Skow, Kate. “Stalinist Russia and the Holodomor in 1932: widening the definition of genocide.” (Genocide, UC Davis, Summer 2013). Under Stalin’s rule, much of the Soviet population was annihilated by its own government. The state’s categorizing of the nation, forced famine in Ukraine, and population purges lead to millions of deaths based on classifications made by the Russian government. If you expand the definition presented in the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, and consider instead the original definition presented by Raphael Lemkin, Stalinist Russia, and specifically the Holodomor in 1932, is genocide. Raphael Lemkin is responsible for coining the term ‘genocide’ which would eventually become the UN Convention on Genocide. This states that genocide is defined as crimes committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” U.N. General Assembly, 3rd Session, “Resolution 260 (III) [Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide],” 9 December 1948. Its specific language is both rigid and broad when it comes to defining genocide. But before genocide, Lemkin also defined ‘barbarism’ which was the extermination of a “racial, religious, or social collectivity.” Norman A. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011): 15. It seems as though Lemkin, when presenting his definition of genocide to the United Nations, was trying to particularly emphasize Nazi crimes after World War II, and so omitted crimes against social or political collectives. The Soviet Union was allied with the United States; if a proposed definition for genocide included any allusion to crimes committed by a member of the Allied powers, it would instigate trouble in the international community. However, Lemkin advocated that his own definition be kept open for interpretation, and that the concept of genocide could be seen as fluid depending on context. And by using his original, much broader definition, the one he first intended, Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union can be considered genocide, which Lemkin himself believed it was. Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide’,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 551. The Stalinist Regime in the Soviet Union lasted from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. Josef Stalin believed in the tenets of Marxism and Leninism, and his own ascent to power morphed their ideologies into one that was uniquely different, which became Stalinism. The basis of all three of these policies was to develop a communist society, therefore eliminating class conflict and the bourgeoisie. However, Stalin’s Russia deviates significantly from Marxism and Leninism. The Communist Revolution was thought to come to an industrialized, modern nation and spread throughout the world, yet Russia was far behind the rest of Europe in their development, and they soon adopted the plan of ‘socialism in one country.’ Stalin implemented policies after the Russian Revolutions, in order to bring rapid industrialization, a centralized state, and collectivization of agriculture to Russia. The subordination of interests of other Communist parties to those of the Soviet party kept him in charge. T. B. Bottomore, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991): 518. He developed a ‘cult of personality’ similar to authoritarian rulers like the Fuehrer of Nazi Germany or Il Duce of Fascist Italy, which grew to “utterly grotesque dimensions” as he wielded absolute power. Ibid. Through this absolute power, Stalin controlled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century and a consequence of his regime was genocide. Josef Stalin’s beginnings set him on the path to leadership, even early on. He was born December 21, 1879 in Gori, Georgia, the son of a poor cobbler, a member of the lower class of tsarist society, and had revolutionary interests at a young age. Ibid., 516. After leaving school, he became a “professional revolutionary” and was frequently arrested, imprisoned, and exiled for his involvement with the Social-Democratic movement, primarily identifying himself with Lenin and Bolshevism. He moved steadily up the political ladder until eventually, at 50 years old, he was the absolute leader of the Soviet party and state. He brought Russia into the twentieth century and destroyed those who stood in the way of the Soviet Union. He was “feared and admired” Ibid. as a leader, and the only major totalitarian leader to remain in office until his death. He sought to establish total communism in Russia, but to eliminate class conflict, Stalin eventually eliminated the members of the classes. Even before Stalin, there were practices that would remain through his rule that forsake human rights for a utopic, socialist Russia. The Soviet Union formed in 1922 when both the Russian Empire and the Russian Provisional Government were overthrown by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolutions and civil war. The Soviet Union was the result of the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian Republics. Ostensibly, the USSR was a single-party state, governed by the Communist Party. Russia was to become a “modern nation” and “fully urbanized society” supported by collectivized agriculture. