Stalin's Genocides, by Norman M. Naimark

Abstract

In a fitting inversion of his notorious personality cult, Joseph Stalin has been vilified with an array of explosive epithets since 1956—from tyrant and autocrat to despot and dictator. Norman Naimark now argues that ‘genocidaire’ ought to be added to this list. Naimark makes his case by beginning with a brief survey of the historical origins of the term ‘genocide’, followed by an equally brief character sketch of Stalin himself. He then offers a series of case-studies on the USSR's experience with collectivisation, the 1932–3 ‘Holodomor’ terror famine, Soviet ethnic cleansing and the 1936–8 Great Terror—as examples of what Naimark terms Stalin's genocides. He concludes the book with a comparison of Stalin to the twentieth century's most famous genocidaire, Adolf Hitler. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Naimark's discussion of the term ‘genocide’, which was coined by the Polish-Jewish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in 1944. As is well known, Lemkin had been attempting since the early 1930s to establish a new category of international crime against humanity that he initially called ‘barbarism’ to express the organised attempt to annihilate completely an entire racial, religious or societal group. Importantly, by 1944, Lemkin had not only devised a new name for this category of crime, but had also narrowed his definition to focus on the destruction of national communities (Axis Rule in Occupied Europe [1944], p. 79). In the wake of the Second World War, the United Nations moved to outlaw genocide and debated whether to accept Lemkin's definition (which was clearly influenced by his perspective on the Jewish experience in the Holocaust) or expand it to cover other forms of mass destruction, from the deliberate elimination of religious and political groups to the annihilation of ‘national-cultural’ sites, artefacts and practices. In the end, the United Nations General Assembly settled on a definition which focused on attempts to destroy national, ethnic, racial and religious groups after a number of governments, including those of Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, South Africa and the Soviet Union, blocked the inclusion of political groups in the landmark convention of 9 December 1948 (pp. 22–3).