At some point, even the people who have actually immersed themselves in the history of mass killings like these must wonder if “genocide” (defined broadly) isn’t something that happens in some way in all wars. In which case, it loses much if not all of its meaning as a particularly horrific and distinct kind of act. And when we designate the forced relocation of significant numbers of people as an act constituting genocide, then that opens many cans of (polemical) worms.
The Soviet government deported the Crimean Tatars in 1944, “as the entire nation was accused of collaborating with the Germans.”1 Around 200,000 Tatars were deported to Uzbekistan and other locations far away from Ukraine.2 There is a real current question about Russia forcibly relocating Ukrainian children into Russia.3
The Allied agreements ending-World War II authorized relocations of significant groups of people. Mass numbers of Germans were forcibly ejected from Poland and Czechoslovakia after the war’s end, a favorite cause of German revanchists and far-right zealots for decades. I don’t even want to think about the kind of poisonous polemics a broad public debate today about that latter set event would involve.
By today’s standards those Allied-endorsed massive population movements could be at least superficially argued to be deliberate acts of genocide. That would add a whole new layer of complexity to the discussion of that period.
I’ll add that German historians and journalists in over the decades and particularly after 1989 did revisit the immediate postwar expulsions of Germans and tried to give realistic accounts of what happened as Europe was reinventing itself then. Sudden mass deportations are consistently deadly. Gerhard Ziemer, for instance, estimated that 2.3 million German civilians died in that postwar transfer.4
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.
But it seems inevitable that as more actions and particular events that are assumed to fall into the category of genocide, the use of the term loses some of its shock value. And its meaning in general understanding becomes diluted. As Nicolas Dreyer wrote in 2018:
The rhetorical paradigm of “genocide” in this [Russia-Ukraine] conflict seems to exemplify something that the historian Eric Hobsbawm observed about the proliferation of this term. Hobsbawm wrote that the term has become “overused” and has “therefore lost some of its meaning, a little like what happened to the word fascism.” Hobsbawm also argues that a clear analytical distinction between “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” ought to be maintained.5
Dreyer notes that Russia was also accusing Ukraine of attempting “genocide” against Russian-speakers in Ukraine. He notes that on the Ukrainian side:
… the rhetoric there has been significantly different from the Russian discourse. Even though there have been individual accusations of genocide being perpetrated by Russia and Russian-supported separatists in the conflict, the Ukrainian discourse has emphasized the relevance of the Holodomor far more and to a lesser extent the deportation of the Crimean Tatars.6[6]
He notes that the government of Ukraine’s then-President Petro Poroshenko:
… places emphasis on framing the Tatar deportation of 1944 as “genocide.” Ukraine declares the deportation to have been a genocide committed by the “Kremlin” …
[A] Ukrainian press report of June 2018 claimed that Russian was conducting a policy of changing the ethnic setup of the Crimea by forcing Tatars to leave and by settling Russian citizens instead. It was entitled: “Putin repeating [sic!] Stalin’s genocide with ‘new hybrid deportation of Crimean Tatars’.”
Holodomor and genocide considerations
Since Raphael Lemkin developed the concept of genocide, it’s certainly worth noting that he considered the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine a genocide. He called it “perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification.”7
But it’s also notable in the first paragraph of his paper on the issue, Lemkin characterizes it as something like inherently Russian behavior:
The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy of expansionism, it is not an innovation devised simply to bring uniformity out of the diversity of Poles, Hungarians, Balts, Romanians — presently disappearing into the fringes of their empire. Instead, it has been a long-term characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin — one which the present masters had ample precedent for in the operations of Tsarist Russia. [my emphasis]
Anne Applebaum’s analytical framework in her account seems to generally follow the model that Lemkin sketched out in his 1953 paper. But the parts about Ukraine are also broad descriptions and the paper is obviously to brief to describe many details in a specific definition of the 1932-33 famine as a case of genocide. He also seems to consider “Soviet” as synonymous with Russia, though Russia itself was the largest but not the only republic in the USSR. Stalin himself, head of the USSR in 1932-33, was Georgian, not Russian.
But it’s striking that Lemkin describes the Soviet policy of 1939-53 as being characterized by “mass murder of peoples and of nations.” It was 1953 and the Cold War was already in full swing. But even by those standards, Lemkin was painting with a very broad brush there. It’s worth noting all these decades later that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia all still exist.