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 55-56. However, Stalinism’s “open advocacy of violence and terror” Ibid., 63. as legitimate means to achieving a socialist utopia morphed what was initially communism into something else entirely. Stalin’s regime eventually repressed and destroyed mass amounts of the population through his authoritarian rule. This repression began with the Bolsheviks’ need to categorize the nation, and would continue during Stalin’s tenure. The Bolsheviks had a severe sense of isolation internationally and domestically, and because of this, were prone to identify both “the friends and the enemies” Ibid., 64. of the party. The Soviet Party classified its population obsessively in terms of class, nationality, and politics. The working class proletarians were given full citizenship rights, although these rights were extended to certain party members even of noble origins. The class distinctions were muddled at best, and were clearly never objective. Unfortunately, by choosing to make so many distinctions, it was easy for citizens to fall into an undesirable category, which were hardly fixed and could change depending on decisions like relocation or marriage. The peasants were further classified into one of three groups: beredniak (poor), seredniak (middle), and kulak (wealthy). The government was particularly interested in the kulaks, who, while the most economically prosperous for the regime, were also considered an “antisocialist” force. Ibid., 65. It was the kulaks that Stalin would target as the victims of his genocide, and specifically those in Ukraine would suffer with the Holodomor of 1932. The kulaks in Ukraine were suspected of specifically providing the basis for Ukrainian nationalism, and consequently the Soviets punished them to eliminate any ideas of separatism. Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Ukraine and Russia in the 1930s,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18, no. 3 (1994): 327. While Russia was hostile of kulaks in general, ethnicity did seem to play a part in the man-made famine. The collective farms were not meeting Moscow’s productivity standards, so the government deprived the peasantry of grain. With the farms under-producing and the government exporting what grain they did produce, the Soviet Union’s own population began to starve. They sought food in the north but were detained due to Stalin’s suspicions that the migration was organized by government enemies, not famished civilians. The border out of Ukraine was closed, and eventually, it is estimated that around 3.5 million people died. Jacques Vallin, France Mesle, Serguei Adamets, Serhiy Pyrozhkov, “The Great Famine: population losses in Ukraine,” Demography and Social Economy 2, no. 12 (2009): 3. The beginnings of this forced famine are actually in the 1920s, with the Bolsheviks and Stalin’s rapid industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and the dekulakization of the Soviet Union. The government believed only the violent removal of the upper peasantry would allow them to take control of the grain supply. Thus, the elaborate forcible requisitioning of the peasants’ grain began. By 1931, the state was collecting 45 percent of the entire harvest, and the peasants were “bereft of food supplies.” Naimark, 71. Stalin saw the famine as a way to eliminate the Ukrainian kulaks who were “doubly suspect” because they were “hopelessly backward” Ibid., 72. as both peasants and Ukrainians. Additionally, he seemingly did not care when local authorities informed him of the massive death count; he argued that “idlers”–those who did not work, or were perhaps unable to work–deserved to starve. Ibid., 73. Peasants found trying to escape Ukraine were either sent back, and so were condemned to die, or to the Gulag: labor camps for prisoners of war and internal exiles including kulaks and deported ethnic minorities, which also resulted in death. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (New York City: Doubleday, 2003): 579-580. Authorities would remove bodies from the streets, and therefore public view, and refuse outside offers of food relief. The very existence of a famine was denied; if it was ever mentioned, it was seen as merely a crisis and those in charge of the requisitioning, including Stalin, expressly blamed the Ukrainians. Naimark, 74. But the Ukrainians were not at fault. The government kept large reserves of grain and exported substantially to continue funding industrialization, instead of feeding their own people. However, it was not simply aspirations of glory for Russia that kept the grain supply low. Moscow specifically targeted the Ukrainian kulaks, both an ethnic and social collective, and this makes it genocide. Even after this forced famine, the death of the Soviet population did not stop. Stalin continued mass atrocity with population purges across the Soviet Union. It began with deportations all across the Soviet Union. Moscow was especially concerned with ‘korenizatsiia,’ indigenization, and particularly, Ukrainianization. Kuromiya, 330. Those who lived on the Western Russian border or even had immigrated to Russia from Ukraine were arrested and considered enemies on simply those bases. The government ordered a “halt” to Ukrainianization, first in Russia, and soon in other parts of the Soviet Union. Stalin believed that the Ukrainians moving were bourgeois-nationalists, bent on destroying his empire. Even “tried and tested” Communists who were from Ukraine were now labeled nationalist, Trotskyites, and even Fascists. Ibid., 330-331. This Great Terror was not only ethnic based; there was, of course, class-based terror. But the terror did seem to target certain ethnicities of the Soviet Union population, in addition to their class distinction. With Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, and the fear of Nazi Germany, German villages were “uncovered and eliminated.” In the western border zone, Germans and Poles especially were deported. In 1937, in Kyiv, there was a “wholesale deportation” of the Chinese, similar to the systematic removal of Koreans. Even in 1944, there were “waves of deportation” of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Karachai, Balkars, Kalmyks, and Meskhetians, as well as eventually Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians. Weitz, 79-80. After the war, rounds of populations purges continued, with more than 90 percent of them members of ethnically defined populations. The ethnic minorities all suffered similar fates because of their origins and ‘foreignness.’ Kuromiya, 331. Stalin was hyper-concerned about foreign enemies, and the possibility of foreign Soviets becoming disloyal to the state. The threat of invasion influenced and, according to him, justified a great deal of his decisions, especially in regards to policies that targeted ethnic minorities. The “rate of extermination” in the Great Purges of 1937 and 1938 were significantly higher of national, rather than social or political, enemies. Naimark, 82-83. Their targets were now definitively changing from class and political to ethnic and national groups. During the 1930s, the oppressed has “shifted from class enemies to ‘enemies of the people,’ a concept that slid easily into ‘enemy nations.’” Weitz, 77. After 1933, there was a transition to predominantly ethnic deportations. It was Stalin’s “generalized xenophobia and pathological fear of losing power” that resulted in forced deportation and persecution of the Soviet population. The deaths would not end until after Stalin’s death in 1953. While isolated incidents had start and end dates within his rule, they, as a whole, did not stop until he was out of power. The targets continued to be deported, sent to labor camps, and killed even after World War II. The Gulag, the government agency who ran the camps, was not dissolved until 1960. The modern industrial cities of Northern Russia were first camps built by the prisoners then used as prisons in the 1970s and 1980s. Applebaum, 3. Stalin’s influence on modern Soviet history is still seen and remembered. Although not a “genocidal regime” as Eric D. Weitz considers Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union did use violence against its own people in pursuit of a larger, idealistic goal for the state. But like Nazi Germany, the Soviet system’s “charismatic leader [and]…ideological motivations 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.” Naimark, 129. Stalin remained in pursuit of the utopic, socialist state throughout his rule, at the cost of the population. Today, Stalinism, and specifically the Holodomor, is subject to debate by some about whether or not it should be considered genocide. Recently, it has become more thoroughly researched and questioned. There is still no official consensus, even among scholars, that it was genocide. Although more evidence always seems to be found, because for more than 50 years, even Ukrainians denied its existence. It is only now that they are focusing on “the tragedy as a key event” in their history. David R. Marples, “Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 3 (2009): 510. But as they talk about it more, so does the scholarly community. More research and articles are being published on both sides of the debate, genocide or not. Some instead coin new terms like ‘classicide’ or ‘politicide’ to implicate Stalin for mass murder, but preserve the UN Convention’s definition. Naimark, 123. The Russian government has ultimately faced no punishment for both the Holodomor specifically and the population purges throughout the Soviet Union during the entirety of Stalin’s rule. But it can’t be ignored that the population as a whole suffered during his time in power, and specifically, the ethnic minorities. Beyond class distinction and the goal of creating a united, socialist Russia, there was clearly some element of xenophobia that drove Stalin to eliminate these parts of the population. It is perhaps not as clearly defined as other genocide, like Nazi Germany, but the destruction of your own population, what Stalin did, should be considered such. If you stretch beyond the rigid UN Convention definition of genocide, and instead consider Raphael Lemkin’s first definition, there is no trouble considering Stalin’s regime as genocide. This regime categorized the nation, which pointed out ‘undesirables’ of the state; in the case of the Soviet Union, it was the kulaks, the so-called wealthy peasantry. Once classified, Stalin targeted Ukrainian kulaks specifically, as he was terrified of a separatist revolution, with a man-made forced famine: the Holodomor of 1932, which resulted in possibly 3.5 million deaths. But, even after that, Stalin continued with population purges of ethnic minorities in pursuit of his ideal socialist state. He did not lose power until his death in 1953. And his absolute power resulted in mass casualties of his own population, with specific targets, and thus should be considered genocide.  Works Cited Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps. (New York City: Doubleday, 2003). Bottomore, T. B. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991). Kuromiya, Hiroaki. “Ukraine and Russia in the 1930s.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18, no. 3 (1994). Marples, David R. “Ethnic Issues in the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine.” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 3 (2009). Naimark, Norman A. Stalin’s Genocides. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011). U.N. General Assembly, 3rd Session. “Resolution 260 (III) [Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide].” 9 December 1948. Vallin, Jacques, France Mesle, Serguei Adamets, Serhiy Pyrozhkov. “The Great Famine: population losses in Ukraine.” Demography and Social Economy 2, no. 12 (2009). Weiss-Wendt, Anton. “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide’.” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005). Weitz, Eric D. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003). Skow 9 September 2013 1