Stalin's Genocides (15 page)

Finally, I would like to return to the question of comparing Nazi and Soviet crimes of mass killing prompted by Conquest’s unforgettable image of Belsen and the Ukrainian famine. In Paul Hollander’s introduction to the vol-ume
From the Gulag to the Killing Fields
, a compendium of personal accounts of victims of repression in communist states, he suggests that while both Stalinist and Nazi mass 126

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killings could be classified under the rubric of genocide, he is not ready to allow them “moral equivalence.”11 One of the reasons, he opines, is that “Communist states did not attempt to eradicate, in a premeditated, systematic, and mechanized fashion, any particular ethnic group or class of people.” The second reason is that “Communist regimes, unlike the Nazis, did not seek to murder children.” The third is that Nazi racial categories were immutable, an “inescapable death sentence” for the victims of the Holocaust, the Jews, while Soviet categories constantly shifted and changed according to the leadership’s particular needs at any given time.

Without seeking in any way to lessen the horrors of the Holocaust or of Nazi crimes against gypsies (Roma and Sinti), homosexuals, Poles, Russians, particularly Soviet POWs, or others, I would suggest that the history of genocide in Stalinist Russia and the Third Reich provides more material for similarity than for difference in Hollander’s categories of comparison.12 Dekulakization and the Ukrainian famine surely should be seen in turn as attempts by the Stalinist government to eliminate “a class of people”

and anyone who seemed to support them. The Chechens and Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, and other “punished peoples” of the wartime period were, indeed, slated for elimination, if not physically, then as self-identifying nationalities. While there is no question that the Nazis intended to eliminate the Jews, it is also true that substantial numbers were able to emigrate from Germany and Austria before the attack on Poland in 1939. As has been well established, the systematic elimination of the Jews was precipi-the crimes of stalin and hitler 127

tated in the main by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

It is interesting that both Courtois and Hollander point to the fate of children as, in one case, indicating the com-monalities and, in the other, the distinctions between the fate of victims of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. A review of the Russian publication
Deti GULAGa
(Children of the Gulag), which documents the Soviet regime’s treatment of the children of those designated as “enemies of the people,” should leave few illusions about the horrendous fate of the offspring of the millions of fathers and mothers who were executed or deported to the camps.13 Except for their periodic convictions in a number of categories of criminal offenses, some blatantly political, minors were usually not executed by the Soviet regime. But children of the “repressed” population were highly susceptible to disease, hunger, exposure, and various forms of exploitation while in transport, in “special settlements,” in orphanages, and in work camps. They were often forcibly separated from their parents and then disappeared into the NKVD orphanages, which were often little better than prisons and work camps themselves. This
is
different from the fearsome Nazi elimination of Jewish children in the death camps and at thousands of sites of mass murder across Eastern Europe and Russia. In this sense, Courtois is wrong and Hollander is right.14 But the agony and untimely deaths of children under the Stalinist regime should not be forgotten. The mortality rates of children are hard to quantify, since so many never made it to term or died soon after birth because of the horrid conditions 128

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of their mothers’ “repression” and internment, but surely infanticide also should be included in an indictment of the Stalinist regime. The indifference of the Stalinist leadership to the suffering of children should not be eliminated from our consideration of Soviet crimes.

Hollander also focuses on the importance of the “immutability” of Nazi racial categories, while Soviet designations of the “enemy” changed depending on the time and circumstances and thus did not constitute the “inescapable death sentence” that was faced by the Jews. In the case of alleged “kulaks,” Volga Germans or Chechens during the war, and Poles before the amnesty of July 1941, there were similar elements of “immutability” in their situations. If the Soviet regime did not pronounce death sentences on all their numbers, they were forced to live under the imminent threat of dying. At the same time, it is worth noting that thousands of Jews married to Gentiles did survive the war in Germany, and there were several thousand Jews serving in the Wehrmacht, almost until the end, just as some kulaks in the Gulag were allowed to join the Red Army’s defense of the homeland, though most often in special punishment battalions. Moreover, Nazi racial designations about Slavs were highly confused and inconsistently applied. Himmler selected Polish children for “reclaiming” by the German race because they had blond hair and blue eyes and “looked” German; in many cases, Nazi categories of race were no more systematic than this. Meanwhile, the Soviets deported every single Chechen and Ingush they could find, nearly half a million the crimes of stalin and hitler 129

people, whether serving with distinction in the Red Army or occupying an important party post in Moscow. They could do so because the nationality of Soviet citizens was systematically registered by the internal passport system.

Both totalitarian killers—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—were perpetrators of genocide, the “crime of crimes.” Even with the fall of the Soviet Union, we know much more about the Nazi crimes than we do about the Soviet ones, about those who conceived and ordered them, those who carried them out, and those who suffered and died as a consequence. The crucial issue of intentionality and criminal culpability in the Soviet case can only be answered definitively when we have full access to Russian archives. But we know enough now to make the case that both systems—Stalinist and Nazi—were genocidal by their very character, meaning that their distinct combina-tions of charismatic leaders (in a Weberian sense), dic-tatorial powers, ideological motivations, and Promethean transformative aspirations, led them to use the mass killing of groups of their own citizens (and others) as a way to achieve the impossible future that defined their very essence.

Hitler’s often-repeated prophecy that the Jews would pay if they brought about a world war against the Third Reich has been justifiably discarded as the real reason for his genocidal attack against the Jews. Though the claim had more of a base in fact, Stalin’s frequent invocations of foreign attacks on the Soviet Union are taken more seriously by historians than they should be as a cause for the 130

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mass killing of the 1930s. In both cases, mass murder was systemic, while intimately linked to the particular psy-chologies of the leaders involved.

