Tweet
Crying Genocide: Use and Abuse of Political Rhetoric in Russia and Ukraine
Source: Getty
Matthew Kupfer, Thomas de Waal Article July 28, 2014
Summary
The word "genocide" has long been abused in Eastern Europe. In the
current Ukraine crisis, such fiery rhetoric is fueling a dangerous
conflict and hindering reconciliation.
Rinat Akhmetov, a powerful oligarch who had been wavering in the
conflict between the Ukrainian authorities and pro-Russian rebels,
declared on May 19, 2014, that he was backing the government in Kiev.
As he did so, he accused his political opponents of the ultimate
crime--"genocide."
Akhmetov released a video message in which he fiercely attacked
pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine's southeastern provinces of Donbas.
"What have they done for our region?" he asked. "[Is theirs] a
struggle for the happiness of our region? No! . . . It's a struggle
against Donbas! It's the genocide of Donbas!"1
To call the actions committed by the rebels in eastern Ukraine
"genocide" looks like a wild overstatement in the context of the
United Nations' definition of this deadliest of crimes. Yet Akhmetov
was far from the first person in the Ukraine crisis to hurl the term
at his ideological opponents. He was unusual only insofar as the word
has been much more commonly used by the pro-Russian side in the
conflict.
Thomas de Waal
Senior Associate
Russia and Eurasia Program
@CarnegieRussia
Indeed, accusations of genocide have become one of the hallmarks of
this conflict. On the surface, the use of this term may merely seem to
be a symptom of strong emotions in eastern Ukraine. But in the former
Soviet Union, more than in any other part of the world, the word
genocide has been used as a weapon of political rhetoric for more than
sixty years. Since its coinage in the 1940s, in popular political
vocabulary--if not in international legal circles--the term genocide has
been used as a signifier for "ultimate evil."
In the current crisis, the use of this language casts the
Russian-Ukrainian conflict as a replay of the ideological divide of
the Second World War, with Russia and Ukraine branded as "antifascist"
and "profascist" respectively. These labels are weapons in a
rhetorical conflict that fuels the fighting on the ground between
combatants who otherwise, in background and culture, have much more
that brings them together than divides them. And these terms are the
result of a nearly seventy-year process that has turned a legal
concept describing a crime against humanity into a politicized
accusation with a general application.
Genocide and the Soviet Union
The (mis)use of the word genocide in the Soviet Union and its
successor states has its origins in the beginnings of the Cold War. In
1946, as the world confronted the repercussions of the Nazis' mass
killing of Europe's Jews in what came to be known as the Holocaust,
the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring genocide a
crime under international law. By giving a word to what had been
called a "crime without a name," the accord sought to deter future
acts of mass killing of that scale.
The Soviet Union supported the resolution, but problems arose when the
UN attempted to craft a legal definition of the term. Moscow objected
to a reference in the declaration that allegedly misidentified the
"object of genocide" by including political groups alongside national,
ethnic, racial, and religious ones. Evidently, Stalin feared that the
inclusion of this criterion could lay his government open to
prosecution for genocide for destroying his own enemies.
Additionally, the tribunal proposed for hearing cases of genocide was
formulated as a supranational organ, foreseeing that in the future a
citizen of one country might be charged with genocide in another. The
Soviet Union feared that its adversaries could potentially use this as
a political weapon.
In 1948, the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, codifying the new crime. The
convention, which entered into force in January 1951, legally defined
genocide as an act intent on destroying, in whole or in part, a
"national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
Unfortunately, however, an idea that was initially adopted as a noble
cause by the victorious Allies over Nazism was tarnished as those same
Allies began to fight the Cold War with one another. Soviet jurist and
academic Aron Traynin declared in his 1956 bookDefense of Peace and
the Struggle Against Crimes Against Humanity, "two opposing camps
formed: the USSR and the countries of peoples' democracy, fighting for
the adoption of the Convention . . . and the imperialist countries,
striving to limit and pare down the Convention in any way possible."2
After much debate, the Soviet Union signed the UN convention on
December 16, 1949. In the opinion of Traynin, the text adopted, though
imperfect, was "a certain step forward in the struggle against
genocide." The Soviet delegation succeeded in removing the reference
to political groups from the convention, but other ideas it had
proposed also failed to make the cut--most significantly, the idea that
genocide was inherently connected to fascism and racist theories.
Whatever the legal nuances of the new term, the Soviet Union
immediately appropriated it for its own political goals in the Cold
War. Writing in 1956, Traynin accused the United States of carrying
out genocide against African Americans with its Jim Crow laws. These
racial segregation policies, he argued, intentionally reduced the
lives of African Americans to "a torturous existence of a people
doomed to lawlessness and discrimination." Traynin had similar
condemnations of apartheid in South Africa, the treatment of Indian
highlanders in Bolivia, and other forms of oppression carried out by
"imperialist" powers. Condemning these abhorrent practices, Traynin's
rhetoric went over the top. These policies were genocidal, he said, or
"a slow motion lynching."
In the 1961 book Genocide: The Gravest Crime Against Humanity, another
Soviet scholar, Mikhail Andryukhin, argued that, in America, racist
theories formed the basis for the "bloody brutalities of imperialism,
the most severe form of which is genocide."3 Most of the atrocities
and racist policies Andryukhin described were real, but his framing of
them was ideologically biased. To Andryukhin, genocide was not just a
crime committed by Western "imperialist" powers, but one backed by
conscious ideology and carried out with relish and glee. In his words,
the "ruthless extermination of millions of Indians, amounting to the
deplorable glory of the American colonizers, was inalterably carried
out under the flag of warlike racism."
As important as Traynin's and Andryukhin's examples of genocide are
the ones they never, or seldom, cite. In Traynin's discussion of the
Nazis' death camps, Jews are mentioned only in passing as one of the
main groups killed. Any mention of the Armenian Genocide is
conspicuously absent from both texts.
Soviet propagandists were not the only ones politicizing genocide. The
United States did the same, albeit on a smaller scale. Raphael Lemkin,
the Polish lawyer who coined the word genocide in 1944 after
immigrating to the United States, frequently used anticommunism to
argue that the U.S. government should ratify the UN genocide
convention. When official Washington was unreceptive to his ideas,
Lemkin fell back on the support of anticommunist Eastern European
immigrant communities that were more than eager to use the new term.
Soon, "an innocent idea to pull political strings to make an important
international treaty work ended with blatant accusations of the Soviet
Union of committing genocide on a global scale."4
In a public speech in 1955, Senator Herbert Lehman urged the U.S.
Senate to ratify the genocide convention, which had been "gathering
dust in a pigeon-hole of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."
