A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (review)

Weitz's book is part of a growing body of literature that applies comparative methodology to the study of genocide and stems from scholars' frustration with the narrow national perspective from which history of the Holocaust is often written. Weitz's discussion centers on four cases: the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and the former Yugoslavia. As the title suggests, Weitz uses three criteria to identify and analyze each case: utopian visions of the future, racial theory, and extreme nationalism.

Unfortunately, for a work written by a historian A Century of Genocide provides little if any new information or interpretation. Weitz acknowledges in the introduction that he does not possess the language skills necessary to use many primary sources. This lack of expertise leads Weitz to exclude from consideration Rwanda—one of the quintessential cases of genocide. He explains his choice of case studies in part by the far-reaching effects on the twentieth century generally of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. By extension, Cambodia and Yugoslavia are significant at least in part because they implemented the Soviet "model," and because Nazi-style policies contributed to the interethnic strife in the former Kingdom and socialist republic of Yugoslavia (i.e., during WWII and during the 1990s).

Obviously, the "racial utopia" the Nazis attempted to build led to the twentieth century's most horrific genocide. Weitz's theoretical construct also seems to work in the case of Cambodia, where the euphoria of victory and fear of defeat placed an ever- growing number of people in the category of "enemy." To identify the enemy, the Khmer Rouge used an arbitrary mix of social, political, and national criteria. The problems start when Weitz attempts to superimpose defining features of the Nazi regime on Stalin's Soviet Union and post-Tito Yugoslavia.

Weitz acknowledges that racial categorization was conspicuously missing in Soviet practice; nevertheless, he tries to prove that the communist lexicon contained "biological" elements, selectively quoting Stalin and Hitler. When he does not substantiate his claim, Weitz substitutes the word "racialized" for "racial." More than 100 pages into the book, Weitz finally explains that a "racialized social system"—the term that Michael Omi and Howard Winant used to describe social processes in the United States from the 1960s on—is one that ascribes immutable characteristics to individuals based on their ethnicity.

In the Ottoman Empire, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda, those who profited from genocide are clearly identifiable. But, aside from rhetoric extolling the Khmer nation, there is nothing to suggest that ethnic Khmers gained from the persecution of minorities in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Weitz errs even more when he implies that ethnic Russians benefited from the Stalinist deportations. He mentions that many Soviet leaders were in fact non-Russians, but calls that an "anomaly." When talking about the deportations of the Crimean Tartars and the Chechens (for some reason omitting several other ethnic groups exiled either in their entirety or in part), Weitz inappropriately raises the issue of popular participation in the purges. He suggests that ordinary people participated in the roundups and then pillaged the deportees' possessions. In fact, the deportations were carried out by the NKVD, army troops, and other officially mobilized individuals; the deportees kept much personal property, while houses, livestock, etcetera. went to the state, which subsequently assigned much of it to neighboring collective and state farms or to new settlers (some of the latter brought in against their will). In some places Russians eventually took over the abandoned property, but elsewhere it was Ossetians, Georgians—whoever happened to be living nearby.

Of the four objectives Weitz ascribes to the Serbs, the facts support only two: the expansion and the ethnic homogenization of Serb-held territory. The terror against Muslims and Croats was simply a means to an end. The Serbs were no more guilty of "making the idea of a federative Yugoslavia unthinkable" than any other...