Raphael Lemkin and the Origins of "Genocide"

I noted its appearance in 2013, but only recently had a chance to read it myself. It is an odd book in some ways, reflecting an odd life too abruptly ended after enduring what I could only regard has terribly shabby treatment. That life is portrayed in this book: Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., (Yale UP, 2013), 328pp.

It seems to be the fate of some men that their enormously important contributions to intellectual history and human civilization are not recognized until after their deaths, when our ability to repay debts to them is obviated. Such was the case with Lemkin, to whom Eastern Christians--notably beginning with the Armenians in 1915, but including also Assyrian Christians (also in 1915), Ukrainians (1932-33 in the Holodomor), and others--owe a very great deal indeed. Beginning with the Armenians, they and other Eastern Christians have been on the front-lines of some of the worst mass atrocities of the last century. But it was only in the aftermath of the Holocaust that the term "genocide" was coined, and the story of how that came to be is told in part by the man who came up with that term in this newly published autobiography:

About this book we are told:

Among the greatest intellectual heroes of modern times, Raphael Lemkin lived an extraordinary life of struggle and hardship, yet altered international law and redefined the world’s understanding of group rights. He invented the concept and word “genocide” and propelled the idea into international legal status. An uncommonly creative pioneer in ethical thought, he twice was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.   Although Lemkin died alone and in poverty, he left behind a model for a life of activism, a legacy of major contributions to international law, and—not least—an unpublished autobiography. Presented here for the first time is his own account of his life, from his boyhood on a small farm in Poland with his Jewish parents, to his perilous escape from Nazi Europe, through his arrival in the United States and rise to influence as an academic, thinker, and revered lawyer of international criminal law.

About this book, Yale psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, author perhaps most famously of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide (whose own autobiography I discussed here) has this to say:

We have studied much about the mentality of those who perpetrate genocide but know little about that of the man who named the crime and did most to combat it. Raphael Lemkin was one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century. In this stirring memoir Lemkin tells us how he combined his experiences as a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Nazis, a legal scholar, and a passionate defender of human rights to articulate a concept that has been all too crucial in our time. Doing that required him to undergo a profound extension of his personal identity that could enable him to apply his ethical imagination to the entire human species. Donna-Lee Frieze has performed a remarkable scholarly task in rescuing a manuscript that might otherwise have been lost, and in meticulously preparing it for a wide reading audience. We encounter a man who, whatever his vulnerabilities and defeats, persists doggedly, courageously, and at considerable personal cost, in a lifelong mission to give international legal status to resisting the most extreme expression of human evil. The entire story is strangely hopeful.

And Peter Balakian, author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response has this to say:

Totally Unofficial is a unique and compelling memoir of the twentieth century. Lemkin’s blend of narrative strategies gives voice, shape, and scope to his remarkable life and large achievement—an achievement that has come to define something essential about our age and the urgency of human rights. In writing about his tireless lifelong efforts to make genocide a crime in international law, Lemkin shows us a rich and textured world, from his flight from Nazi occupied Poland, through northern Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan to the United States, and then to corridors of international political process in Paris, Geneva, and at the U.N. This is essential reading. Donna Frieze has done a remarkable job unearthing it from the archives and bringing it to the world.

Eastern Christians and the Great Terror

Eastern Christians, especially those in Ukraine and Russia trying to understand their history over the last 98 years, and especially the massive destruction of Christianity in the Soviet period, must contend with the scholarship of Robert Conquest, who has just died. Born in the same year as the Bolshevik revolution, he was an absolutely crucial figure in demolishing the romanticized notions certain Western intellectuals had about communism.

I have not read all his works, but two are seared into my memory. The first, The Great Terror: A Reassessment was a landmark work when it was first published in 1968. It was republished after the collapse of the evil empire, and his publishers asked whether he wanted to re-title the work. I've never forgotten his blunt response as recorded in this interview with him in 2003.

For Ukrainians and those interested in Ukraine in particular, his study The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, published in 1987, was likely the first book to gain widespread attention to what later on, more recently, would come to be called the Holodomor about which several studies have been published as I noted here.