According to Lehman, "genocide, developed to a science by Nazi
Germany, has been practiced on an even vaster scale by Soviet Russia.
Although history is not without its long instances of genocide, never
has the commission of this crime taken place on such a prodigious
scale."5
Thus, within a decade of being coined and codified by the United
Nations, the word genocide had already degenerated into a term of
political abuse, especially in the Soviet Union. That trend continued
in the second half of the twentieth century and became even more
marked after the fall of Communism.
Genocide After the Soviet Collapse
In post-Soviet political discourse, the word genocide became even
further unmoored from its original legal formulation than the
already-loose meaning it had acquired during the 1950s and 1960s. For
the first time, post-Soviet peoples began to explicitly label
themselves, rather than others, as victims of genocide. It is in the
context of this semantic shift that the term has been employed so
broadly in the current Ukraine crisis.
As they constructed fifteen new nation-states out of the wreckage of
the Soviet Union in the 1990s, post-Soviet peoples and governments
rediscovered and reinvented national histories, cultures, and
languages. In the process, the new nations frequently described their
past sufferings as "genocide," with barely any reference to the
international legal understanding of the term. Scholar Evgeny Finkel
labeled this phenomenon the "search of lost genocides."6
Finkel noted that new states, often with little or no history of
independence, used the idea of genocide to bolster their national
legitimacy. The leaders of such states have used the status of
"genocide victim" as a "very efficient mechanism to brush aside
demands to confront injustices and crimes committed by members of the
'suffering nation.'"
As the historian Tzvetan Todorov has noted, no one wants to be a
victim, but many want to have been victims. The status conferred by
past victimhood gives justification to complaints and demands that
might otherwise seem unreasonable. If a group can prove that it has
been the victim of injustice, it "obtains a bottomless line of moral
credit. The greater the crime in the past, the more compelling the
rights in the present--which are gained merely through membership in
the wronged group."7
Many post-Soviet nations have made allegations of genocide. In the
conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of
Nagorny Karabakh, Armenians termed the 1988 pogroms by Azerbaijanis
against Armenians in the town of Sumgait genocide. Azerbaijanis did
the same with reference to the killing by Armenians of Azerbaijani
civilians outside the town of Khojali in 1992.
Abkhaz and Ossetians have accused the Georgian state of genocide
against them, while Georgia has accused the Abkhaz of committing
genocide against ethnic Georgians. Circassians have called on the
world to recognize the mass deportation of their ancestors from the
Russian Empire in the 1860s as genocide--and won recognition of the
term from the Georgian parliament in 2011. In the Baltic states, many
term the period of Soviet rule a genocide.
There is an unfortunate element of "genocide competition" in many of
these campaigns: if my neighbor calls attention to his genocide, I
must present evidence of my own suffering.
In contemporary Russia, the "G-word" has entered the mainstream
vocabulary as a description of many kinds of abuse or victimization.
For example, Russia's oppositionNovaya Gazeta newspaper titled a 2009
article about a Saint Petersburg law that would cut the number of
public green areas in the city "Green Genocide." After a plan to cut
down 130 trees in Stavropol was blocked in court, the website of the
local state television channel proclaimed, "Green Genocide in
Stavropol Declared Illegal."
During a December 2013 press conference, economist Mikhail Delyagin
characterized the Russian government's tax and financial policies of
the past year as a "genocide of small and medium business." If
continued, Delyagin warned, those policies would lead to "financial
repressions" analogous to the most intense period of Stalin's Great
Purge. Afterward, in an interview with the Forum.msk website, Delyagin
stretched the metaphor to absurdity, suggesting that policymakers
"began the year with a genocide of businessand they're going to finish
it with preparations for a new round of business genocide."
More seriously, Sergei Glazyev, an economist, Russia nationalist, and
one of the chief ideologists of "Eurasianism," which is now a dominant
ideology in President Vladimir Putin's Russia, has argued that ethnic
Russians are at risk of genocide both from Russia's neighbors and from
foreign powers. In his 1998 book Genocide, Glazyev alleges that the
radical economic reforms carried out in Russia from 1991 until 1998
destroyed the Russian state's economic system and led to its
"colonization in the interests of international capital."8 After then
president Boris Yeltsin dissolved Russia's opposition-dominated
parliament in 1993, the reforms "went beyond legality and took on the
character of an economic genocide of wide swaths of the population."
Unlike many around him who have cried genocide, Glazyev does
specifically refer to the UN genocide convention. He emphasizes that
the commission of genocide need not require physical violence, merely
the creation of conditions that make it impossible for a people to
survive. Yet his version of Russian politics in the 1990s reads like
an opposition conspiracy theory, with ordinary Russians perpetually
cast in the role of victims. After the shelling of the Russian
parliament in 1993, the "victorious revolutionaries" had total
impunity and carried out reforms for the sake of personal enrichment,
Glazyev writes. Although the reformers may have used terms like
democracy, human rights, and freedom, their real motivation was
"hatred for Russia and Russian culture, a desire to smash our
civilization."
As an economist and academic, Glazyevbacks up his partisan claims with
statistics about the sharp decline in the living standards, health,
fertility, and education levels of the Russian population during the
1990s. His work also touches on moral issues, perhaps foreshadowing
his role today as an adviser to the increasingly socially conservative
Putin. Glazyev blames Russia's falling birthrate not only on the
country's economic collapse but also on "propaganda of debauchery,"
the destruction of the family by the media, and "dubious methods of
sexual education" developed outside the country and then implanted in
Russia.
To Glazyev, all threats come from abroad. This "genocide" may be
happening in Russia, but it traces its origins back to the West.
However, Glazyev does not glorify the Soviet Union. He places Russia's
"economic genocide" in the context of several historical genocides,
including the Soviet elimination of so-called class enemies.
Genocide and Ukraine
In one country in the post-Soviet space--Ukraine--the genocide label has
proved especially divisive. There, the question of genocide has been a
serious and polarizing issue for much of the country's history since
independence.
