Raphael Lemkin was born on 24 June 1900 to a Jewish farming family of Bezwodne, a village near the Old Rus town of Volkovysk, in the Grodno region. Now a part of Belarus, the territory belonged to Russia before World War I and to Poland after the demise of the Tsarist Empire.[1] In the early 1920s Lemkin enrolled at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lviv, then a Polish institution, first to study linguistics and then law. [2] The switch to law was inspired by the assassination in 1921 of Talaat Pasha, one of the Turkish leaders responsible for the Armenian massacres. Lemkin regarded the act of the Armenian student Soghomon Tehlirian a just retribution for the crime but regretted that there was no international law to punish perpetrators of mass destruction. He intended to work for the establishment of such legislation. After studying in Germany, France, and Italy, he returned to Lviv University and in 1926 obtained a Doctorate in Law. His subsequent career as assistant prosecutor in the District Court of Berezhany (Ternopil Province of Eastern Galicia, now Western Ukraine) and Warsaw, followed by a private legal practice in the Polish capital, did not divert Lemkin from elaborating rudiments of international law dealing with group exterminations. In October 1933 he presented his innovative ideas at the 5th Conference for the Unification of Penal Law in Madrid.[3] Of the five crimes discussed in his report, “acts of barbarity” will later provide the basis for his concept of “genocide.” Whether in Lviv, Berezhany, or Warsaw, Lemkin could not remain oblivious to what was happening on the other side of the Polish-Soviet border, having himself translated into Polish the Soviet criminal codes of 1922 and 1927. Polish society as a whole was very well informed of the evils of collectivization, dekulakization and deportations, and the eventual Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine.[4]

After the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet troops in 1939, Lemkin fled to Vilnius and then to Sweden, where he lectured at the University of Stockholm and collected documents of German repressive laws. In early 1941 he obtained a visa to the USSR and via Japan and Canada came to the United States. In April 1941 he was appointed “special lecturer” at Duke University Law School in Durham, North Carolina. In 1944 he published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.[5] The study is a thoroughly documented exposé of Nazi crimes in Europe. The book contains the first mention and an elaboration of the term “genocide.” With the authority of the book behind him, Lemkin relentlessly lobbied delegates to the newly created United Nations Organization. On 9 December 1948 the UN General Assembly finally adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Lemkin devoted the following years to campaigning for the ratification of the Genocide Convention by the member states and the inscription of its principles into national codes of law and constitutions. With the Nazi regime eliminated, Lemkin regarded Communism, which had subjugated his native Poland, as the main destructive force. His convictions met with particular support in the anti-Communist communities of Eastern Europe. He developed particularly close relations with the Balts and Ukrainians, which he cultivated until his premature death on 28 August 1959.

Raphael Lemkin was the first Western scholar to examine the human tragedy we now call Holodomor in the spirit and the letter of the 1948 Genocide Convention and come to the conclusion that the horrendous crime was genocide against the Ukrainian nation. Lemkin’s remarkably insightful analysis is contained in a short treatise entitled “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine.” The phrase “What I want to speak about” beginning the second paragraph, and the handwritten note “Begin here” preceding it, indicate that the paper was written for an oral presentation. The speech was probably delivered at one of the Great Famine commemorations organized by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. One such rally was held at the Manhattan Center on 11 September 1951 and, according to The New York Times, assembled four thousand people to hear speeches by Mayor Vincent Impellitteri of New York City, Professor Philip Mosely of Columbia University, and Professor Raphael Lemkin of Yale University.[6]

It is more likely, however, that the text on Ukrainian genocide dates from 1953, when Lemkin strove to raise the question of Soviet genocide before the United Nations. On 18 January 1953 The New York Times reported that Lemkin called on the United Nations “to find the Soviet Union and its satellites guilty of violating the pact [the Genocide Convention—R.S.] by a determined campaign to wipe out minorities behind the Iron Curtain.”[7] Lemkin’s accusation of the “crime of genocide” specifically mentioned the “persecution of the Jews”—an obvious allusion to the so-called Jewish Doctors’ Plot “revealed” by Pravda five days earlier.[8] As a Polish Jew born in a region that was then part of Russia, who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust, Lemkin was understandably anxious about his community of origin. But his concern extended to all the national groups that had the misfortune to come under Communist rule.

