Stalin's genocides

Stalin's Genocides

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 1-163

  Naimark, Norman M ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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References (172)

1. Norman Naimark, "Revolution, Stalinismus, und Genozid," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 44-45 (October 27, 2007): 14-20
2. Naimark, "Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide," Telos, no. 136 (Fall 2006): 10-25
3. Naimark, "Stalin and the Question of Soviet Genocide," in Political Violence, Behavior, and Legitimation, ed. Paul Hollander (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 39-49.
4. See, for example, Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe's Edge, trans. William Templar (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), pp. 182-186.
5. Sto sorok besed c Molotovym: Iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow: "Terra," 1991), pp. 390, 416.
6. Alexander N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, trans Anthony Austin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 234.
7. Cited in Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (NewYork: Basic Books, 2002), p. 521, n. 6.
8. Some of the material here on the history of genocide comes from Power and from my essay "Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide," pp. 10-25.
9. See also Amir Weiner, "Nothing but Certainty" (comment on Eric Weitz), Slavic Review 61, 1 (Spring 2002): 45-46.
10. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for Inernational Peace, 1944), p. 79.
11. Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York: Norton, 2000), pp. 150-152.
12. Anton Weiss-Wendt, "Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on 'Soviet Genocide'," Journal of Genocide Research 7, 4 (December 2005): 551-559.
13. Power, A Problem from Hell, p. 51.
14. Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 203.
15. Francine Hirsch, "The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order," American Historical Review (June 2008): 714
16. I owe many of the observations about Nuremberg to Hirsch's research.
17. Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin's Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky, trans. Jan Butler (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), p. 259.
18. New York Times, April 7 and 13, 1948.
19. A. N. Trainin, Bor'ba progressivnykh sil protiv unichtozheniia natisonal'nykh grupp i ras (Moscow: Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo po rasprostraneniiu polit. i nauchn. znanii, 1948), p. 11.
20. Cited in Victor Zaslavsky, Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn (New York: Telos Press, 2009), p. 23.
21. Nehemiah Robinson, The Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1960), pp. 17-18
22. see Resolution 96 (I) in appendix 1, pp. 121-122. My emphasis.
23. "Draft Convention Prepared by the Secretariat." My emphasis.
24. William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 136, n. 219. My emphasis.
25. UN General Assembly, Sixth Committee, Third Session, Sixty-fourth Meeting, October 1, 1948, "Continuation of the Consideration of the Draft Convention on Genocide," pp. 12-19.
26. New York Times, November 19, 1948.
27. M. N. Andriukhin, Genotsid-tiagchaishee prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva (Moscow: Gosud. Izd. Iuridicheskoi literatury, 1961), pp. 85-86.
28. "Report of the Sixth Committee on the Draft Convention on Genocide," December 6, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), vol. 1 (1948), "Human Rights" (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office), p. 298.
29. Schabas, Genocide in International Law, pp. 134-135.
30. See A. N. Trainin, "Bor'ba s genotsidom kak mezhdu-narodnym prestupleniem," Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo, no. 5 (May 1948): 1-16
31. Andriukhin, Genotsid-tiagchashee prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva, pp. 72-93.
32. Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, vol. 1: The Meaning of Genocide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 80.
33. Some of these convictions have been successfully appealed in the European Court of Human Rights.
34. See: Antonio Casses, "Balancing the Prosecution of Crimes against Humanity and Non-Retroactivity of Criminal Law: The Kolk and Kislyiy v. Estonia Case before the ECHR," Journal of International Criminal Justice 4 (2006): 410-418.
35. I take much of this material from the research of Lauri Mälksoo, "Soviet Genocide? Communist Mass Deportations in the Baltic States and International Law," Leiden Journal of International Law, no. 14 (2001): 757-787.
36. See also John B. Quigley, The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis (Derbyshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006).
37. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge 1975-1979, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 460-464.
38. Cited in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1991), p. 310.
39. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 53-60.
40. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend, trans. Priscilla Macmillan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
41. Martin Malia, "The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia," in Stalinism: The Essential Readings, ed. David Hoffmann (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 68.
42. Cited in Ronald G. Suny, "Stalin and the Russian Revolution: From Koba to Commissar," manuscript, chap. 1, p. 17
43. My thanks to Suny for allowing me to read and cite his manuscript.
44. Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 9.
45. This romanticism emerged later in Stalin's ideas of the heroic in mass mobilization. See David Priestland, "Stalin as Bolshevik Romantic: Ideology and Mobilization, 1917-1939," in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 181-201.
46. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin: Profiles in Power (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 8.
47. Suny, "Stalin and the Russian Revolution," chap. 1, p. 19.
48. Miklos Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait (Budapest, CEU Press, 2003), p. 43.
49. Feliks Chuev, Tak govoril Kaganovich: Ispoved' stalinskogo apostola (Moscow, "Otechestva," 1992), p. 81.
50. Norman M. Naimark, "Cold War Studies and New Archival Materials about Stalin," Russian Review 61 (January 2002): 11-15.
51. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), pp. 224-225.
