Raphael Lemkin's Famine In Ukraine

The idea of a deliberate, mass act of killing of a group or category of people has since the early 20th century occupied a unique position within international law and historical discussion. Raphael Lemkin coined the word ‘genocide’ in the 1930s and following the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust it garnered significance in post-war discourse. The word was ratified at the December 1948 UN convention and its definition applied to the deliberate mass killing of ethnic, national, religious and racial groups ; the definition did not stretch to social groups and Naimarck speculated this was due to a political compromise with USSR . For the purpose of this essay I will be paying particularly attention to the famine in Ukraine, the worst affected

Tauger greatly disputes the claim the famine was ‘mad-made’ operation used to wipe out Ukrainian nationalism, choosing instead to highlight the famine as a tragic natural disaster and as a consequence of collectivisation and the 5 year plan. The official figures show that the harvest year of 1932 was higher than in 1933 or 1934 when there was no famine and thus are pronounced by Tauger to be illogical and fabricated. Perhaps these figures were tampered with out of embarrassment that Stalinist ideology was failing against western output. Evidence is also presented showing that although Stalin did not stop exports; various forms of aid were given. A February 1933 Central Committee decree gave seed loans of 320,000 tonnes to Ukraine , while Ukrainian party archives are alleged to show total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 at over 560,000 tonnes, at least 15% of which was food. Figures show that Ukrainian aid was 60% greater than the amount exported at the same time, and aid given to the worst areas of famine was over double the exports of the first half of 1933. In light of these facts, it is problematic to unambiguously accuse Stalin of deliberate killing or genocide. His purported response to the famine, which included large amounts of aid point toward the theory that the famines were a result of misguided policy and not an overall plan to put down Ukrainian nationality. One must however examine the reliability of the figures used (or not used) in Tauger’s work, more specifically in his choosing of some Soviet statistics as true and others as false. This arguably highlights a contradiction in his argument; it could be that both sets of figures are fabricated or neither, and henceforth the strength of his argument is somewhat