Ukraine's genocide narrative can be traced back to 1933, when a
horrific man-made famine caused by Stalin's grain requisition policies
in the southwestern Soviet Union took more than 2 million lives in
Ukraine. Not all the victims were ethnic Ukrainians, nor was the
famine limited to Ukraine, but two facts are clear: ethnic Ukrainians
were hardest hit; and the famine was, to a significant degree, the
result of an intentional plan by Stalin to break the back of Ukrainian
and other peasants' resistance to Soviet collectivization.9
The famine remained unrecognized throughout the Soviet period. Only
with glasnost and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union were
Ukrainian historians finally able to freely study what came to be
called Holodomor, or "extermination by hunger." The new debate over
one of the grisliest chapters of Ukrainian history raised the question
of whether theHolodomor was genocide. Many Ukrainian nationalists
answered "yes," and this led to more questions. As political scientist
Alexander Motyl asked in 1993:
Who is to be held accountable? The all-too-easy answer is: the Soviet
system or Stalinism. But who in particular? Some point a finger at
"the Russians," but Ukrainians also took part. A more reasonable reply
might be: the secret police and its party henchmen. Many, clearly,
must still be alive. Should old wounds therefore be opened in the
quest for justice?10
The Holodomor debate exacerbated serious fractures with Russia and
within Ukraine itself. The suffering became one of the ideas
underpinning the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power as
a result of Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004. While previous
presidents had commemorated the Holodomor and sought to incorporate it
into the Ukrainian national identity, Yushchenko actively promoted the
idea of the famine as genocide.
In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament passed a resolution that referred to
the Holodomor as an "act of genocide against the Ukrainian people."
Although a legislative success for Yushchenko, the bill was not
universally supported: the then prime minister Viktor Yanukovych and
over 200 parliamentarians, mostly from the Russian-speaking southeast,
abstained from or otherwise did not take part in the voting.11 The
following year, Yushchenko promoted a tougher law that would
criminalize Holodomor and Holocaust denial, although the parliament
never voted on the bill.
When he succeeded Yushchenko as president in 2010, Yanukovych took a
different position on the Holodomor. Shortly after coming to power, he
told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that the
Holodomor was not genocide. "Recognizing the Holodomor as an act of
genocide, we think, will be incorrect, unjust," Yanukovych said. "It
was a tragedy, a common tragedy of the states that made up the united
Soviet Union."12 These remarks were highly controversial in Ukraine.
Political opponents even tried to take Yanukovych to court for denying
that the Holodomor was a genocide.13 After that, Yanukovych kept a
lower profile on the issue. Each November, he gave a formal address
commemorating the victims of the famine, referring to it as a
"tragedy" or an "Armageddon," but never a genocide.14
In Russia, the description of the Holodomor as a genocide was largely
rejected both by politicians and by historians, some of whom accused
Ukrainians of anti-Russian bias. However, Ukrainian cultural scholar
Mykola Riabchuk argues that anti-Russian interpretations of the
Holodomor were neither the official view nor prevalent in society.
"Anti-imperial? Yes. Anti-Kremlin? Yes. Anti-Stalin? Yes. But if you
take a look at all the speeches and publications by Yushchenko . . .
he was very careful not to blame Russia," Riabchuk said. "Maybe some
very marginal forces tried, but it was never mainstream discourse to
blame Russians for the genocide."15
The Holodomor debate inevitably caused divisions between the country's
west and its more Russified east. Some Ukrainian scholars partly
explain the different identity of the southeastern provinces--notably
the two regions of Donetsk and Luhansk--by the fact that their peasant
population was wiped out in the 1933 famine and replaced by a more
Russified Soviet worker population. "Destruction of peasantry was
equal to the destruction of Ukrainians as a nation because it was a 90
percent peasant nation. So this is part of the explanation why we have
the current troubles, why Donbas is so rebellious, disloyal," Riabchuk
said.16
In Russian discourse, the idea of a "genocide" perpetrated by
Ukrainians against ethnic Russians proliferated in opposition to the
2004 Orange Revolution. In that year, a Russian language website
published an article entitled "The First Signs of the Russian
Ethnocide," referring to a draft law that would have required all
civil servants to use the Ukrainian language. The bill in question was
rejected in the Ukrainian parliament, but the author believed it could
still be passed in the future. If that happened, she predicted,
Russian speakers would be excluded from the government, have their
media eliminated, be unable to defend themselves in court, and even
face assault and murder.17
In 2005, the site published a similarly hyperbolic article, "The
Orange Genocide of the Russian Nation Has Started." Using terms eerily
prescient of Ukraine's 2014 clashes, the publication accused the
"Orange junta" of denying the "native Russian land, heroic Crimea" its
language. The event that provoked the article--the required translation
of the Crimean Autonomous Region's official website and press service
into Ukrainian--spilled no blood, yet to the author it was the
bellwether of genocide.18
It is no surprise, then, that the word is again being invoked in the
current conflict in Ukraine. The Donetsk separatist leader Denis
Pushilin referred to clashes in Odessa on May 2, 2014, when over 40
people lost their lives during a fire, as the "genocide in Odessa."19
On May 13, another rebel leader, Miroslav Rudenko, said the
separatists would like a "civilized divorce" with Ukraine, but that
the "efforts of the junta" were complicating the process. "Now there
are occupation forces on the territory of the republic that carry out
terrorist acts and genocide against the civilian population," he
explained.20In Russia, Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the country's
parliament, called the actions of the Kiev government a "real genocide
of both the Russian and Ukrainian nations."21
A New War of Words in Ukraine
The word genocide has emerged as a leitmotif in the current
Russian-Ukrainian crisis for a number of reasons. In eastern Ukraine,
pro-Russian separatists know that they are challenging the status quo
and the international order, which places them at a disadvantage. By
framing their struggle as one against a regime attempting to commit
genocide, they present their actions not as a first choice but as the
last resort of a people trying to protect its fundamental human
rights. Meanwhile, in Russia, the most persistent exponent of the idea
of a genocide against Russians, Sergei Glazyev, has framed events in
eastern Ukraine as part of his broader narrative of widespread
persecution of ethnic Russians in other post-Soviet states.
Overall ideology in the Kremlin has changed in recent times.
Antifascism has increasingly become a central idea in Putin's Russia,
reinforcing a growing tendency to identify the modern country with the
Soviet Union. The Red Army's victory over Nazism is increasingly
reframed as a victory of the Russian nation rather than of the
multiethnic Soviet people. The enhanced prominence given to Victory
Day on May 9 and debates about giving the city of Volgograd its old
name of Stalingrad are further reflections of this reimagining of
history. Accusations that the new Ukrainian government is
fascist--Glazyev even told a BBC interviewer that Ukrainian President
Petro Poroshenko is a Nazi--fit into this narrative.22
On the Ukrainian side, it is notable that the Holodomor is a less
politicized issue now than it was during the Yushchenko presidency. In
his inauguration speech, Poroshenko struck a more conciliatory tone,
declaring "our state's aspiration for peace and unity dominates in all
regions of Ukraine."23
In fact, the vast majority of recent genocide accusations came from
pro-Russian individuals in eastern Ukraine. Even Rinat Akhmetov, who
now supports the government in Kiev, is a Russian speaker who emerged
from the eastern, Russia-oriented cultural and political narrative and
who previously had strong ties to Yanukovych. Are genocide accusations
retribution for Ukrainians' (supposed) implication of Russians in
theHolodomor?Perhaps for some, but for the majority of participants in
this ideological battle, the Holodomor remains in the background. If
anything, it probably explains why the pro-Kiev side did not make
genocide accusations: Ukraine already has a national genocide, and
making more accusations would only serve to delegitimize the
Holodomor.
