The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention by Anton Weiss-Wendt (review)

When Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide," he initially identified it with the intention to "annihilate a group of population by destroying the essential foundations of life for that group," and further posited that "genocide might be political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral" (p. 19). Lemkin's concern lay as much in the extirpation of identity as of life, and hence he conceptualized genocide broadly to encompass, in Anton Weiss-Wendt's words, the destruction of "social and political institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, economic means, personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and finally life itself" (p. 19). For Lemkin, the path forward lay in law, specifically an international treaty.¹ And Lemkin had his wish: the Genocide Convention was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951.

Weiss-Wendt's book unpacks what happened to "genocide" as it journeyed along this path of codification. To be clear, codification was conditioned by compromise among states; and states were often motivated by Cold War selfishness, spite, manipulation, and machination. The Convention narrowed—and even mangled—the set of protected groups to national, ethnic, racial, and religious. The Convention, moreover, limited the recognized forms that genocide could take. The title of Weiss-Wendt's book reflects its argument that the expansiveness of genocide as an idea was "gutted" in the process of codifying it in an international treaty.

The process of codification, while certainly generative, was thus also limiting. Weiss-Wendt fingers the Soviet Union as the primary culprit. The Soviets gutted the Convention, principally through a relentless and successful push to exclude political groups from protection. They were concerned with the exercise of external penal jurisdiction over political arrests, executions, and forced population movements conducted under Josef Stalin (for example, the Great Terror, the Gulag, and deportations of entire nations, pp. 72–75).

Weiss-Wendt concludes that the U.S. delegation to the UN "had played the key role in bringing the Genocide Convention to life" (p. 142).² When readers consider the details that Weiss-Wendt presents, however, it becomes apparent that the U.S. also was complicit in gutting the treaty. U.S. officials were preoccupied with race, and specifically the Convention's implications for segregation in the American South. The Soviets leveraged the U.S. government's fears over genocidal liability throughout the negotiation process, insisting on the connections between genocide and racism. The State Department ensured that the lynching of African-Americans—"sporadic outbreaks against the Negro population" (p. 80)—would fall outside the scope of genocide.³ The Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Genocide went so far as to recommend ratification of the Convention only with "reservations"—including the explicit exclusion of "lynching, race riots, and so forth" (p. 228). Even so, it still took decades before the U.S. finally ratified the Convention.

Despite discussion of American politics and reference to the U.K.'s reluctance to support the prohibition of cultural genocide (owing to British fears of linkages to colonialism), only the USSR—not the U.S. or U.K.—gets singled out in the book's title. In addition, the roles of many other states that objected to the inclusion of political groups, including Brazil, Iran, and South Africa, get short shrift; Canada also was anxious about cultural genocide (p. 91). Indeed, the Soviets ratified the Convention on May 3, 1954—more than three decades before the Americans did.

However, without the treaty, contemporary institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court likely would not be able to prosecute genocide under their own enabling instruments, and, in the case of the first two, convict defendants. So, yes, while the "two superpowers worked in dialectical unison to the detriment of international criminal law" (p. 280), the Convention surpassed...