"Trumpers" are their kulaks
Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010), argues that the world needs a much broader definition of genocide that includes nations killing social classes and political groups.
Case in point: Stalin, perpetrator of the multiple examples behind the book’s plural title.
The Soviet elimination of a social class, the kulaks (higher-income farmers), the subsequent killer famine among Ukrainian peasants, and the notorious 1937 order that called for the mass execution and exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people” were, in fact, genocide.
“I make the argument that these matters shouldn’t be seen as discrete episodes, but seen together,” says author Norman Naimark, an authority on the Soviet regime. “It’s a horrific case of genocide—the purposeful elimination of all or part of a social group, a political group.”
Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the 1930s. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin’s henchmen.
“In some cases, a quota was established for the number to be executed, the number to be arrested,” says Naimark. “Some officials over-fulfilled as a way of showing their exuberance.”
Genocide was defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The convention’s work was shaped by the Holocaust, says Naimark. “A catastrophe had just happened, and everyone was still thinking about the war that had just ended. This always occurs with international law—they outlaw what happened in the immediate past, not what’s going to happen in the future.”
Both Hitler and Stalin, Naimark says, “chewed up the lives of human beings in the name of a transformative vision of Utopia. Both destroyed their countries and societies, as well as vast numbers of people inside and outside their own states. Both, in the end, were genocidists.”
All early drafts of the U.N. convention included social and political groups in the definition of genocide. But the pen was guided by one hand that wasn’t in the room.
The Soviet delegation vetoed any definition of genocide that might include the actions of its leader, Josef Stalin. And the Allies, exhausted by war, deferred to their Soviet comrades—to the detriment of subsequent generations.
Naimark argues that the narrow definition of genocide is the dictator’s unacknowledged legacy to us today.
Accounts “gloss over the genocidal character of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, which killed systematically rather than episodically,” says Naimark. In the process of collectivization, for example, thirty thousand kulaks were killed directly, mostly shot on the spot. About 2 million were forcibly deported to the Far North and Siberia.
They were called “enemies of the people,” as well as swine, dogs, cockroaches, scum, vermin, filth, garbage, half animals, apes. Activists promoted murderous slogans: “We will exile the kulak by the thousand when necessary—shoot the kulak breed. . . . We will make soap of kulaks. . . . Our class enemies must be wiped off the face of the earth.”
One Soviet report noted that gangs “drove the kulaks naked in the streets, beat them, organized drinking bouts in their houses, shot over their heads, forced them to dig their own graves, undressed women and searched them, stole valuables, money, etc.”
The destruction of the kulaks triggered the Ukrainian famine, during which 3 million to 5 million peasants died of starvation.
“There is a great deal of evidence of government connivance in the circumstances that brought on the shortage of grain and bad harvests in the first place and made it impossible for Ukrainians to find food for their survival,” Naimark writes.
We will never know how many millions Stalin killed. “And yet somehow Stalin gets a pass,” Ian Frazier wrote in a bout the gulags. “People know he was horrible, but he has not been declared horrible officially.”
Time magazine put Stalin on its cover eleven times.
There’s a reason for this obliviousness. “A vast network of organizations had to be mobilized to seize and kill that many people,” Naimark writes, estimating that tens of thousands were accomplices.
“How much can you move on? Can you put it in your past? How is a national identity formed when a central part of it is a crime?” Naimark asks. “The Germans have gone about it the right way,” he says, pointing out that Germany has pioneered research about the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime. “Through denial and obfuscation, the left have gone about it the wrong way.”
Without a full examination of the past, Naimark says, it’s too easy for it to happen again.
Toward the end of his life, Stalin may have been preparing another genocide.
We’ll never know whether the concocted conspiracy of "Jewish Kremlin doctors" in 1952 would have resulted in the internal exile of the entire Jewish population. Whatever plans existed ended abruptly with Stalin’s death in March 1953, as rumors of Jewish deportations were swirling.
One of Stalin’s colleagues recalled the dictator reviewing an arrest list (really a death list) and muttering to himself: “Who’s going to remember all this riffraff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one. . . . Who remembers the names now of the boyars Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one. . . . The people had to know he was getting rid of all his enemies. In the end, they all got what they deserved.”
https://www.hoover.org/research/stalins-genocides
