Stalin's Genocides Read Online Free PDF

would add, made it very difficult for scholars to talk about genocide as a product of the Soviet system. The Soviets made the self-serving argument, both in the U.N. committees and in contemporary scholarly works on the subject, that social and political groups were too fluid and too difficult to define for them to be included in the convention.21
    At the same time, in many cases of Stalinist mass killing, the Soviet leaders tended to create just such categories in their own rhetoric and by their own actions. In Stalinist lore, the more than thirty thousand “kulaks” who were shot and the two million who were deported to the Far North, Siberia, and Central Asia during collectivization and after constituted an allegedly identifiable social and political category of rich peasants, in contrast to poor and middle peasants. In fact, this was an invented group of opponents and alleged opponents of collectivization. In the history of genocide, writes Mark Levene, not enough attention has been paid to the ways “a perpetrator can conceive a group as an organized collectivity in spite of itself.” In some ways, this was as true of the “Jews,” especially fully assimilated German Jews, who were targeted for elimination by the Nazis, as it was of the “kulaks.”22
    Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Baltic states, the legal questions regarding Stalin and genocide have taken a decidedly contemporary turn. In their desire to bring to justice perpetrators of crimes against their peoples, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania passed their own national laws on genocide, which, though deriving from the 1948 U.N. convention and its subsequent legal history, have broadened the definition the genocide issue 25
    of genocide to include specific crimes perpetrated in the Baltic region such as forced deportation and the execution of groups of resisters and their supporters. As a result, numbers of alleged Soviet perpetrators of crimes against the Baltic peoples have been indicted, tried, and, in some cases, convicted of genocide. These crimes include the NKVD murder and deportation of citizens of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia during the occupation period, 1940–41. They also include crimes committed during the reconquest of these countries after World War II; the NKVD’s brutal attacks in 1944–45 on the “forest brethren” (local resistance groups) and their supporters in the population; and dekulakization, deportation, and campaigns against “enemies of the people” and “nationalists” primarily in the period 1948–49, during the collectivization drive in the Baltic states. Those who were convicted, both Balts and Russians, were essentially cogs in the Stalinist repressive regime, though often active and murderous cogs. Interestingly, as far as I know these are the first and only servants of the Stalinist state to have stood trial and been convicted for “crimes against humanity” or genocide perpetrated anywhere in the former Soviet Union.23
    A number of important insights into the problem of Soviet genocide are illuminated by the evolution of the law in the Baltic cases, despite their partly politicized origins.24 For example, the legal codes in the Baltic states recognize that it is often difficult to prove the intention of the perpetrator, in this case Stalin, to commit mass murder.
    Was there intent to kill so many Balts during the periods of occupation and reconquest? The courts in the region 26
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    conclude—using precedents in international law—that intent can be deduced from the actual events themselves, how many died, and how organized the actions were.
    The courts note in addition that the atmospherics of the crime are also important: whether the acts of arrest and deportation were conducted according to standard legal procedures at the time, whether they were surrounded by hateful language and demeanor, and whether there was gratuitous brutality during the process. Much like