The current Ukrainian leadership has instead used a different kind of
inflammatory language, accusing the rebels of Donetsk and Luhansk of
being "terrorists" who undermine Ukraine's state order. This language,
perhaps deliberately, recalls the Russian government's chosen
terminology in two wars in Chechnya, in 1994-1996 and 1999-2009, which
were presented to the Russian public as the "restoration of
constitutional order" (by Yeltsin) and an "antiterrorist operation"
(by Putin). However, in the wake of the tragic downing on July 17,
2014, of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, presumably by
a separatist-fired surface-to-air missile, the terrorist label has
understandably gained greater traction in the international community.
Nonetheless, such rhetoric makes the task of reconciliation much more
difficult and reduces the space for a political compromise in eastern
Ukraine. People of different ethnic, religious, and linguistic
identities can live and have lived together in Ukraine in peace. But
the invocation of genocide, a word that signifies "ultimate evil,"
incites the belief that Russians and Ukrainians are incompatible and
closes down opportunities for dialogue and cooperation. In a crisis
where words matter, the implacable rhetorical war in Ukraine helps
fuel an increasingly dangerous conflict.
Matthew Kupfer is a junior fellow in the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia
Program. Follow him on Twitter: @Matthew_Kupfer.
Notes
1 "V svyazi s situatsiyei na Donbasse Rinat Akhmetov sdelal
ekstrennoye zayavlenie" [In connection with the situation in Donbas
Rinat Akhmetov made an emergency declaration] (video), Segodnya.ua,
May 19, 2014, www.segodnya.ua/regions/donetsk/v-svyazi-s-situaciey-na-donbasse-rinat-ahmetov-sdelal-ekstrennoe-zayavlenie-521628.html.
2 Aron Naumovich Traynin, Zashchita mira i borba c prestupleniyami
protiv chelovechestva [Defense of Peace and the Struggle Against
Crimes Against Humanity] (Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1956),
226-239.
3 Mikhail Nikolaevich Andryukhin, Genotsid--tyagchaishee prestuplenie
protiv chelovechestva [Genocide: The gravest crime against humanity]
(Moscow: Gosyurizdat, 1961), 17-19.
4 Anton Weiss-Wendt, "Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on 'Soviet
Genocide,'"Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (December 2005):
555-57.
5 Herbert H. Lehman, "Senator Lehman Calls for Liberation Program in
New York Address," Hairenik Weekly xxii, no. 16, June 2, 1955.
6 Evgeny Finkel, "In Search of Lost Genocide: Historical Policy and
International Politics in Post-1989 Eastern Europe," Global Society
24, no. 1 (January 2010): 51-66.
7 Tzvetan Todorov, "The Lunchbox and the Bomb," Project Syndicate,
August 2, 2003,www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-lunchbox-and-the-bomb.
8 Sergei Glazyev, "Chast 1. Genotsid (oktyabr' 1993 g. - avgust 1998
g.)" ["Part 1: Genocide (October 1993--August 1998"] in Genotsid
[Genocide] (Moscow: Terra, 1998), available online at
http://rus-sky.com/history/library/glazyev, 1-12.
9 Anatol Lieven, Ukraine & Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry (Washington,
DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1999), 36.
10 Alexander J. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine After
Totalitarianism (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993), 14.
11 Jennifer Boryk, "Memory Politics: The Use of the Holodomor as a
Political and Nationalistic Tool in Ukraine," MA thesis, Central
European University, 2011, 52-53.
12 "Yanukovich: Golodomor nel'zya priznavat' genotsidom ukraintsev"
[Yanukovych: The Holodomor cannot be recognized as a genocide of
Ukrainians], Korrespondent.net, April 27, 2010,
http://korrespondent.net/ukraine/politics/1071204-yanukovich-golodomor-nelzya-priznavat-genocidom-ukraincev.
13 "Yanukovich budut sudit' za otritsanie Golodomora?" [Yanukovych
will be judged on the denial of the Holodomor], Ukrainskaya Pravda,
June 14, 2010,www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2010/06/14/5137127.
14 Alexander J. Motyl, "Yanukovych and Stalin's Genocide," Ukraine's
Orange Blues blog, World Affairs Journal, November 29, 2012,
www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/yanukovych-and-stalin%E2%80%99s-genocide.
15 Interview with Mykola Riabchuk, May 26, 2014.
16 Interview with Mykola Riabchuk, May 26, 2014.
17 Olga Kievskaya, "Perviye lastochki russkogo etnotsida" [First signs
of the Russian ethnocide], Anti-oranzh, December 18, 2004,
http://anti-orange.com.ua/article/president/60/1169.
18 Olga Kievskaya, "Oranzheviy genotsid russkogo naroda startoval"
[The Orange genocide of the Russian nation has started], Anti-oranzh,
May 24, 2005, www.anti-orange-ua.com.ru/content/view/810/46.
19 "Donetskii activist: yavka na referendum v Donbasse mozhet
prevysit' 60%" [Donetsk activist: turnout at the referendum in the
Donbas may exceed 60%], RIA Novosti, May 8, 2014,
http://ria.ru/world/20140508/1007051511.html.
20 "Sopredsedatel' pravitel'stva DNP: rano obsuzhdat' prisoedinenie k
RF" [Co-Chair of the DNP Government: Too early to discuss accession to
the Russian Federation], RIA Novosti, May 13, 2014,
http://ria.ru/world/20140513/1007544264.html.
21 "Naryshkin: sobytiya na Ukraine - genotsid russkogo i ukrainskogo
narodov" [Naryshkin: developments in Ukraine--the genocide of Russian
and Ukrainian peoples], RIA Novosti, May 6, 2014,
http://ria.ru/politics/20140506/1006700879.html.
22 For an excellent analysis of this theme, see Timothy Snyder, "The
Battle in Ukraine Means Everything," New Republic, May 11, 2014,
www.newrepublic.com/article/117692/fascism-returns-ukraine.
23 "Inauguratsionnaya rech' prezidenta Poroshenko; polniy tekst"
[Inaugural speech of President Poroshenko; full text],
Informatsionnoye Agentstvo 112.ua, June 7,
2014,http://112.ua/glavnye-novosti/inauguracionnaya-rech-prezidenta-poroshenko-polnyy-tekst-72737.html.
http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/07/28/crying-genocide-use-and-abuse-of-political-rhetoric-in-russia-and-ukraine/his9
Source: Getty
Matthew Kupfer, Thomas de Waal Article July 28, 2014
Summary
The word "genocide" has long been abused in Eastern Europe. In the
current Ukraine crisis, such fiery rhetoric is fueling a dangerous
conflict and hindering reconciliation.