Two months later Lemkin returned to the problem of “Soviet genocide” with an article in The Ukrainian Weekly. “It is an irony of history,” he asserted, “that eight million Ukrainians had to die from genocidal famine, that thousands of the flower of the Ukrainian people had to be massacred in Vinnitsia and countless Ukrainian men, women, and children had to perish in the salt mines before the conscience of the world was really shocked.” The author praised the Ukrainian community for “explaining to the world the tragic meaning of genocide” and for “requesting that Soviet genocide should be investigated by the United Nations.” But the effort must continue: “We must use every opportunity to keep the eyes of the world on Soviet genocide. The incoming anniversary of the 1933 deliberately organized famine is a good occasion to further explain Soviet genocide.” [9]

One such opportunity for Lemkin to explain Soviet genocide was the three-day twentieth annual convention of the Ukrainian Youth League of America, held in the beginning of September 1933.[10] Resolutions adopted by the 600 delegates denounced “Russian imperialistic communism” and condemned Communist “genocidal programs,” which caused the “extermination of 8,000,000 Ukrainians by famine.” The figure of eight million victims, previously cited by Lemkin and now used in one of the resolutions, could be an indication that Lemkin was present at the convention, even though the short report in The New York Times does not mention it. Another occasion for Lemkin to present his ideas came two weeks later, when he was invited to the twentieth “Memorial Manifestation” in honor of the victims of the Great Famine.

On Sunday, 20 September 1953, “10,000 Americans of Ukrainian descent. . .gathered at Washington Square, as many of their compatriots had done on Nov. 18, 1933, in a protest parade that moved up Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street and hence to the meeting place on Eight Avenue,” reported The New York Times. [11] Among the marchers were members of clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of America and people in Ukrainian folk costumes. Later, an audience 3,000 strong filled the Manhattan Center, while “hundreds more stood on the sidewalks at Thirty-fourth Street.” Ukrainians had gathered to remember “that dark hour in the history of the Ukraine when 6,000,000 inhabitants of the Russian ‘granary’ were starved to quell the resistance of an independent people to the Soviet regime.” Congressman Arthur G. Klein, noted the Times, “urged that the fight for Ukrainian liberation be continued,” while Raphael Lemkin “said that high crime had been employed 100 years ago against the Irish.” The Ukrainian Weekly was more explicit on Lemkin’s speech:

An inspiring address was delivered at the rally by Prof. Raphael Lemkin, author of the United Nations Convention against Genocide, that is, deliberate mass murder of peoples by their oppressors. Prof. Lemkin reviewed in a moving fashion the fate of the millions of Ukrainians before and after 1932-33, who died victims to the Soviet Russian plan to exterminate as many of them as possible in order to break the heroic Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet Russian rule and occupation and to Communism.[12]

There can be little doubt that the Ukrainian Weekly reporter was summarizing Lemkin’s “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine.”

Lemkin’stext on the Ukrainian genocide is preserved in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.[13] The eight-page typescript is stored together with the author’s writings on other mass atrocities, which he was assembling for his three-volume “History of Genocide.” Lemkin’s typewritten outline of his ambitious undertaking lists cases of genocidal acts from antiquity to modern times but does not mention the Ukrainian famine. However, as John Cooper supposed, “possibly at a later stage he meant to incorporate it into the project.”[14] But since the book was not published, Lemkin’s views on the Ukrainian genocide remained obscured for 55 years. His perceptive analysis of the Ukrainian tragedy remained virtually unknown and hardly ever figured in publications on the famine of 1932-1933 or studies of genocide.[15] The text was brought to public attention only in 2008.[16] Lemkin’s holistic approach to the Soviet regime’s systematic destruction of the Ukrainian nation was highly innovative in its time and has not lost its significance today.

