Stalin's Genocides Read Online Free PDF Page B

first-degree murder, premeditation and intent in genocide are extremely difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt.
    What the courts have said—both in the Baltic countries and internationally—is that intent can be inferred from the specifics of the crimes themselves.
    The cases against Soviet genocidaires in the Baltic countries have also concluded that exterminating part of a group can be viewed as genocide when the attack places the existence of the entire group in jeopardy. These rulings refer back in particular to the Srebrenica case, where the international courts decided in landmark rulings that the murder of nearly eight thousand Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb military units was genocide because it was an attack on the entire people, using the crucial modifier of the genocide convention, “as such.” In this legal context, one could conclude in retrospect that Stalin’s assaults on many peoples in the course of the 1930s and early 1940s constituted an attempt to eliminate them “as such.” The Ukrainian killer famine and the deportation and murder of Poles in the Soviet Union certainly fit this current of legal thinking.
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    Finally, the Baltic cases shed light in interesting ways on the question of whether genocide has to be carried out only against “other” ethnic, national, racial, or religious groups, as designated in the genocide convention, versus social and political ones. Since regaining their independence, the Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians have tended to ignore the unpleasant historical reality that native communists and local Baltic NKVD officers were sometimes directly responsible for the deportations, dekulakization, and the murderous attacks on the “forest brethren” and their supporters in the region. But the courts certainly understand this fact, since many of the defendants who have stood trial are Balts themselves and not Slavs. Does this make these attacks on the Baltic nations any less genocidal than if they were carried out solely by Russians or Ukrainians?
    In perhaps the most celebrated case in the Baltic states, Arnold Meri, a cousin of the esteemed first president of Estonia, Lennart Meri, was put on trial in May 2008 for genocide in connection with the forced deportation of some 251 Estonians from the island of Hiiumaa to Siberia in March 1949. Forty-three of the deportees died in exile.
    Meri, who was the first Estonian to win the medal of Hero of the Soviet Union in World War II, pleaded innocent to the charges, insisting he was simply carrying out orders. Meri died in March 2009, before the trial concluded; the Russian president Dmitri Medvedev posthumously awarded him a medal for his service during the war.
    It is important to note that the rhetoric of the campaigns carried out against the Baltic peoples by Moscow at 28
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    the time was not directed against the particular nationalities themselves but against “bandits,” “counterrevolutionaries,” “kulaks,” and “enemies of the people,” similar to the rhetoric of Stalinist campaigns in the 1930s. The cases in the Baltic countries reflect a broader acceptance in international jurisprudence of political groups as legitimate victims of genocide, even if the 1948 convention implicitly excluded them from consideration. At the same time, in Argentina, a number of generals and high-ranking police officials were tried for genocide in connection with crimes of mass killing committed against their own “nation”
    in the period 1976 to 1983.25 With this said, the Baltic cases also demonstrate that sometimes what appears to be a class genocide can have strong ethnic or national elements. In his important work on the Cambodian genocide, Ben Kiernan has demonstrated that social and ethnic criteria are not so easily separated from each other and often mix. From his research it is apparent that one cannot distinguish the Cambodian events from the normal pat-terns of genocide by using terms