Rinat Akhmetov, a powerful oligarch who had been wavering in the
conflict between the Ukrainian authorities and pro-Russian rebels,
declared on May 19, 2014, that he was backing the government in Kiev.
As he did so, he accused his political opponents of the ultimate
crime--"genocide."
Akhmetov released a video message in which he fiercely attacked
pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine's southeastern provinces of Donbas.
"What have they done for our region?" he asked. "[Is theirs] a
struggle for the happiness of our region? No! . . . It's a struggle
against Donbas! It's the genocide of Donbas!"1
To call the actions committed by the rebels in eastern Ukraine
"genocide" looks like a wild overstatement in the context of the
United Nations' definition of this deadliest of crimes. Yet Akhmetov
was far from the first person in the Ukraine crisis to hurl the term
at his ideological opponents. He was unusual only insofar as the word
has been much more commonly used by the pro-Russian side in the
conflict.
Thomas de Waal
Senior Associate
Russia and Eurasia Program
@CarnegieRussia
Indeed, accusations of genocide have become one of the hallmarks of
this conflict. On the surface, the use of this term may merely seem to
be a symptom of strong emotions in eastern Ukraine. But in the former
Soviet Union, more than in any other part of the world, the word
genocide has been used as a weapon of political rhetoric for more than
sixty years. Since its coinage in the 1940s, in popular political
vocabulary--if not in international legal circles--the term genocide has
been used as a signifier for "ultimate evil."
In the current crisis, the use of this language casts the
Russian-Ukrainian conflict as a replay of the ideological divide of
the Second World War, with Russia and Ukraine branded as "antifascist"
and "profascist" respectively. These labels are weapons in a
rhetorical conflict that fuels the fighting on the ground between
combatants who otherwise, in background and culture, have much more
that brings them together than divides them. And these terms are the
result of a nearly seventy-year process that has turned a legal
concept describing a crime against humanity into a politicized
accusation with a general application.
Genocide and the Soviet Union
The (mis)use of the word genocide in the Soviet Union and its
successor states has its origins in the beginnings of the Cold War. In
1946, as the world confronted the repercussions of the Nazis' mass
killing of Europe's Jews in what came to be known as the Holocaust,
the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring genocide a
crime under international law. By giving a word to what had been
called a "crime without a name," the accord sought to deter future
acts of mass killing of that scale.
The Soviet Union supported the resolution, but problems arose when the
UN attempted to craft a legal definition of the term. Moscow objected
to a reference in the declaration that allegedly misidentified the
"object of genocide" by including political groups alongside national,
ethnic, racial, and religious ones. Evidently, Stalin feared that the
inclusion of this criterion could lay his government open to
prosecution for genocide for destroying his own enemies.
Additionally, the tribunal proposed for hearing cases of genocide was
formulated as a supranational organ, foreseeing that in the future a
citizen of one country might be charged with genocide in another. The
Soviet Union feared that its adversaries could potentially use this as
a political weapon.
In 1948, the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, codifying the new crime. The
convention, which entered into force in January 1951, legally defined
genocide as an act intent on destroying, in whole or in part, a
"national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
Unfortunately, however, an idea that was initially adopted as a noble
cause by the victorious Allies over Nazism was tarnished as those same
Allies began to fight the Cold War with one another. Soviet jurist and
academic Aron Traynin declared in his 1956 bookDefense of Peace and
the Struggle Against Crimes Against Humanity, "two opposing camps
formed: the USSR and the countries of peoples' democracy, fighting for
the adoption of the Convention . . . and the imperialist countries,
striving to limit and pare down the Convention in any way possible."2
After much debate, the Soviet Union signed the UN convention on
December 16, 1949. In the opinion of Traynin, the text adopted, though
imperfect, was "a certain step forward in the struggle against
genocide." The Soviet delegation succeeded in removing the reference
to political groups from the convention, but other ideas it had
proposed also failed to make the cut--most significantly, the idea that
genocide was inherently connected to fascism and racist theories.
Whatever the legal nuances of the new term, the Soviet Union
immediately appropriated it for its own political goals in the Cold
War. Writing in 1956, Traynin accused the United States of carrying
out genocide against African Americans with its Jim Crow laws. These
racial segregation policies, he argued, intentionally reduced the
lives of African Americans to "a torturous existence of a people
doomed to lawlessness and discrimination." Traynin had similar
condemnations of apartheid in South Africa, the treatment of Indian
highlanders in Bolivia, and other forms of oppression carried out by
"imperialist" powers. Condemning these abhorrent practices, Traynin's
rhetoric went over the top. These policies were genocidal, he said, or
"a slow motion lynching."
In the 1961 book Genocide: The Gravest Crime Against Humanity, another
Soviet scholar, Mikhail Andryukhin, argued that, in America, racist
theories formed the basis for the "bloody brutalities of imperialism,
the most severe form of which is genocide."3 Most of the atrocities
and racist policies Andryukhin described were real, but his framing of
them was ideologically biased. To Andryukhin, genocide was not just a
crime committed by Western "imperialist" powers, but one backed by
conscious ideology and carried out with relish and glee. In his words,
the "ruthless extermination of millions of Indians, amounting to the
deplorable glory of the American colonizers, was inalterably carried
out under the flag of warlike racism."
As important as Traynin's and Andryukhin's examples of genocide are
the ones they never, or seldom, cite. In Traynin's discussion of the
Nazis' death camps, Jews are mentioned only in passing as one of the
main groups killed. Any mention of the Armenian Genocide is
conspicuously absent from both texts.
Soviet propagandists were not the only ones politicizing genocide. The
United States did the same, albeit on a smaller scale. Raphael Lemkin,
the Polish lawyer who coined the word genocide in 1944 after
immigrating to the United States, frequently used anticommunism to
argue that the U.S. government should ratify the UN genocide
convention. When official Washington was unreceptive to his ideas,
Lemkin fell back on the support of anticommunist Eastern European
immigrant communities that were more than eager to use the new term.
Soon, "an innocent idea to pull political strings to make an important
international treaty work ended with blatant accusations of the Soviet
Union of committing genocide on a global scale."4
In a public speech in 1955, Senator Herbert Lehman urged the U.S.
Senate to ratify the genocide convention, which had been "gathering
dust in a pigeon-hole of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."
According to Lehman, "genocide, developed to a science by Nazi
Germany, has been practiced on an even vaster scale by Soviet Russia.
