Abstract
In the introduction to one of his classic works The Harvest of Sorrow, on collectivization and the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933, Robert Conquest wrote:
Fifty years ago, as I write these words, the Ukraine and the Ukrainian, Cossack, and other areas to the east—a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants—was like one vast Belsen. A quarter of the rural population, men, women, and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbours. At the same time, (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.1
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Notes
Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, 1986), p. 3.
Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, et al., eds., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 9.
Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York, 2000), p. xii.
Richard Evens, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians’ Attempts to Escape from the Nazi Past (London, 1989), p. 88.
The ghettos “were considered temporary means of segregating the Jewish population before its expulsion.” Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945 (New York, 2007), p. 38.
See my discussion of comparison in Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 81–84.
For the “crime of crimes,” see William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: the Crimes of Crimes (Cambridge, 2000), p. 9.
See, for example, Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2005), p. 17, and
Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (London, 2007), pp. 316–20.
See especially Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, 2003), p. 100–01.
See, for example, Bernd Bonwetsch, “Der GULAG und die Frage des Völkermords,” in Jörg Baberowski, ed., Moderne Zeiten? Krieg, Revolution und Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, Germany, 2006), p. 9.
Cited in Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (NewYork, 2002), p. 521, n. 6. Much of the material here on the history of genocide comes from Power and from my article,
Norman M. Naimark, “Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide,” Telos, no. 136 (Fall 2006): 10–25.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C., 1944), p. 79.
Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History (New York, 2005), pp. 59–61. General Nikitchenko was first a prosecutor and then “a hanging judge” at Nuremberg. See Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York, 1007), pp. 432–33.
Nehemiah Robinson, The Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York, 1960), pp. 17–18. See Resolution 96 (I) in Appendix I of ibid., pp. 121–122. My emphasis.
See A. N. Trainin, “Bor’ba s genotsidom kak mezhdunarodnym prestupleniem,” Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo, no. 5 (May 1948): 1–16; and
M. N. Andriukhin, Genotsidtiagchashee prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva (Moscow, 1961), pp. 72–93.
Jörg Baberowski, Der Rote Terror: Die Geschichte des Stalinismus (Munich, 2003), p. 126.
Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, vol. I (The Meaning of Genocide) (London, 2005), p. 80.
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans Vadim A. Staklo (New Haven, CT, 2004), pp. 140, 166.
See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York, 1990), pp. 484–89.
Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History. 70, no. 4 (December 1998): 857.
Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin: Profiles in Power (Harlow, UK, 2005), p. 103. Davis and Wheatcroft, as well as Michael Ellman, cited in footnote 25, deal in lower numbers. For example, Ellman uses the figure of 3.2 million who died in Ukraine.
Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet famine of 1932–33 Revisited,” Europe-Asia Studies, 59:4 (2007): p. 682, n. 30.
Nicholas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” Henry Russo, ed., Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, trans. Lucy B. Golsan, et al., (Lincoln, NE, 2004), p. 80.
Cited in Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001), p. 301.
See Norman M. Naimark, “Srebrenica in the History of Genocide,” to be published in the series Memory and Narrative, eds. Mary Chamberlain and Selma Leydesdorff (New Brunswick, NJ, 2008).
On Lenin, see the introduction to Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven, CT, 1996), pp. 1, 8, 11. Pipes emphasizes that Lenin was a “heartless cynic,” “a thoroughgoing misanthrope,” and had an “utter disregard for human life.” He also cites Molotov’s assertion that Lenin was “more severe” than Stalin.
Baberowski, Der Rote Terror, pp. 8–10. See also Jörg Baberowski, ed. Moderne Zeiten? Krieg, Revolution und Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, Germany, 2006), p. 9, and
Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Ordnung durch Terror: Gewaltexzesse und Vernichtung im nationalsozialistischen und im stalinistischen Imperium (Bonn, Germany, 2006), pp. 15–19.
Paul Hollander, ed., From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (Wilmington, DE, 2006), pp. 20–24.
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Naimark, N.M. (2008). Stalin and the Question of Soviet Genocide. In: Hollander, P. (eds) Political Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616240_3
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