Discussions of the Great Famine traditionally focused on the starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry. The UN definition of genocide recognizes only four categories of genocide victims: national, ethnic, religious, and racial. The crucial question with regard to the Ukrainian genocide is thus whether the Ukrainian peasants were targeted as Ukrainians (a national or ethnic category) or as peasants (a social category)? If the Ukrainian peasants were targeted as a social group, then they do not qualify under the UN Genocide Convention. In Lemkin’s personal view, genocide included the willful destruction of political and social groups. In his analysis of the Ukrainian tragedy, however, he avoided the traditional emphasis on the peasantry and in fact refuted the thesis that later came to be known as the “peasantist interpretation,” which connected the destruction of Ukrainian peasantry “with the collectivization. . .and the elimination of the kulaks.”[17] Lemkin presented the Ukrainian genocide as the regime’s intention to destroy the Ukrainian nation in a four-stage operation: 1) the decimation of the national elites, 2) the elimination of the national church, 3) the extermination of a sizable portion of the Ukrainian peasantry, and 4) the intermixing of the Ukrainian people with other nationalities by population movements. In all four phases of destruction, the national character of the operation is shown as having been paramount, for even the main victims of genocide—the starved Ukrainian peasants—are presented as “the repository” of the “national spirit” and of the characteristics that make them “a culture and a nation.” This analysis of the four-pronged destruction of the Ukrainian nation is Lemkin’s main contribution to the study of the Ukrainian genocide. As for the question of intent, the second crucial element of the genocide definition—it is well covered by the recent publication of Soviet documents.[18]

[1] Bibliographical data gathered from Ryszard Szawlowski, “Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) - The Polish Lawyer Who Created the Concept of ‘Genocide’,” The Polish Quarterly of International Affairs 2 (2005), pp. 98-133; Jean-Louis Panné, “Rafaël Lemkin ou le pouvoir d’un sans-pouvoir,” introduction to Rafaël Lemkin. Qu’est-ce qu’un génocide? (Monaco: Édition du Rocher, 2008), pp. 7-66.

[2] Published information on Lemkin’s life and career up to and including the beginning of the war is uncertain and often contradictory.

[3] “Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations” at  http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/madrid1933-english.htm (Accessed: 2 Jan. 2009)

[4] As shown by the latest publications: Robert Kusnierz, Ukraina w latach kolektywizacji i Wielkiego Glodu (1929-1933) (Torun: Grado, 2005); Robert Kusnierz, ed., Pomór w “raju bolszewickim”: Glód na Ukrainie w latach 1932-1933 w swietle polskich dokumentów dyplomatycznych i dokumentów wywiadu (Torun: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszalek, 2008); Jan Jacek Bruski, ed., Holodomor 1932-1933. Wielki Glód na Ukrainie w dokumentach polskiej dyplomacji i wywiadu(Warsaw, 2008).

[5] Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).

[6] “Anti-Red Rally Held by Ukrainian Group,” The New York Times, 12 November 1951.

[7] “Lemkin Calls Soviet Guilty of Genocide,” The New York Times, 18 January 1953.

[8] For an English translation of the Pravda article accusing Soviet doctors with Jewish sounding names of plotting to assassinate Stalin see http://www.cyberussr.com/rus/vrach-ubijca-e.html (Accessed: 2 January 2009).

[9] Prof. Raphael Lemkin, “Investigation of Soviet Genocide by U.N.,” The Ukrainian Weekly, 7 March 1953. Vinnytsia was a burial site of mass executions of Ukrainian citizens by the Soviets during the great purges. The burial site was excavated during the German occupation in 1943. See Ihor Kamenetsky, ed., The Tragedy of Vinnytsia: Materials on Stalin’s Policy of Extermination in Ukraine During the Great Purge, 1936-1938 (Toronto-New York: Ukrainian Historical Association in cooperation with Bahriany Foundation and Ukrainian Research and Documentation Center, 1989).

