Ukraine's Charges of Genocide

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/02/window-on-eurasia-to-counter-ukraine.html

Returning to Stalin’s excesses, The above is an article by Paul Goble entitled “To Counter Ukraine’s Charges of Genocide, Moscow Admits to Mass Murder.” A few excerpts:

“. . . Moscow has released new documents suggesting that the Soviet dictator engaged in a criminal campaign of mass murder across the entire Soviet Union. . . Vladimir Kozlov, the head of Russia’s Federal Archives Agency, told a Moscow press conference that the famine in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR was “the result of [Stalin’s] criminal policy” but that “of course, no one planned any famine” or singled out any ethnic group as its victim . . . the famine was the result of the errors and miscalculations of the political course of the leadership of the country in the course of the realization of collectivization.” And he insisted that he and his researchers had not found “a single document” showing that Stalin planned “a terror famine” in Ukraine.

“Instead, Kozlov said, “absolutely all documents testify that the chief enemy of Soviet power at that time was an enemy defined not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of class,” in this case the peasantry which Stalin wanted to force to join collective farms throughout whatever means he could.”

“. . . Ukrainians and indeed the rest of the world are almost certain to be struck by one of the fundamental weaknesses of the position that Kozlov and Tishkov advance: Somehow they appear to believe that everyone will accept their notion that mass murder is somehow not as serious a problem as genocide.

“That such an argument may convince some is beyond question, given the political use to which deaths in the past are often put, but that it will convince all is highly improbable. Indeed, when a regime kills as many people as Stalin’s did, most people of good will, including many Russians, will question Moscow’s latest effort to politicize history in this way.

“Indeed, it is virtually certain not only that this latest compilation by Russian authors will not dissuade Ukrainians from their view that their nation was a victim of the Soviet system but also will lead many others, including ethnic Russians, to dismiss Moscow’s current efforts to restore the image of Stalin as a wise and effective manager.”

COMMENT:

The attempts to rehabilitate Stalin in Russia and elsewhere are undergoing difficulties. Absent from the above site is the fact that Stalin’s plan did not work. All those folks were killed for nothing. Even if one accepts the idea that the “greater good” outweighs individual rights, what Stalin did was not really a “greater good.” It was an poorly conceived experiment that failed. He was winging it as Pol Pot was. Fortunately for him there was no neighboring Ho Chi Minh to rush across his border and put a stop to him.