After the Holodomor

We have, as I have often noted, been commemorating, in 2014, the centenary of the Great War. Next year, as I shall presently note, we shall commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. But 2014 also saw the emergence of new scholarly works on the Holodomor, the terror-famine that so devastated Ukraine at the behest of Stalin and his henchmen. Though nearly a quarter-century ago, this event continues to haunt Ukrainian political and theological imaginaries, as we learn through the effors of Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda, and Halyna Hryn, eds., After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Harvard University Press, 2014), 332pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Over the last twenty years, a concerted effort has been made to uncover the history of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. Now, with the archives opened and the essential story told, it becomes possible to explore in detail what happened after the Holodomor and to examine its impact on
Ukraine and its people. In 2008 the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University hosted an international conference entitled “The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Holodomor and Its Consequences, 1933 to the Present.” The papers, most of which are contained in this volume, concern a wide range of topics, such as the immediate aftermath of the Holodomor and its subsequent effect on Ukraine’s people and communities; World War II, with its wartime and postwar famines; and the impact of the Holodomor on subsequent generations of Ukrainians and present-day Ukrainian culture. Through the efforts of the historians, archivists, and demographers represented here, a fuller history of the Holodomor continues to emerge.

Athanasius McVay: the Holodomor and the Holy See (*)

The famous diabolical sneer attributed to Hitler on the eve of the Holocaust, "Who remembers the Armenians?", uttered a scant quarter-century after the genocide in that country, could equally apply, mutatis mutandis, to Ukrainians under Stalin who, only a half-dozen years before the Final Solution, suffered through what Robert Conquest first called The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. That horrendous event has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention.

Recently I noted the launch of a new scholarly work treating the Holodomor or terror-famine as seen in the documents of the archives of the Holy See: Athanasius McVay and Lubomyr Luciuk, The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine. (This topic is also the subject of a symposium at the Huffington Ecumenical Institute in Los Angeles under the capable direction of Nicholas Denysenko.) I asked one of the co-authors of that study, the priest and historian Athanasius McVay (who blogs about some of his scholarship at Annales Ecclesiae Ucrainae), to discuss his work for us.

AD: Tell us a bit about your background:

I was born in Winnipeg, Canada to a mother of Ukrainian ancestry. I studied at the Angelicum and Church History at the Gregorian University in Rome, and completed a doctoral dissertation on the relations between the papal diplomats and the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic hierarchy during the struggle for Ukrainian independence (1918-1923). Currently I am completing an historical biography of the first Ukrainian bishop for Canada, Blessed Nykyta Budka (1877-1949), the centenary of whose appointment we will be celebrating in 2012.

In addition to being a church historian and scholar, I am a Ukrainian Greco-Catholic priest who has, among other assignments, spent the last twelve years transcribing various documents in the Vatican Archives relating to Ukrainian history. At first this research was aimed at the preparation of my doctoral dissertation. Later, I discovered that there was very little research being done on Ukrainian subjects in these archives.

AD: You note some of this research and its findings on your blog, yes?

Yes, and I publish some of it in scholarly journals including, as you know, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

AD: What happened after you finished your doctoral program?

After finishing my doctorate in 2008, both Bishop David Motiuk of the Edmonton Eparchy of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church and the Bishop Budka Society of Edmonton commissioned me to write an historical biography of Blessed Nykyta Budka in preparation for the centenary of his nomimnation (1912-2012).

While searching the archives for information on Budka, I accidentally discovered documents concerning the Holodomor. I’ve known about the Holodomor since the early 1980’s when Ukrainians across Canada organized various conferences and demonstrations to have this humanitarian tragedy officially recognized by the Canadian Government. In 1984 my hometown erected a monument to the Holodomor directly in front of our City Hall.

AD: "Holodomor" is still not a generally well-known term. What does it describe?

After the 1917 Russian Revolution and creation of the USSR, the Soviet economy was a disaster, especially due to the ideological economic schemes such as the collective farms. Widespread famine was occurring in Russia and Ukraine at the end of the 1920’s. This made the Soviet Union politically weak and fueled the Ukrainian independence movement. Stalin decided to kill two birds with one stone by weakening the Ukrainian ethnic population and also eliminating the prosperous farmer-class known as kulaks. Grain was confiscated at gunpoint and shipped to Russian parts of the Soviet Union that were also experiencing food shortages. The politically motivated famine was directed specifically against Ukrainian ethnics. Estimates range from three to ten million starved to death as a result. The exact number of victims is a matter of lively debate.

The Soviet Union and its successor the Russian Federation have denied that the famine was directed against Ukraine. Political and diplomatic pressure has been exerted on other countries not to disseminate information about the Holodomor and especially not to give it any kind of official recognition. As to the labeling of genocide, the question is complicated. Whatever you want to call the Holodomor, it is vital that it be recognized as a deliberate act directed mainly against the ethnically Ukrainian population of Soviet Ukraine and Russia. Films about the Holodomor have been released. At the time journalists such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones broke the story after visiting Soviet Ukraine.

