Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Initially, a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1946 condemned genocide in language that echoed Lemkin’s broad understanding. Genocide was identified as “a crime under international law…whether it is committed on religious, racial, political or any other ground.” Early drafts of what would become the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide also included “political groups” as potential victims of genocide. But the USSR, knowing that it could be considered guilty of carrying out genocide against “political groups”—the kulaks, for example—resisted this broader definition. Instead, the Soviet delegation argued that political groups “were entirely out of place in a scientific definition of genocide, and their inclusion would weaken the convention and hinder the fight against genocide.” The Soviet delegation sought instead to ensure that the definition of “genocide” was “organically bound up with fascism-nazism and other similar race theories.” Lemkin himself began to lobby for this narrower definition, as did others who badly wanted the measure to pass, and feared that the USSR might otherwise block it.