Although history is not without its long instances of genocide, never
has the commission of this crime taken place on such a prodigious
scale."5
Thus, within a decade of being coined and codified by the United
Nations, the word genocide had already degenerated into a term of
political abuse, especially in the Soviet Union. That trend continued
in the second half of the twentieth century and became even more
marked after the fall of Communism.
Genocide After the Soviet Collapse
In post-Soviet political discourse, the word genocide became even
further unmoored from its original legal formulation than the
already-loose meaning it had acquired during the 1950s and 1960s. For
the first time, post-Soviet peoples began to explicitly label
themselves, rather than others, as victims of genocide. It is in the
context of this semantic shift that the term has been employed so
broadly in the current Ukraine crisis.
As they constructed fifteen new nation-states out of the wreckage of
the Soviet Union in the 1990s, post-Soviet peoples and governments
rediscovered and reinvented national histories, cultures, and
languages. In the process, the new nations frequently described their
past sufferings as "genocide," with barely any reference to the
international legal understanding of the term. Scholar Evgeny Finkel
labeled this phenomenon the "search of lost genocides."6
Finkel noted that new states, often with little or no history of
independence, used the idea of genocide to bolster their national
legitimacy. The leaders of such states have used the status of
"genocide victim" as a "very efficient mechanism to brush aside
demands to confront injustices and crimes committed by members of the
'suffering nation.'"
As the historian Tzvetan Todorov has noted, no one wants to be a
victim, but many want to have been victims. The status conferred by
past victimhood gives justification to complaints and demands that
might otherwise seem unreasonable. If a group can prove that it has
been the victim of injustice, it "obtains a bottomless line of moral
credit. The greater the crime in the past, the more compelling the
rights in the present--which are gained merely through membership in
the wronged group."7
Many post-Soviet nations have made allegations of genocide. In the
conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of
Nagorny Karabakh, Armenians termed the 1988 pogroms by Azerbaijanis
against Armenians in the town of Sumgait genocide. Azerbaijanis did
the same with reference to the killing by Armenians of Azerbaijani
civilians outside the town of Khojali in 1992.
Abkhaz and Ossetians have accused the Georgian state of genocide
against them, while Georgia has accused the Abkhaz of committing
genocide against ethnic Georgians. Circassians have called on the
world to recognize the mass deportation of their ancestors from the
Russian Empire in the 1860s as genocide--and won recognition of the
term from the Georgian parliament in 2011. In the Baltic states, many
term the period of Soviet rule a genocide.
There is an unfortunate element of "genocide competition" in many of
these campaigns: if my neighbor calls attention to his genocide, I
must present evidence of my own suffering.
In contemporary Russia, the "G-word" has entered the mainstream
vocabulary as a description of many kinds of abuse or victimization.
For example, Russia's oppositionNovaya Gazeta newspaper titled a 2009
article about a Saint Petersburg law that would cut the number of
public green areas in the city "Green Genocide." After a plan to cut
down 130 trees in Stavropol was blocked in court, the website of the
local state television channel proclaimed, "Green Genocide in
Stavropol Declared Illegal."
During a December 2013 press conference, economist Mikhail Delyagin
characterized the Russian government's tax and financial policies of
the past year as a "genocide of small and medium business." If
continued, Delyagin warned, those policies would lead to "financial
repressions" analogous to the most intense period of Stalin's Great
Purge. Afterward, in an interview with the Forum.msk website, Delyagin
stretched the metaphor to absurdity, suggesting that policymakers
"began the year with a genocide of businessand they're going to finish
it with preparations for a new round of business genocide."
More seriously, Sergei Glazyev, an economist, Russia nationalist, and
one of the chief ideologists of "Eurasianism," which is now a dominant
ideology in President Vladimir Putin's Russia, has argued that ethnic
Russians are at risk of genocide both from Russia's neighbors and from
foreign powers. In his 1998 book Genocide, Glazyev alleges that the
radical economic reforms carried out in Russia from 1991 until 1998
destroyed the Russian state's economic system and led to its
"colonization in the interests of international capital."8 After then
president Boris Yeltsin dissolved Russia's opposition-dominated
parliament in 1993, the reforms "went beyond legality and took on the
character of an economic genocide of wide swaths of the population."
Unlike many around him who have cried genocide, Glazyev does
specifically refer to the UN genocide convention. He emphasizes that
the commission of genocide need not require physical violence, merely
the creation of conditions that make it impossible for a people to
survive. Yet his version of Russian politics in the 1990s reads like
an opposition conspiracy theory, with ordinary Russians perpetually
cast in the role of victims. After the shelling of the Russian
parliament in 1993, the "victorious revolutionaries" had total
impunity and carried out reforms for the sake of personal enrichment,
Glazyev writes. Although the reformers may have used terms like
democracy, human rights, and freedom, their real motivation was
"hatred for Russia and Russian culture, a desire to smash our
civilization."
As an economist and academic, Glazyevbacks up his partisan claims with
statistics about the sharp decline in the living standards, health,
fertility, and education levels of the Russian population during the
1990s. His work also touches on moral issues, perhaps foreshadowing
his role today as an adviser to the increasingly socially conservative
Putin. Glazyev blames Russia's falling birthrate not only on the
country's economic collapse but also on "propaganda of debauchery,"
the destruction of the family by the media, and "dubious methods of
sexual education" developed outside the country and then implanted in
Russia.
To Glazyev, all threats come from abroad. This "genocide" may be
happening in Russia, but it traces its origins back to the West.
However, Glazyev does not glorify the Soviet Union. He places Russia's
"economic genocide" in the context of several historical genocides,
including the Soviet elimination of so-called class enemies.
Genocide and Ukraine
In one country in the post-Soviet space--Ukraine--the genocide label has
proved especially divisive. There, the question of genocide has been a
serious and polarizing issue for much of the country's history since
independence.
Ukraine's genocide narrative can be traced back to 1933, when a
horrific man-made famine caused by Stalin's grain requisition policies
in the southwestern Soviet Union took more than 2 million lives in
Ukraine. Not all the victims were ethnic Ukrainians, nor was the
famine limited to Ukraine, but two facts are clear: ethnic Ukrainians
were hardest hit; and the famine was, to a significant degree, the
result of an intentional plan by Stalin to break the back of Ukrainian
and other peasants' resistance to Soviet collectivization.9
The famine remained unrecognized throughout the Soviet period. Only
with glasnost and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union were
Ukrainian historians finally able to freely study what came to be
called Holodomor, or "extermination by hunger." The new debate over
one of the grisliest chapters of Ukrainian history raised the question
of whether theHolodomor was genocide. Many Ukrainian nationalists
answered "yes," and this led to more questions. As political scientist
Alexander Motyl asked in 1993:
Who is to be held accountable? The all-too-easy answer is: the Soviet
system or Stalinism. But who in particular? Some point a finger at
"the Russians," but Ukrainians also took part. A more reasonable reply
might be: the secret police and its party henchmen. Many, clearly,
must still be alive. Should old wounds therefore be opened in the
quest for justice?10
The Holodomor debate exacerbated serious fractures with Russia and
within Ukraine itself. The suffering became one of the ideas
underpinning the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power as
a result of Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004. While previous
presidents had commemorated the Holodomor and sought to incorporate it
into the Ukrainian national identity, Yushchenko actively promoted the
idea of the famine as genocide.
