CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Gennadi Poberezny, a political geographer with expertise on the Holodomor, asked his audience a provocative opening question during a lecture on October 22 at Harvard University.
“Do you believe there is a straightforward answer to the question of whether or not the Holodomor was genocide?” he asked the roughly two dozen people who came to listen to his talk titled “Conceptualizing the Holodomor: Ukraine’s Great Famine from Lemkin to Applebaum.”
Based on his own recent experience while attending a conference in Toronto, Dr. Poberezny said, “most people have a fairly comfortable answer to this question, whether it is or is not a genocide.” A comfortable answer, however, does not mean there is consensus. When asked if the Holodomor was an act of genocide, people fall on either side of the fence, Dr. Poberezny said.
In fact, after Dr. Poberezny posed the question here, several people replied that the Holodomor was genocide, while others said that it was not. But scholars have previously noted that, although the Ukrainian case represents the highest stage of genocide, it does not fall under the legal definition of the term.
The problem, Dr. Poberezny said, exists because there are different conceptual definitions of the Holodomor and genocide. “It is impossible to answer this question without first examining both concepts,” he said. Depending on how a person has defined these concepts, “then you can answer the question any way you want,” Dr. Poberezny said. “The struggle is which definition of genocide are we applying to answer this question.”
Dr. Gennadi Poberezny
In raising this problem, Dr. Poberezny said his lecture – which was part of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Seminar in Ukrainian Studies program – sought to explore both “the notion of the Holodomor” and “various interpretations of the notion of genocide.”
In the years that immediately followed the Holodomor, the event was known in the Ukrainian diaspora as the Great Famine of 1932-1933. “It was not until the 1960s that the term Holodomor itself came into prominence,” Dr. Poberezny said.
While news of the Holodomor did spread to the West as early as 1934, “it took the genius of Raphael Lemkin to articulate what happened,” said Dr. Poberezny, referring to the man credited with creating the term “genocide”. Lemkin, who is remembered as “the father of the U.N. Genocide Convention,” coined the word in the early 1940s by combining “genos” (Greek for family, tribe, or race) with the Latin suffix “-cide” (meaning to kill).
Lemkin formulated the ideas that were later used as the foundation of the concept of genocide well before the Holocaust took place, Dr. Poberezny said. Lemkin spent years lobbying for a legal definition of genocide, which culminated with the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. The convention, however, did not live up to his conception of genocide.
“Lemkin actually considered the adoption of the convention of genocide not the biggest achievement of his life, but the biggest failure of his life,” Dr. Poberezny said. “And, namely, because it was compromised to the degree that he believed it was so corrupt, so ineffective that it was not worthy of running with it. That is why, as I mentioned before, his speech on the Ukrainian genocide [in New York City in 1953] did not have any reference to the convention of genocide.”
Dr. Poberezny stressed that, while Lemkin was concerned with the physical harm done to a group of people, Lemkin’s broader conception of genocide also included non-physical, psychological acts that sought to change how certain groups of people think or perceive of themselves.
In Lemkin’s view, Dr. Poberezny said, “you can commit genocide without killing anybody. So genocide, conceptually, is not about killing people at all. The concern that Lemkin had is the destruction of a group as such. And for that we don’t need to kill people, necessarily.” This is the first point of difference between Lemkin’s conception of genocide and the U.N. convention.
The second point of difference, Dr. Poberezny said, regards Lemkin’s concern of colonial power. “Essentially, it boils down to an asymmetry of power between the group that dominates and the group that is dominated. … It’s a case of extreme social engineering under duress. Which is to say, it’s not about assimilation; it’s about imposition through terror or the threat of terror. And that, of course, is not in the convention.”
A third distinction between Lemkin’s concept of genocide and the U.N. convention regards the issue of proving the intent to commit genocide. “For Lemkin, intent was not a problem. He never spoke about intent,” Dr. Poberezny said. “He [Lemkin] spoke about the result of a coordinated plan of action. For him, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
George G. Grabowicz, Dmytro Cyzevskyi Professor of Ukrainian Literature at Harvard University, said he was deeply moved by Dr. Poberezny’s talk. “It is such an important discussion that needs to be held,” Prof. Grabowicz said.
Charles S. Maier, the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, said he greatly appreciated Dr. Poberezny’s effort to establish Lemkin’s definition of genocide, but he was unconvinced that it would have the power needed to stop mass murder of large groups of people simply because they were perceived as somehow different.
“It strikes me that we still are left with a convention with ambiguities,” Prof. Maier said. “I personally think body counts are important, and I think cultural suppression is different from murdering people. Groups have been culturally suppressed, individuals have been forced silent, but where there’s life there’s some sort of hope. … I think murder really makes a difference in these projects,” he said.
In his introduction to Dr. Poberezny’s lecture, Dr. Lubomyr Hajda, senior advisor to the HURI director, noted that Dr. Poberezny was a research fellow on the Holodomor at the institute in 2010-2013, and he was one of the creators of its MAPA project, focusing in particular on mapping aspects of the Holodomor. In addition to a Ph.D. in global affairs, Dr. Poberezny holds masters degrees in sustainable systems, geography, political science and global affairs.