Srebrenica massacre, slaying of more than 7,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) boys and men, perpetrated by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, in July 1995. In addition to the killings, more than 20,000 civilians were expelled from the area—a process known as ethnic cleansing. The massacre, which was the worst episode of mass murder within Europe since World War II, helped galvanize the West to press for a cease-fire that ended three years of warfare on Bosnia’s territory (see Bosnian conflict).4
In that case:
The trial chamber reasoned, in part, that "Bosnian Serb forces could not have failed to know, by the time they decided to kill all the men, that this selective destruction of the group would have a Lasting impact upon the entire group[; they] had to be aware of the catastrophic impact that the disappearance of two or three generations of men would have on the survival of a traditionally patriarchal society." Krstic was convicted of genocide, though the Court's Appeals Chamber later reduced this to a conviction for aiding and abetting genocide.5
Still, this massacre of 7,000-plus people and 20,000-plus civilians expelled was officially designated as genocide.
In the Epilogue chapter of Red Famine, Applebaum explicitly acknowledges that in her view, the Holodomor does not fit the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention:
The Convention finally passed in 1948, which was a personal triumph for [Rafael] Lemkin and for many others who had lobbied in its favour. But the legal definition was narrow, and it was interpreted even more narrowly in the years that followed. In practice, 'genocide', as defined by the UN documents, came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust.
The Holodomor does not meet that criterion. The Ukrainian famine was not an attempt to eliminate every single living Ukrainian; it was also halted, in the summer of 1933, well before it could devastate the entire nation. Although Lemkin later argued for an expansion of the term, and even described the Sovietization of Ukraine as the 'classic example of Soviet genocide', it is now difficult to classify the Ukrainian famine, or any other Soviet crime, as genocide in international law. (p. 357) [my emphasis]
Serhii Plokhy describes Applebaum’s position in Red Famine this way:
The Holodomor, she suggests, does not conform to the definition of genocide set forth in the United Nations convention of 1948, [actually, she states very explicitly as just quoted that it does not] but it readily fits the definition produced by no less a figure than the father of the concept, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who emphasizes the Soviet attack on the Ukrainian political and cultural elite in his article of 1952, “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine.”6
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. United Nations. <https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf> (Accessed: 2023-11-08).
Ostler, Jeffrey (2019): Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States From the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Orentlicher, Diane (2007): Genocide. In: Gutman, Roy, et al Crimes of War 2.0, 2007, 195. New York & London: W.W. Norton.
Smith, R. Jeffrey. Srebrenica massacre. Encyclopedia Britannica 04/29/2023, <https://www.britannica.com/event/Srebrenica-massacre> (Accessed: 2023-08-07).
Orentlicher, Diane (2007), op. cit., 194.
Plokhy, Serhii (2021): The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine's Past and Present, 103. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.