Anton Weiss-Wendt. The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention.

Extract

In his impressively researched book The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention, Anton Weiss-Wendt offers an in-depth account of the drafting of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, documenting the UN General Assembly’s adoption of it in 1948, its entry into force in 1951, and UN members’ arguments for and against ratification. Although the book focuses on Soviet views regarding the definition of genocide and specific provisions of the draft convention, it provides an important window into how other UN members responded to the Genocide Convention, particularly the United States.

Weiss-Wendt faults the Soviet Union for undermining the scope and efficacy of the international treaty. It opposed the inclusion of political groups alongside national, ethnic, racial or religious groups as targets of genocide—an omission that is widely considered one of the convention’s major limitations. Although Soviet delegates argued that a “scientific definition of genocide” precluded the protection of political groups, who did not have immutable characteristics and were ephemeral, the history of Stalinist mass repression in the 1930s and the postwar Communist takeover of Eastern Europe informed this position (86, 282). Soviet resistance to characterizing property confiscation and forced labor as genocidal acts was also a product of the regime’s deployment of these practices as it forcibly collectivized agriculture, exiled “kulak” peasants to work in “special settlements,” and established the Gulag, an elaborate system of forced labor camps.