With the death of Hitler and the collapse of the Third Reich, the German state ceased to be a genocidal threat altogether. A new state emerged out of the ashes of the Nazi catastrophe and the strictures of Allied occupation, one that consciously and determinedly turned its back on its twentieth-century history of war and genocide.15 With the death of Stalin, many of the fundamentals of the system remained, but the threat of genocide in the Soviet Union quickly dissipated. The Soviet system frightened itself with its capacity for killing masses of its own citizens. Khrushchev and his successors continued the practice of intern-ing political opponents but rejected the Stalinist urge to kill them or others for their alleged or real opposition.

Conclusions

The Soviet regime under Stalin decimated its own population. Because of the availability of NKVD data, as flawed as they might be, the numerical losses are easier to summarize than the costs of Stalinism to society and the country as a whole, which is such a deep, difficult, and elusive subject that few scholars have dared to take it on. Using the NKVD figures, between the early 1930s and 1953 some 1.1–1.2 million Soviet citizens were executed, three quarters during the period 1937–38. Some 6 million Soviet citizens were deported to the special settlements; 1.5 million (25 percent) experienced an “untimely death.”

During that period, as well, 16 to 17 million Soviet citizens were imprisoned in forced labor, 3 million of them convicted of “counterrevolutionary” activities. Ten percent of labor camp victims perished in untimely fashion.1

These figures do not include the 3–5 million of victims of the Ukrainian famine or of the massacres and executions of Poles, Baltic peoples, peasants who resisted collectivization, and nationalities who fought their deportations. Nor do they include those who died in transport to the special 132

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settlements and labor camps or were killed or died during preliminary investigations, detention, and interrogations.

This brief study has made the case that Stalin was the crucial figure in any calculus of mass killing and that genocide is the appropriate appellation for that killing.

Perhaps the most useful way to end the book is to summarize the major points of this argument.

1. The origins of the term “genocide” in the writings of Raphael Lemkin and the development of the 1948 U.N.

convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide do not preclude using the term to identify political and social groups as victims of genocide. Lemkin himself originally had this in mind in his work during the 1930s.

Original drafts of the U.N. convention also mentioned the centrality of political and social groups. In the end, however, the Soviet Union exerted a powerful political influence on the making of the U.N. convention, to the point where one can claim that the exclusion of social and political groups should not be honored in rigid fashion. The subsequent development of international law in connection with the prosecution of genocide also leads to a more flexible use of the term for the “crime of crimes.” After 1991

the Baltic nations, in particular, have applied international legal precedents to the Soviet case, indicting—and in some cases convicting—former Soviet officials of genocide.

2. Stalin was not born or raised to be a mass killer. His upbringing in the Caucasus and Georgia cannot explain the extreme violence that later characterized his rule over conclusions 133

the Soviet system. He became a genocidaire over time, and there were a number of important moments in that personal evolution, from his difficult family background and youth in Georgia, to his involvement in the revolutionary movement, his attachment to Lenin and Bolshevism, his experiences in the underground and in exile, his role in the revolution and especially in the Civil War, which pre-saged in some ways what came later, and his involvement in the struggle for power in the 1920s. Even the blood spilled in the collectivization campaign in the early 1930s contributed to the growing acceptance of mass killing by Stalin and his lieutenants. The cumulative effect of his biography and personality created in him a fierce anger and resentment of those who stood in his way and could be seen as criticizing his achievements. Once he launched unionwide programs of industrialization and collectivization, their inevitable failures were blamed on entire groups of the population with the same hatred and vindictiveness he harbored for his political opponents.

3. Dekulakization can be looked at as genocidal. During the collectivization campaign Stalin and the Soviet regime demonized the alleged social group known and identified as kulaks. They were set off from the rest of the peasant population as “enemies of the people” and were slated to be wiped out as a group. Their status was deemed inheritable, and their official portrayal was that of being less than human. Several tens of thousands were shot on the orders of troikas set up to try alleged resisters. The rest were removed from their lands and sent off to barely 134

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inhabitable territory in the Far North and Siberia. There, in special settlements, many hundreds of thousands died of hunger, exposure, overwork, and disease.

4. A final wave of dekulakization in 1937–38 over-lapped with a general effort on the part of Stalin and the regime to do away with those groups designated as socially “alien” people—vagrants, criminals, the homeless, prostitutes, the chronically unemployed, ex-kulaks, former landlords, and imperial government servants—who did not belong in a perfectible state, the socialist USSR.

They were to be quarantined from the “healthy” corpus of Soviet citizens and eliminated from the body politic.

The murderous campaign against these supposed enemies can be linked to the promulgation of the Soviet constitution in 1936, trumpeting the achievement of socialism, and the election campaign to the Supreme Soviet, which was to confirm this victory at the ballot box. The infamous Order 00447 contained quotas of people to be summarily tried and executed. Others would be exiled to the special settlements, where many died. This can be considered a particular kind of genocide: of an identifiable group of social “others,” who did not fit into Stalin’s conception of the future Soviet socialist society.

5. The Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide. There is enough evidence—if not overwhelming evidence—to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants knew that the widespread famine in the USSR

in 1932–33 hit Ukraine particularly hard, and that they were ready to see millions of Ukrainian peasants die as a result. They made no efforts to provide relief; they pre-conclusions 135

vented the peasants from seeking food themselves in the cities or elsewhere in the USSR; and they refused to relax restrictions on grain deliveries until it was too late. Stalin’s hostility to the Ukrainians and their attempts to maintain their form of “home rule” as well as his anger that Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivization fueled the killer famine.

6. The attack on certain “enemy” nationalities in some cases took on genocidal characteristics. Early in the 1930s those nationalities that had ostensible homelands abroad—the Poles, Germans, and Koreans in particular—