Putin's Genocide in Ukraine

National Review, July 28 2022 (August 15, 2022 Issue)

During the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had made it to the U.S., coined the word “genocide,” he intended that it should cover more than the Holocaust, which had consumed 49 members of his own family. Nazi-style annihilation was the ne plus ultra, but Lemkin argued that genocide could also be somewhat subtler. Genocidaires might want to destroy a national group as a distinct entity while being content to see many of those who had been a part of it survive, so long as they accepted the identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Time would take care of the rest as the next generation grew up in a new order it did not know was new. 

This, not extermination, is what Vladimir Putin has in mind for Ukrainians. A democratic, Western-oriented Ukraine on its borders would be a threat not to Russia but to its ruling regime. That, to Moscow, is reason enough to lay waste to its unruly neighbor, though it would prefer to bind Ukraine de jure or de facto in a greater Russia (with Belarus, doubtless, to follow). The boost to Russia’s population — essentially stagnant but shortly to decline — would be welcome, especially as Ukraine is overwhelmingly Slavic while, to the Kremlin’s concern, Russia has a significant (10–15 percent) and growing Muslim minority. This would, however, work only so long as Ukrainians no longer saw themselves as different from Russians, except in sanitized, primarily folkloric ways. 

Thus Putin’s repeated attempts to push a dubious view of the past — set out perhaps most notoriously in his “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” an article from 2021 in which he asserts that “Velikorussians” (Great Russians), “Malorussians” (Little Russians, an old-fashioned term for Ukrainians that many of them find demeaning), and “Belorussians” (White Russians) are one “large Russian nation, a triune people,” rather than three separate nationalities. The idea of a Ukrainian national identity is, Putin claims, an unnatural confection, the result of machinations by “part of the Malorussian intelligentsia,” the Polish elite, and the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Making matters worse, the victorious Bolsheviks adopted a federal structure for their new state, the Soviet Union — a collection of “national” Soviet socialist republics, including the Ukrainian SSR — to replace the unitary Russian empire they had overthrown. Russia, concludes Putin, was “robbed,” a theft sealed by the fact that each SSR had, in theory, the right to secede, a “dangerous time bomb,” which exploded once the “safety mechanism” — that’s one way of describing it — “provided by the leading role” — and that’s one way of describing that — of the Soviet Communist Party had disappeared. 

Federalization was reinforced by what Putin dismissively refers to as Bolshevik “localization policy” in the union’s republics, an undertaking then known as “indigenization” (korenizatsiya), a word that recognized that those territories were inhabited by distinct peoples. To Putin, “localization,” the building up of what he regards as artificial national republics, “undoubtedly played a major role in the development and consolidation of the Ukrainian culture, language, and identity.” The emphasis he puts on this is intended to undermine the notion that all three had flourished before the Bolshevik ascendancy, and comes complete with a tellingly misleading chronology. As Putin relates it, the Bolsheviks “actively promoted” localization “in the 1920s–30s,” which, in the Ukrainian SSR, took the form of Ukrainization. To be fair, that was true both culturally and, to a lesser extent, politically, but it lasted for far less than two decades. From the end of the 1920s, indigenization went sharply into reverse, an assertion of Moscow’s control that Putin, for obvious reasons, does not address. 

The Ukrainian intelligentsia came under attack, as did the Ukrainian churches, the Ukrainian language, and (actual or supposed) “national” elements within the Ukrainian Communist Party as Stalin tightened his grip. All this was capped by the transformation in Ukraine of the disastrous consequences of the collectivization of agriculture, a policy enforced across the USSR, into a man-made famine — the Holodomor — designed to crush the determinedly independent peasantry that was not only a class enemy but also the symbol, the repository, and the essence of Ukrainian national consciousness. Possibly 4 million died, mainly between 1932 and 1933, but no one can be sure (some estimates are much higher). 

In 1953, Lemkin, who considered that the Soviets were guilty of genocide in Ukraine, and indeed elsewhere, wrote that 

if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people.

This was a continuation of an argument Lemkin had made in 1944, that one of the “techniques” of genocide was the destruction of the victims’ culture. 

Lemkin was uninterested in the sources of that culture, those beliefs or common ideas. Whether they had, say, been shaped by outsiders or an elite or were — as in Ukraine — at their core more organic was immaterial to him. What counted was that they had come to represent to millions of Ukrainians what it was to be Ukrainian. That said, the emergence of national consciousness in the 19th century — particularly, but certainly not only, in the predominantly rural stretches of Eastern Europe — was a complex process and often influenced by a rising intelligentsia. Nevertheless, the extent to which it won acceptance in Ukraine suggests that its roots were real enough: They had been uncovered, not invented. 

Moreover, national identity is a work in progress. It is not static. Putin, an unconvincing historian, might enjoy rummaging through the centuries, fruitlessly trying to prove his point, but more-modern developments can reduce what this czar or that hetman did hundreds of years ago to comparative irrelevance. Contemporary Russian identity has been profoundly affected by that country’s 20th century, from revolution to totalitarianism to the Great Patriotic War. The same is true of Ukrainian identity, in ways that both overlap with the Russian story and diverge from it, not least when it comes to the Holodomor and, of course, the experience of having now been independent for over 30 years. The relationship between Russia and Ukraine will always be tangled, but after three decades apart, it will never again be the same, especially after the conflict in 2014 and, even more so, now, when Moscow’s aggression has brought many of the country’s Russian-speakers far closer to Ukraine than its flawed democracy ever could. 