After the publication of government documents proving the existence of the Holodomor, the publication of our documents, and contemporary news reports by Muggeridge and Jones, it is obvious that the late Walter Duranty’s reports were inaccurate. I don’t know the motivation behind such reports. I understand that some scholars have asked for Duranty’s Pulitzer prize to be posthumously revoked.

For my doctoral dissertation, I sifted through well over ten-thousand folios, mainly from two collections: the Archives of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs (AES) and those of the Apostolic Nunciature of Warsaw. For this particular project, virtually all of the documents are found in the Pro Russia section of the AES. Pro Russia was a Pontifical Commission created by Pius XI to handle all Catholic affairs in the Soviet Union and among Russian émigréés.

AD: I have heard from other scholars that doing research in Rome, and especially the Vatican, is sometimes difficult and that accessing materials is not always easy. What was your experience?

The Archivium Secretum Vaticanum was opened for research to scholars by Pope Leo XIII in 1881. It has been the custom for the Roman Pontiffs to de-classify documents dating from not less than eighty years after the end of a pontificate of one or more of their predecessors. In 1985 John Paul II declassified documents from the pontificates of Pius X and Benedict XV (1903-1922). In 2006 Benedict XVI de-classified those from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939).

It is a great privilege to be permitted to perform research in such an important collection of archival fonds known collectively as the Vatican Secret Archives. The official name is a bit of a misnomer. Secretum here would be the equivalent to Privy in English. They are the Pope’s archives and, as at any state archives, are private but not secret.

The staff of the Vatican archives is made up of highly competent historians. Researchers have to be recommended by competent academic institutions and even by ecclesiastical authorities in order to gain permission to consult the archival collections. They do not have direct access to the archives themselves but may consult the indices provided and request portions of archival fonds, boxes, envelopes and sometimes even single folios. Consultation of the documents is carefully monitored by the staff in order that no harm comes to them.

AD: It is often assumed that all communications in the Vatican are in Latin, still the "official" language of the Roman Catholic Church. What languages did you encounter in the documentation?

The lingua franca used in Vatican diplomatic correspondence is Italian. Documents to and from secular diplomatic representatives are invariably in French. Only a very few documents are in Latin, often to or from churchmen who did not speak Italian or French. The letters coming from Ukraine were written in Russian. The AES index lists the themes of all the documents contained in that archive, including famine in Russia. "Holodomor" is a Ukrainian term coined later. I spent about two months on-and-off translating the documents as I had other work do on my biography of Bishop Budka.

AD: Were there any surprises as you did your research?

The basic details about the Holodomor were known to me; but many of the details of the famine were new to me, especially how the Apostolic See sought to intervene to make the tragedy know to the world and to alleviate the people's suffering. The Pope learned about the Holodomor from the French Jesuit, Bishop Michel d'Herbigny, who was the president of the Pro Russia Commission. D'Herbigny was receiving letters from the Soviet Union as well as reports from foreign diplomats who had witnessed the situation first hand. D'Herbigny attempted to move mountains in order to convince Pius XI to launch an aid-mission to the Soviet Union, just as he and his predecessor Benedict XV had done in 1921-1923. The emotional Pius XI wept when he received one report and insisted that something must be done. Unfortunately churchmen and diplomats all concurred that no aid would ever reach the people because Soviet authorities were officially denying the existence of a famine that Stalin had deliberately orchestrated. In the end, the Pope was only able to authorize a gift of ten-thousand Italian lire to be forwarded to starving Catholics via German charitable organizations that had contacts in Ukraine.

AD: Sum up the book for us:

The book, currently only in English, is simply one more testimony of the Holodomor from primary and international diplomatic sources.

It is also a contribution to scholarship on the inner workings of the Roman Curia during the pontificate of Pius XI. The book is available from Kashtan Press, Abe Books, and, in Rome, at the Centro Russo Ecumenica (Messaggio dell’Icona) on Borgo Pio.

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* Updated at request of the interviewee

The Vatican and the Holodomor in Ukraine

Those of you in Rome or with easy access to it may be interested to know of a book launch on October 26th at 5:30pm* at the Centro Russia Ecumenica (Borgo Pio 141, Roma) of a new scholarly work by Athanasius McVay and Lubomyr Luciuk, The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine.

We will have this book expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, and also discussed on here later.



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* Which I previously mistakenly mentioned as being on Sept. 26th