The invitation for Soviet participation in the conference facilitated Moscow’s drive for peaceful coexistence with the West and for the substantial foreign trade, technology, loans, and investment required by the New Economic Policy. Both sides failed to achieve their objectives. The Anglo-French
GENOCIDE
Genocide is a word coined after World War II to designate a phenomenon that was not new-the extermination, usually by a government, of a group of people for their ethnic, religious, racial, or political belonging. The term implies both a deliberate intent as well as a systematic approach in its implementation. Until international law came to terms with the Holocaust of the Jewish people in Europe, the extermination of such groups was considered as a crime against humanity or as a war crime, since wars tended to provide governments the opportunity to execute their designs. In a resolution adopted in 1946, the U.N. General Assembly declared genocide a crime under international law-its perpetrators to be held accountable for their actions. Two years later, with the full support of the USSR, the same body approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that went into effect soon after.
Article II of the Convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: a) killing members of the group; b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another.” Article III of the Convention stipulated that those who commit such acts as well as those who support or incite them are to be punished. The Convention provided for an International Court of Justice to try cases of genocide. The Tribunal was established only in 2002. Meanwhile, the genocide of Ibos in Nigeria during the 1970s was not considered by any court; those responsible for the Cambodian genocide during the 1980s were tried by a domestic court some years later; the genocide during the mid 1990s of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda was finally considered by an international court in Tanzania, while an international tribunal in The Hague undertook a review of charges of genocide against Serb, Croat, and other leaders responsible for crimes during the Balkan crisis following the collapse of Yugoslavia during the early 1990s.
Two well-known cases of genocide have affected Russia and the Soviet Union. The Young Turk Government of the Ottoman Empire implemented a deliberate and systematic deportation and extermination of its Armenian population during World War I in the Western part of historic Armenia under its domination. Eastern Armenia had been integrated into the Russian Empire by 1828. Russia, along with other European powers, had pressed Ottoman governments to introduce reforms in Ottoman Armenia and Russian Armenians were involved in the efforts to produce change. Close to one million Armenians perished as a result. The Russian army, already at war with the Ottomans, was instrumental in saving the population of some cities near its border, assisted by a Russian Armenian Volunteer Corps. Many of the survivors of the Genocide ended up in Russian Armenia and southern Russia. Others emigrated after 1920 to Soviet Armenia, mainly from the Middle East during the years following World War II. A few of the Young Turk leaders responsible for the Armenian genocide were tried by a Turkish court following their defeat in the war and condemned, largely in absentia, but the trials were halted due to changes in the domestic and international environment. During World War II Nazi advances into Soviet territory provided an opportunity to German forces to extend the policy of extermination of Jews into those territories. Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust were tried and condemned to various sentences at Nuremberg, Germany, following the war.
Russian and Soviet governments have tolerated or implemented policies that, while not necessarily qualified as genocides, raise questions relevant to the subject. Pogroms against Russian Jews during the last decades of the Romanov Empire and the deportation of the Tatars from Crimea, Chechens and other peoples from their Autonomous Republics within Russia, and Mtskhetan Turks from Georgia during and immediately following World War II on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans reflect a propensity on the part of Russia and Soviet governments to resolve perceived political problems through punishment of whole groups. Equally important, the politically motivated purges engineered by Josef Stalin and his collaborators of the Communist Party and Soviet government officials and their families and various punitive actions against whole populations claimed the lives of millions of citizens between 1929 and 1939.
In one case, Soviet policy has been designated as genocidal by some specialists. As a result of the forced collectivization of farms during the early 1930s, Ukraine suffered a famine, exacerbated by a severe drought, which claimed as many as five million lives. The Soviet government’s refusal to recognize the scope of the disaster and provide relief is seen as a deliberate policy of extermination. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; WORLD WAR II.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Courtois, St?phane. (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, tr. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fein, Helen. (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. New York: The Free Press. Walliman, Isidor, and Dobkowski, Michael N., eds. (1987). Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. New York: Greenwood Press. Weiner, Amir. (2000). Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Russia is the world’s largest country, 1.7 times larger than second-place Canada, ten times larger than Alaska, and twenty-five times larger than Texas. It stretches from 19° E Longitude in the west to 169° W Longitude in the east, spanning 5,700 miles (9,180 kilometers) and eleven time zones. If Russia were superimposed on North America with St. Petersburg in Anchorage, Alaska, the Chukchi Peninsula would touch Oslo, Norway, halfway around the globe. Thus, when Russians are eating supper on any given day in St. Petersburg, the Chukchi are breakfasting on the next. From its southernmost point (42° N) to its northernmost islands (82° N), the width of Russia exceeds the length of the contiguous United States.
Russia’s size guarantees a generous endowment of natural features and raw materials. The country contains the world’s broadest lowlands, swamps, grasslands, and forests. In the Greater Caucasus Mountains towers Europe’s highest mountain, Mt. Elbrus. Flowing out of the Valday Hills northwest of Moscow and into the world’s largest lake, the Caspian Sea, is Europe’s longest river, the “Mother Volga.” Almost three thousand miles to the east, in Eastern Siberia, is Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake. The Russian raw material base is easily the world’s most extensive. The country ranks first or second in the annual production of many of the world’s strategic minerals. Historically, Russia’s size has ensured defense in depth. Napoleon and Hitler learned this the hard way in 1812 and in the 1940s, respectively.
Because Russia is such a northerly country, however, much of the land is unsuitable for human habitation. Ninety percent of Russia is north of the 50th parallel, which means that Russian farmers can harvest only one crop per field per year. Three-fourths of Russia is more than 250 miles (400 km) away from the sea. Climates are continental rather than maritime. Great temperature ranges and low annual precipitation plague most of the country. Therefore, only 8 percent of Russia’s enormous landmass is suitable for farming. The quest for food is a persistent theme in Russian history. Before 1950, famines were harsh realities.
The Russian people thus chose to settle in the temperate forests and steppes, avoiding the mountains, coniferous forests, and tundras. The primary zone of settlement stretches from St. Petersburg in the northwest to Novosibirsk in Western Siberia and back to the North Caucasus. A thin exclave of settlement continues along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. Except for random mining and logging, major economic activities are carried out in the settled area.
Russia’s size evidences great distances between and among geographic phenomena. Accordingly, it suffers the tyranny of geography. Many of its raw materials are not accessible, meaning they are not resources at all. The friction of distance-long rail and truck hauls-accounts for high transportation costs. Although in its entirety Russia displays great beauty and diversity of landforms, climate, and vegetation, close up it can be very dull because of the space and time required between topographical changes. Variety spread thinly over a massive land can be monotonous. Three-fourths of the country, for example, is a vast plain of less than 1,500 feet (450 meters) in