In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament passed a resolution that referred to
the Holodomor as an "act of genocide against the Ukrainian people."
Although a legislative success for Yushchenko, the bill was not
universally supported: the then prime minister Viktor Yanukovych and
over 200 parliamentarians, mostly from the Russian-speaking southeast,
abstained from or otherwise did not take part in the voting.11 The
following year, Yushchenko promoted a tougher law that would
criminalize Holodomor and Holocaust denial, although the parliament
never voted on the bill.
When he succeeded Yushchenko as president in 2010, Yanukovych took a
different position on the Holodomor. Shortly after coming to power, he
told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that the
Holodomor was not genocide. "Recognizing the Holodomor as an act of
genocide, we think, will be incorrect, unjust," Yanukovych said. "It
was a tragedy, a common tragedy of the states that made up the united
Soviet Union."12 These remarks were highly controversial in Ukraine.
Political opponents even tried to take Yanukovych to court for denying
that the Holodomor was a genocide.13 After that, Yanukovych kept a
lower profile on the issue. Each November, he gave a formal address
commemorating the victims of the famine, referring to it as a
"tragedy" or an "Armageddon," but never a genocide.14
In Russia, the description of the Holodomor as a genocide was largely
rejected both by politicians and by historians, some of whom accused
Ukrainians of anti-Russian bias. However, Ukrainian cultural scholar
Mykola Riabchuk argues that anti-Russian interpretations of the
Holodomor were neither the official view nor prevalent in society.
"Anti-imperial? Yes. Anti-Kremlin? Yes. Anti-Stalin? Yes. But if you
take a look at all the speeches and publications by Yushchenko . . .
he was very careful not to blame Russia," Riabchuk said. "Maybe some
very marginal forces tried, but it was never mainstream discourse to
blame Russians for the genocide."15
The Holodomor debate inevitably caused divisions between the country's
west and its more Russified east. Some Ukrainian scholars partly
explain the different identity of the southeastern provinces--notably
the two regions of Donetsk and Luhansk--by the fact that their peasant
population was wiped out in the 1933 famine and replaced by a more
Russified Soviet worker population. "Destruction of peasantry was
equal to the destruction of Ukrainians as a nation because it was a 90
percent peasant nation. So this is part of the explanation why we have
the current troubles, why Donbas is so rebellious, disloyal," Riabchuk
said.16
In Russian discourse, the idea of a "genocide" perpetrated by
Ukrainians against ethnic Russians proliferated in opposition to the
2004 Orange Revolution. In that year, a Russian language website
published an article entitled "The First Signs of the Russian
Ethnocide," referring to a draft law that would have required all
civil servants to use the Ukrainian language. The bill in question was
rejected in the Ukrainian parliament, but the author believed it could
still be passed in the future. If that happened, she predicted,
Russian speakers would be excluded from the government, have their
media eliminated, be unable to defend themselves in court, and even
face assault and murder.17
In 2005, the site published a similarly hyperbolic article, "The
Orange Genocide of the Russian Nation Has Started." Using terms eerily
prescient of Ukraine's 2014 clashes, the publication accused the
"Orange junta" of denying the "native Russian land, heroic Crimea" its
language. The event that provoked the article--the required translation
of the Crimean Autonomous Region's official website and press service
into Ukrainian--spilled no blood, yet to the author it was the
bellwether of genocide.18
It is no surprise, then, that the word is again being invoked in the
current conflict in Ukraine. The Donetsk separatist leader Denis
Pushilin referred to clashes in Odessa on May 2, 2014, when over 40
people lost their lives during a fire, as the "genocide in Odessa."19
On May 13, another rebel leader, Miroslav Rudenko, said the
separatists would like a "civilized divorce" with Ukraine, but that
the "efforts of the junta" were complicating the process. "Now there
are occupation forces on the territory of the republic that carry out
terrorist acts and genocide against the civilian population," he
explained.20In Russia, Sergei Naryshkin, the speaker of the country's
parliament, called the actions of the Kiev government a "real genocide
of both the Russian and Ukrainian nations."21
A New War of Words in Ukraine
The word genocide has emerged as a leitmotif in the current
Russian-Ukrainian crisis for a number of reasons. In eastern Ukraine,
pro-Russian separatists know that they are challenging the status quo
and the international order, which places them at a disadvantage. By
framing their struggle as one against a regime attempting to commit
genocide, they present their actions not as a first choice but as the
last resort of a people trying to protect its fundamental human
rights. Meanwhile, in Russia, the most persistent exponent of the idea
of a genocide against Russians, Sergei Glazyev, has framed events in
eastern Ukraine as part of his broader narrative of widespread
persecution of ethnic Russians in other post-Soviet states.
Overall ideology in the Kremlin has changed in recent times.
Antifascism has increasingly become a central idea in Putin's Russia,
reinforcing a growing tendency to identify the modern country with the
Soviet Union. The Red Army's victory over Nazism is increasingly
reframed as a victory of the Russian nation rather than of the
multiethnic Soviet people. The enhanced prominence given to Victory
Day on May 9 and debates about giving the city of Volgograd its old
name of Stalingrad are further reflections of this reimagining of
history. Accusations that the new Ukrainian government is
fascist--Glazyev even told a BBC interviewer that Ukrainian President
Petro Poroshenko is a Nazi--fit into this narrative.22
On the Ukrainian side, it is notable that the Holodomor is a less
politicized issue now than it was during the Yushchenko presidency. In
his inauguration speech, Poroshenko struck a more conciliatory tone,
declaring "our state's aspiration for peace and unity dominates in all
regions of Ukraine."23
In fact, the vast majority of recent genocide accusations came from
pro-Russian individuals in eastern Ukraine. Even Rinat Akhmetov, who
now supports the government in Kiev, is a Russian speaker who emerged
from the eastern, Russia-oriented cultural and political narrative and
who previously had strong ties to Yanukovych. Are genocide accusations
retribution for Ukrainians' (supposed) implication of Russians in
theHolodomor?Perhaps for some, but for the majority of participants in
this ideological battle, the Holodomor remains in the background. If
anything, it probably explains why the pro-Kiev side did not make
genocide accusations: Ukraine already has a national genocide, and
making more accusations would only serve to delegitimize the
Holodomor.