52. On Lenin, see the introduction to Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 1, 8, 11.
53. Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 185.
54. Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-1923 (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), pp. 173-175.
55. Cited in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 295.
56. For analyses of the transcripts of the Politburo meetings, see Paul R. Gregory and Norman Naimark, eds., The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rue to Stalin's Dictatorship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). The Central Committee plenums are available for research in the Hoover Institution archives.
57. Robert C. Tucker, "Foreword," in Stalin's Letters to Molotov: 1925-1936, eds. Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. xii.
58. Stalin to Molotov [no later than September 15, 1930], in Stalin's Letters to Molotov, p. 216.
59. Alfred J. Rieber, "Stalin: Man of the Borderlands," American Historical Review 106, 5 (December 2001): 1.
60. Hiroaki Kuromiya, "Stalin in the Light of the Politburo Transcripts," in The Lost Politburo Transcripts, eds. Gregory and Naimark, p. 45.
61. Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 268.
62. See Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).
63. Cited in Nicolas Werth, "A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union," in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Stephane Courtois et al., trans. Jonathan Murphy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 146.
64. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 85.
65. Cited in Mark Iunge, Rol'f Binner, Kak terror stal "bol'shim": Sekretnyi prikaz No 00447: tekhnologiia ego ispolneniia (Moscow: Airo-XX, 2003), p. 155.
66. Peter Holquist, "State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism," in Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 145.
67. Quotes from Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 37.
68. Cited in Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War, p. 49.
69. Paul Hagenloh, Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926-1941 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009), p. 12.
70. Figes, The Whisperers, p. 88.
71. Kuromiya, Stalin: Profiles in Power, pp. 91-92.
72. Cited in Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 155.
73. Viola, The Unknown Gulag, p. 96.
74. Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 227.
75. Vladimir Khaustov and Lennart Samuel'son, Stalin, NKVD i repressii 1936-1938 gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), p. 52.
76. See Hagenloh, Stalin's Police, pp. 15, 207;
77. David Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 313-318. I thank Shearer for sending me a copy of the prepublication page proofs of the book.
78. Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), p. 91; Khaustov and Samuel'son, Stalin, NKVD i repressii, pp. 67-68.
79. Paul Gregory, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
80. Hagenloh, Stalin's Police, p. 227.
81. Khaustov and Samuel'son, Stalin, NKVD, i repressii, pp. 67-68. Hagenloh doubts the importance of the elections, suggesting instead that Stalin and Yezhov were intent on pursu ing "social prophylaxis" to the end, removing all "'threatening' population cohorts in preparation for war." Hagenloh, Stalin's Police, p. 285.
82. Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 128.
83. Amir Weiner, "Introduction," in Landscaping the Human Garden, pp. 14-15.
84. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
85. For the debates, see the exchange between R. W. Davies and Steven G. Wheatcroft, on the one hand, and Michael Ellman, on the other, in Europe-Asia Studies 57, 6 (2005); 58, 4 (2006); and 59, 4 (2007).
86. Nicholas Werth, "Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR," in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Com pared, ed. Henry Russo, trans. Lucy B. Golsan et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 80.
87. See Kuromiya, Stalin: Profiles in Power, pp. 111-112.
88. Stalin's Letters to Molotov, p. 230, n. 3.
89. Ellman, "Stalin and the Soviet Famine," p. 689.
90. Cited in Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 301.
91. Nicholas Werth, "The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification," manuscript, p. 10. My gratitude to Werth for allowing me to cite his manuscript.
92. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, pp. 306-307.
93. Cited in Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 234.
94. See the many testimonies to this effect in Report to Congress: Commission on the Ukraine Famine (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), pp. 235-507.
95. See Ellman, "Stalin and the Soviet Famine," pp. 688-689.
96. See Werth, "The Crimes of the Stalin Regime," p. 10.
97. R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 440.
98. Andrea Graziosi, "The Soviet 1931-1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?" in Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and its Soviet Context, ed. Halyna Hryn (Cambridge: Ukrainian Research Institute, 2008), pp. 3-7.
99. See Niccolo Panciola, "Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazakh Herdsmen, 1928-1934," Cahiers du Monde russe 45, 1-2 (2004): 189.
100. Kurt Jonassohn with Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), p. 256.
101. On the "creation" of nationalities, see Ronald G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
102. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 274.
103. Hoover Institution Archives (hereafter HIA), fond (f.) 17, opis (op.) 2, delo (d.) 591, list (l.) 90; d. 593, l. 79.
104. McLoughlan, "Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937-38," p. 143.
105. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner, pp. 94-95.
106. According to Eric van Ree, Stalin both intensely disliked and reluctantly admired the Poles, an attitude that paralleled his ambivalent admiration and distaste for the Germans. See "Heroes and Merchants: Stalin's Understanding of National Character," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, 1 (2007): 49.
107. Khaustov and Samuel'son, Stalin, NKVD, i repressii, pp. 29-30.
108. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner, pp. 96-99.
109. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner, p. 99.
110. Terry Martin, "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," Journal of Modern History 70, 4 (December 1998): 857.
111. Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migration in the USSR (Budapest: CEU Press, 2004), p. 100.
112. Weiner, "Nothing but Certainty," p. 46.
113. A document sent from Merkulov to Stalin, Molotov, and Beria in May 1941 indicates that the numbers of "anti-Soviet criminal and socially dangerous elements" repressed by the NKVD in the three republics from 1939 to 1941 were somewhat fewer. HIA, f. 89, op. 18, d. 6, l. 1.
114. Polian, Against Their Will, pp. 122-123, 167.
115. See Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in Soviet Exile during World War II (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2002).
116. Beria recommends the death sentence to Stalin in a communication of March 5, 1940. HIA, f. 89, op. 14, dd. 1-20, l. 9.
117. Zaslavsky, Class Cleansing, pp. 32-33.
118. Sarah Meiklejohn Terry, Poland's Place in Europe: General Sikorski and the Origins of the Oder-Neisse Line (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 33.
119. A. M. Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War, trans. George Saunders (New York: Norton, 1978).
120. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 94-95.
121. N. F. Bugai, L. Beriia-I. Stalinu: "Soglasno Vashemu ukazaniiu" (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1995).
122. Werth, "The Crimes of the Stalin Regime," p. 16.
123. See Werth "A State against Its People," p. 223, for related figures. Also Polian, Against Their Will, pp. 210-211.
124. See the new edition of the work, Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
125. Baberowski, Der Rote Terror, p. 201.
126. See Karl Schlögel's evocative Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008).
127. Figes, The Whisperers, p. 159.
128. Wladyslaw Hedeler, "Ezhov's Scenario for the Great Terror," in McLoughlin and McDermott, eds. Stalin's Terror, p. 47.
129. Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), p. xxiii.
130. Cited in Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, p. 293.
131. HIA, f. 89, op. 48, d. 2, l. 13.
132. Charters Wynn, "The 'Smirnov-Eismont-Tolmachev Affair'," in The Lost Politburo Transcripts, eds. Gregory and Naimark, pp. 112-113.
133. Tucker and Cohen, The Great Purge Trial, p. xxiii. In a private correspondence, Robert Service makes the important point that Stalin did not have a gross personality disorder, which would normally produce a variety of clinical symptoms of paranoia, like involuntary lapses into passivity.
134. Gregory, Terror by Quota, p. 104.
135. Ivo Banac, ed., The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.
136. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov paint a portrait of Yezhov as a killer, to be sure, but more controlled, bureaucratic, modest, understated, and "banal," in Hannah Arendt's sense, than the one better known to historians.See their Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's "Iron Fist" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 212-221.
137. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner, p. 116.
138. Getty and Naumov, Yezhov, p. 7.
139. Werth, "A State against Its People," p. 190.
140. Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 2.
141. Werth, "The Crimes of the Stalin Regime," p. 15.
142. HIA, f. 89, op. 48, d. 3, l. 14.
143. HIA, f. 89, op. 48, d. 17, l. 31.
144. Cited in Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003), p. 63.
145. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner, p. 111.
146. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, eds., The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 130-131.
147. McLoughlan, "Mass Operations of the NKVD," p. 128.
148. Getty and Naumov, Yezhov, p. 216. The authors suggest, no doubt correctly, that Stalin "trusted Yezhov's judgment," at least in this period.
149. Jansen and Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner, pp. 69-70.
150. Khaustov and Samuel'son, Stalin, NKVD, i repressii, pp. 23-24.
151. HIA, f. 89, op. 48, d. 12, ll. 25-26.
152. Oleg Khlevniuk, "The Objectives of the Great Terror," in Stalinism, p. 97.
153. Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism, p. 369.
154. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, p. 310.
155. Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim A. Staklo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 148.
156. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, p. 3.
157. Stephane Courtois, "Introduction: The Crimes of Communism," in The Black Book of Communism, ed. Courtois et al., p. 9.
158. Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. xii.
159. Danilo Kis, Homo-Poeticus: Essays and Interviews (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995), p. 126. Thanks to Holly Case for alerting me to these essays.
160. Richard Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians' Attempts to Escape from the Nazi Past (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), p. 88.
161. Schabas, Genocide in International Law, p. 9.
162. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 17.
163. Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (London: Hurst, 2007), pp. 316-320.
164. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 100-101.
165. Bernd Bonwetsch, "Der GULAG und die Frage des Völkermords," in Moderne Zeiten? Krieg, Revolution und Gewalt im
166. Jahrhundert, ed. Jörg Baberowski (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), p. 9.
167. Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, "State Violence-Violent Societies," in Beyond Totalitarianism, eds. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, p. 138.
168. Paul Hollander, ed., From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), pp. 20-24.
169. Deti GULAGa. 1918-1956: Dokumenty (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond "Demokratija," 2002.)
170. Courtois does state that his formulation should not be seen as detracting "from the unique nature of Auschwitz." "Introduction," in The Black Book of Communism, ed. Courtois et al., p. 9.
171. James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
172. Gerlach and Werth, "State Violence-Violent Societies," Beyond Totalitarianism, p. 176