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fight against genocide.” The Polish delegate argued that the United Nations should oppose the extermination of groups of people for their political beliefs, like the mass shooting and killing of (left-wing) “hostages” in Spain, Greece, and elsewhere.
    But genocide was about mass murder of peoples, as happened to the Poles, the Russians, and the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during the war.15 The Soviets were so insistent on this point that they urged the inclusion of language in the convention that specifically referred to the fact 22
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    that genocide “was organically bound up with fascism-nazism and other similar race theories which preach racial and national hatred, the domination of the so-called higher races and the extermination of the so-called lower races.”16
    The Soviet delegation and its allies were not the only ones who insisted that political and social groups be left out of the convention. According to the New York Times , countries like Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Iran, and South Africa were worried that they could be accused of genocide if they fought against domestic political insurgencies by revolutionary groups. Thus the Soviets and their right-wing political opponents joined forces in the United Nations on the genocide issue. Other observers thought that the United Nations would be obligated to defend Francisco Franco in Spain or even Stalin himself against potential political revolts if the protection of “political groups” was included in the convention.17
    Interestingly, Soviet proposals for the genocide convention were not confined to purely “biological” categories.
    They proposed that the convention include what they called “national-cultural genocide,” using the following language. “Under genocide in the present convention we also understand all of the premeditated actions taken with the intention of destroying the language, religion, or culture of any national, racial, or religious group.” Among the prohibitions included in the Soviet proposal was “the destruction of libraries, museums, schools, historical monuments, buildings used by religious groups, or other cultural buildings and objects of culture used by such the genocide issue 23
    groups.”18 Here, too, it is clear that the Soviets were thinking about the Nazis and the terrible destruction wrought on churches, museums, and monuments in Soviet territory, not about their own similar crimes perpetrated in the northern Caucasus, among other places. The United States and its “satellites” (in the words of one Soviet scholar) successfully blocked the Soviet initiative because of American concerns about being indicted for racism and the repression of native cultures at home.
    The Soviets did not get “national-cultural genocide”
    included in the convention, but on the issue of political groups they did in the end wear down the Sixth Committee, in charge of the comprehensive redactions of the convention. A compromise was reached for the purpose of achieving unanimous approval of the convention. “It was for that reason,” the American delegate stated, “that it had agreed to the omission of political groups among the groups to be protected by the convention.”19 In the name of getting the convention passed at this point, Lemkin and a number of Jewish groups also lobbied against including
    “political groups” in its language.20 As a consequence, the final genocide convention, unanimously adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1948, with Lemkin in the gallery, famously defined genocide as a variety of “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
    What this brief rendition of the origins of our use of
    “genocide” makes clear is that the Soviet Union and its allies in the United Nations eliminated any social, economic, 24
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    or political groups from the genocide convention—and, I