The current Ukrainian leadership has instead used a different kind of
inflammatory language, accusing the rebels of Donetsk and Luhansk of
being "terrorists" who undermine Ukraine's state order. This language,
perhaps deliberately, recalls the Russian government's chosen
terminology in two wars in Chechnya, in 1994-1996 and 1999-2009, which
were presented to the Russian public as the "restoration of
constitutional order" (by Yeltsin) and an "antiterrorist operation"
(by Putin). However, in the wake of the tragic downing on July 17,
2014, of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, presumably by
a separatist-fired surface-to-air missile, the terrorist label has
understandably gained greater traction in the international community.
Nonetheless, such rhetoric makes the task of reconciliation much more
difficult and reduces the space for a political compromise in eastern
Ukraine. People of different ethnic, religious, and linguistic
identities can live and have lived together in Ukraine in peace. But
the invocation of genocide, a word that signifies "ultimate evil,"
incites the belief that Russians and Ukrainians are incompatible and
closes down opportunities for dialogue and cooperation. In a crisis
where words matter, the implacable rhetorical war in Ukraine helps
fuel an increasingly dangerous conflict.
Matthew Kupfer is a junior fellow in the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia
Program. Follow him on Twitter: @Matthew_Kupfer.
Notes
1 "V svyazi s situatsiyei na Donbasse Rinat Akhmetov sdelal
ekstrennoye zayavlenie" [In connection with the situation in Donbas
Rinat Akhmetov made an emergency declaration] (video), Segodnya.ua,
May 19, 2014, www.segodnya.ua/regions/donetsk/v-svyazi-s-situaciey-na-donbasse-rinat-ahmetov-sdelal-ekstrennoe-zayavlenie-521628.html.
2 Aron Naumovich Traynin, Zashchita mira i borba c prestupleniyami
protiv chelovechestva [Defense of Peace and the Struggle Against
Crimes Against Humanity] (Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1956),
226-239.
3 Mikhail Nikolaevich Andryukhin, Genotsid--tyagchaishee prestuplenie
protiv chelovechestva [Genocide: The gravest crime against humanity]
(Moscow: Gosyurizdat, 1961), 17-19.
4 Anton Weiss-Wendt, "Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on 'Soviet
Genocide,'"Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (December 2005):
555-57.
5 Herbert H. Lehman, "Senator Lehman Calls for Liberation Program in
New York Address," Hairenik Weekly xxii, no. 16, June 2, 1955.
6 Evgeny Finkel, "In Search of Lost Genocide: Historical Policy and
International Politics in Post-1989 Eastern Europe," Global Society
24, no. 1 (January 2010): 51-66.
7 Tzvetan Todorov, "The Lunchbox and the Bomb," Project Syndicate,
August 2, 2003,www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-lunchbox-and-the-bomb.
8 Sergei Glazyev, "Chast 1. Genotsid (oktyabr' 1993 g. - avgust 1998
g.)" ["Part 1: Genocide (October 1993--August 1998"] in Genotsid
[Genocide] (Moscow: Terra, 1998), available online at
http://rus-sky.com/history/library/glazyev, 1-12.
9 Anatol Lieven, Ukraine & Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry (Washington,
DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1999), 36.
10 Alexander J. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine After
Totalitarianism (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993), 14.
11 Jennifer Boryk, "Memory Politics: The Use of the Holodomor as a
Political and Nationalistic Tool in Ukraine," MA thesis, Central
European University, 2011, 52-53.
12 "Yanukovich: Golodomor nel'zya priznavat' genotsidom ukraintsev"
[Yanukovych: The Holodomor cannot be recognized as a genocide of
Ukrainians], Korrespondent.net, April 27, 2010,
http://korrespondent.net/ukraine/politics/1071204-yanukovich-golodomor-nelzya-priznavat-genocidom-ukraincev.
13 "Yanukovich budut sudit' za otritsanie Golodomora?" [Yanukovych
will be judged on the denial of the Holodomor], Ukrainskaya Pravda,
June 14, 2010,www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2010/06/14/5137127.
14 Alexander J. Motyl, "Yanukovych and Stalin's Genocide," Ukraine's
Orange Blues blog, World Affairs Journal, November 29, 2012,
www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alexander-j-motyl/yanukovych-and-stalin%E2%80%99s-genocide.
15 Interview with Mykola Riabchuk, May 26, 2014.
16 Interview with Mykola Riabchuk, May 26, 2014.
17 Olga Kievskaya, "Perviye lastochki russkogo etnotsida" [First signs
of the Russian ethnocide], Anti-oranzh, December 18, 2004,
http://anti-orange.com.ua/article/president/60/1169.
18 Olga Kievskaya, "Oranzheviy genotsid russkogo naroda startoval"
[The Orange genocide of the Russian nation has started], Anti-oranzh,
May 24, 2005, www.anti-orange-ua.com.ru/content/view/810/46.
19 "Donetskii activist: yavka na referendum v Donbasse mozhet
prevysit' 60%" [Donetsk activist: turnout at the referendum in the
Donbas may exceed 60%], RIA Novosti, May 8, 2014,
http://ria.ru/world/20140508/1007051511.html.
20 "Sopredsedatel' pravitel'stva DNP: rano obsuzhdat' prisoedinenie k
RF" [Co-Chair of the DNP Government: Too early to discuss accession to
the Russian Federation], RIA Novosti, May 13, 2014,
http://ria.ru/world/20140513/1007544264.html.
21 "Naryshkin: sobytiya na Ukraine - genotsid russkogo i ukrainskogo
narodov" [Naryshkin: developments in Ukraine--the genocide of Russian
and Ukrainian peoples], RIA Novosti, May 6, 2014,
http://ria.ru/politics/20140506/1006700879.html.
22 For an excellent analysis of this theme, see Timothy Snyder, "The
Battle in Ukraine Means Everything," New Republic, May 11, 2014,
www.newrepublic.com/article/117692/fascism-returns-ukraine.
23 "Inauguratsionnaya rech' prezidenta Poroshenko; polniy tekst"
[Inaugural speech of President Poroshenko; full text],
Informatsionnoye Agentstvo 112.ua, June 7,
2014,http://112.ua/glavnye-novosti/inauguracionnaya-rech-prezidenta-poroshenko-polnyy-tekst-72737.html.
http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/07/28/crying-genocide-use-and-abuse-of-political-rhetoric-in-russia-and-ukraine/his9