[10] “Ukrainians Attack Reds. Youth League Assails Genocide and Soviet ‘Imperialism’,” The New York Times, 8 September 1953.

[11] “Ukrainians March in Protest Parade. 10,000 Here Mark Anniversary of the 1933 Famine—Clergy Join in the Procession,” The New York Times, 21 September 1953.

[12] “Over 154,000 N.Y. Ukrainian Americans March in Protest Parade Marking Anniversary of Soviet Fostered 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine,” The Ukrainian Weekly, 26 September 1953. A week earlier the paper had announced the presence at the Manhattan Center Mass Rally of “prominent speakers, including Prof. Lemkin, author of the Genocide Convention.” See “Great Manifestation in New York To Mark 20th Anniversary of Moscow-Made Famine in Ukraine, The Ukrainian Weekly, 19 September 1953. Thanks are due to Roma Lisovich, treasurer of the Ukrainian National Association, for providing references to the clippings from The Ukrainian Weekly and The New York Times.

[13] Raphael Lemkin papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Box 2, Folder 16.

[14] John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 253. Cooper rightly picks up on Lemkin’s emphasis on the national character of the Ukrainian peasants and on his rejection of the explanation of the famine as a result of economic policy, but curiously calls the famine “self-imposed.”

[15] A notable exception is Jean-Louis Panné’s, “Rafaël Lemkin ou le pouvoir d’un sans-pouvoir,” in Rafaël Lemkin, Qu’est-ce qu’un génocide?, pp. 7-66. (I wish to thank Stéphane Courtois, research director at the CNRS in Paris, for sending me this informative study.) For the most recent commentary devoted wholly to Lemkin’s text on the Ukrainian genocide see Steven Jacobs, “Raphael Lemkin and the Holodomor: Was It Genocide?” in Lubomyr Luciuk, ed., Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston, Ontario: Kashtan Press, 2008), pp. 159-70. However, by insisting on viewing the famine as kulak oriented, Jacobs misses the main point of Lemkin’s analysis, for the latter applied the notion of genocide to the whole Ukrainian nation and not just to the kulaks, who, as he rightly noted, were “few and far between.”

[16] In October 2008 excerpts of Lemkin’s text were posted on the Internet and a month later the full text of the article appeared in English [https://maidanua.org/static/mai/1227337113.html] and in Ukrainian [http://www.radiosvoboda.org/content/Article/1349371.html]. The Kyiv-based Ukrainian journal Suchasnist printed a Ukrainian translation in November 2008 (Rafael Lemkin, “Sovietskyi henotsyd v Ukraini,” Suchasnist 11 (2008), pp. 40-45) and the English original was published in Luciuk, ed., Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine, pp. 235-42.

[17] On the “peasantist interpretation” see Terry Martin. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001). See also his article “Famine Initiators and Directors: Personal Papers: The 1932-1933 Ukrainian Terror: New Documentation on Surveillance and the Thought Process of Stalin,” in Wsevolod W. Isajiw, ed., Famine-Genocide in Ukraine 1932-33: Western archives, testimonies and new research (Toronto: Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center, 2003), pp. 97-114.

[18] Above all: Stalin i Kaganovich Perepiska. 1931-1936 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001); Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 3, Konets 1930-1933 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001); Sovetskaia derevnia glazami OGPU, vol. 3, 1930-1934 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003); Ruslan Pyrih, ed., Holodomor 1932-1933 rokiv v Ukraini. Dokumenty i materialy (Kyiv: Vydavnychyi dim “Kyievo-Mohylianska akademiia,” 2007); Rozsekrechena pamiat. Holodomor 1932-1933 rokiv v Ukraini v dokumentakh GPU-NKVD (Kyiv: Stylos, 2007).