AA also seems to share some of Lemkin’s 1953 of radical continuity in Russian history: “Eighty years later, it is possible to hear the echo of Stalin's fear of Ukraine - or rather his fear of unrest spreading from Ukraine to Russia - in the present too.” (p. 365)
But Lemkin’s paper itself was a short 4 1/2 pages. Arch Getty observes:
I am surprised that my colleagues continue to drag poor Lemkin into the matter. He was writing some seventy-five years ago [from 2018] without access to a fraction of the documentation we have today. Faced with amass of documents on Stalinist repression, surely we can do better than to worry about his observations, or the United Nations or Nuremberg definitions for that matter. Their definitions were important in their day, but to try to jam a mass of new evidence we have barely started to exploit into their categories appears to me to be a strange and fruitless exercise. The world and its savage history have become more complicated since then; there is tragically a greater number and variety of mass deaths in many places.8
Like with other crimes, motive is important in judging genocide. Motive does not require explicit official declarations of intent to commit genocide. Although such overt declared intent isn’t always present, Applebaum describes how explicitly the German intentions were declared when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and occupied Ukraine:
Hitler had long claimed that 'the occupation of Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry', and that Ukrainian territory would ensure 'no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war'. Since the late 1930s his government had been planning to transform that aspiration into reality. Herbert Backe, the sinister Nazi official in charge of food and agriculture, conceived a 'Hunger Plan' whose goals were straightforward: 'the war can only be won if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war'. But he also concluded that the entire Wehrmacht, as well as Germany itself, could only be fed if the Soviet population were completely deprived of food. (p. 329) [my emphasis]
But then she adds in purely polemical fashion: “This was Stalin's policy, multiplied many times: the elimination of whole nations through starvation.” (p. 329)
This may be standard in eastern-European style foreign policy talk. But this wording suggests without saying so directly that Hitler got the idea from Stalin, a line of argument that doesn’t have a distinguished history.9
Serhii Plokhy stops short of accepting the genocide label, noting the definitional issues. He summarizes it this way:
But a broad consensus is also emerging on some of the crucial facts and interpretations of the 1932-1933 famine. Most scholars agree that it was indeed a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy; while it also affected the North Caucasus, the lower Volga region, and Kazakhstan, only in Ukraine did it result from policies with clear ethnonational coloration: it came in the wake of Stalin's decision to terminate the Ukrainization policy [that promoted Ukrainian language and culture] and in conjunction with an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres. The famine left Ukrainian society severely traumatized, crushing its capacity for open resistance to the regime for generations to come.10 [my emphasis]
Plokhy, Serhii (2021): The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, 298. New York: Basic Books.
Deportation of the Crimean Tatars. Wikipedia 07/15/2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars&oldid=1165552593> (Accessed: 2023-11-08).
Ioffe, Julia (2023): Forcibly Transferring Ukrainian Children to the Russian Federation: A Genocide? Journal of Genocide Research 07/10/2023. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2023.2228085> (Accessed: 2023-11-08).
Naimark, Norman (1995): The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, 148. Cambridge MA & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Dreyer, Nicolas (2018): Genocide, Holodomor and Holocaust Discourse as Echo of Historical Injury and as Rhetorical Radicalization in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict of 2013–18. Journal of Genocide Research 20:4, 551. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2018.1528740> (Accessed: 2023-11-08).
Ibid., 553-4.
Lemkin, Raphael (1953): Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine. Internet Archive. <https://web.archive.org/web/20120302234607/http://www.uccla.ca/SOVIET_GENOCIDE_IN_THE_UKRAINE.pdf> (Accessed: 08-07-2023).
Arch, Getty J. (2018): New Sources and Old Narratives. Contemporary European History 27:3, 451. <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777318000322>. (Accessed: 2023-21-07).
Evans, Richard (1987): The New Nationalism and the Old History: Perspectives on the West German Historikerstreit. Journal of Modern History 59:4, 765. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1879952> (Accessed: 2023-09-07-2023).)
See also on Applebaum: Lazare, Daniel (2016): Ernst Nolte’s Revenge. Jacobin 10/18/2016. <https://jacobin.com/2016/10/ernst-nolte-stalin-hitler-fascism-historikerstreit> (Accessed: 2023-23-06).
Plokhy, Serhii (2021): The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, 254. New York: Basic Books.