For Putin to downplay, denigrate, or deny Ukrainian national identity, something he has been doing for years, and then wage a war to destroy it is, as Lemkin would have agreed, evidence of genocide. Putin’s tirades have been echoed by incendiary commentary in Russia, none of which, presumably, has appeared without some degree of official approval. This has included the dehumanization of Ukrainians — another characteristic of genocide — as, in a peculiarly perverse historical twist, “Nazis.” More-usual fare, such as comparisons with insects, has not been neglected but clearly was not thought to be enough. Some of this appears to have been internalized by the invading forces, with effects — such as the mass killing, torture, and rape of civilians in Bucha, not far from Kyiv — that have been as horrific as they were predictable. 

Some of the ruin that the Russians have left in their wake has been of Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Perhaps the destruction of museums, such as one dedicated to a prominent pre-revolutionary painter from Mariupol and another, near Kharkiv, to an 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher, was collateral damage. Perhaps. And perhaps, in Borodyanka, the shots into a bust of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, who was persecuted under the czars for favoring something dangerously close to an independent Ukraine, were merely the result of malicious high spirits of a type not infrequently displayed by occupying armies. Perhaps. But as early as April, Ukrainian officials were talking of the destruction of dozens of churches, monuments, and other sites of cultural significance in what looks disturbingly like a repeat, sometimes improvised, sometimes more carefully targeted, of the wholesale destruction of, to quote one prominent Stalinist apparatchik, “historical junk” in Kyiv after the effective abandonment of indigenization in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Russian history books, those endlessly rewritten devices for the propagation of an invented past, have been arriving in the schools of occupied Ukraine. 

More sinister still, well over a million Ukrainians have been forcibly “relocated” across Russia, among them hundreds of thousands of children, including, reportedly, orphans — some young enough to forget their identity and their language and thus prime candidates for assimilation. Those who remain in Ukraine’s occupied cities are increasingly being taught in Russian, while Ukrainian is . . . discouraged. 

On any commonsense understanding of the word or, for that matter, of a reading of Lemkin, there can be little doubt that what is occurring in Ukraine is genocide. Unsurprisingly, given their countries’ own decades-long sufferings, the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian parliaments have declared the war in Ukraine to be genocidal, in each case unanimously. Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, has joined in arguing that it is “hard to deny” that genocide is under way. President Biden has also applied the term, explaining that he “called it genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being Ukrainian.” The State Department has, however, stressed that the president’s comments should not be read as a formal declaration that that threshold had been crossed. 

There were probably two reasons for this hesitation, one having to do with the legal definition of genocide, the other with realpolitik. As for the first, U.S. government determinations of genocide have typically (since the end of the Cold War, anyway) been tied to the definition contained in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, and that’s a tough test. Although the convention was heavily influenced by Lemkin’s work, its definition of genocide is narrower than Lemkin would, ideally, have liked (it excludes “cultural genocide” and the mass murder of people for their political beliefs or social class) and does not necessarily match the way the man in the street, or indeed in the Oval Office, understands the term. 

Under Article II of the convention, two tests must be satisfied to establish that genocide has taken place. The first is that at least one of a series of enumerated “acts” has been directed against a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These include “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group,” all of which Russia has carried out in Ukraine. The second test is trickier. The intent behind the acts must “be to destroy, in whole or in part, the national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” How to prove the necessary degree of intent, which must be aimed at physical destruction (as noted above, destroying a culture is not enough), has been the subject of extensive legal and academic debate. In the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the dehumanizing language of the aggressors, not to speak of calls for the elimination, imprisonment, or more generalized punishment of segments of the population, might — although the bar is very high — show that required intent. If so, the forcible transfer (at least in some cases) of Ukrainian children to Russia starts to look as if it might satisfy the convention’s definition of genocide. The same can be said of massacres, such as that in Bucha, where, allegedly, many of the victims were selected on grounds of (Ukrainian) ethnicity, creating clear parallels with the slaughter in Srebrenica, one of the rare cases in which an international court has held that genocide has occurred. 

A finding by the U.S. of genocide in Ukraine would have little or no immediate legal consequence, which brings us to the second reason why the State Department might be hesitating. Previous findings of genocide (such as in Darfur) were never likely to cause any problems for the makers of U.S. foreign policy. With Russia, it could well be different. Washington will, in all likelihood, have to continue to deal with Putin and his accomplices for the foreseeable future and, quite possibly, to rebuild a working relationship with them, something that could well be complicated, to say the least, by formally labeling them responsible for genocide. 

But if that is the decision, it should be taken without any illusions about either Russian expansionism or the Kremlin’s desire to tear NATO apart: Moscow is not going to change course. Nor should the U.S. be complicit in any efforts to deny the essence of what, on any reasonable view, and probably according to legal definitions too, Russia has done. And, even if it is irrelevant for the convention’s purposes, there should be no doubt that the assault on Ukraine’s culture, its heritage and language, is yet more evidence of Russia’s intent not only to break a nation, but to annihilate everything that makes it a nation.  

And the word for that is “genocide.”

This article appears as “Putin’s Genocide” in the August 15, 2022, print edition of National Review.