About the project
The USSR signed the document in 1948 and ratified the Convention six years later. It is argued that the USSR's position was motivated by a blend of realpolitik, the concept of “social legality” and the emergence of WWII as a new founding myth. Mass violence perpetrated by the Stalinist regime was barely registered by the Convention's authors, whether Soviet or international. When the confrontation between the USSR and the West intensified, both sides in the Cold War embraced the Genocide Convention as a propaganda tool.
Some researchers claim that the Soviet delegation to the UN in 1946–1948 objected to the inclusion of political groups in the Convention's final draft in order to avoid liability for mass crimes perpetrated by the USSR in the 1930s and early 1940s. However, a careful review of available sources reveals that the underlying factor for the debates concerning protected groups and international vs. national jurisdiction was the so-called Truman Doctrine. The political situation in post-war Europe overshadowed any humanitarian considerations that the superpowers could have taken in the process of framing the Genocide Convention. Despite their attempts to assert precedence from the Nuremberg trials, the Soviets succeeded in forcing through their version of a new international agreement within the established framework of the UN and its subcommittees.
The project concluded in 2014.
Results
Parts of the project were presented in the form of addresses at conferences in Warsaw in September 2008 and The Hague in December 2008. The project also resulted in a book, The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention. The book contains five chapters:
1. Soviet theories of international law: from the World Revolution to the Nuremberg trials
2. The USSR and UN: a power struggle
3. The framing of the Genocide Convention: a fundamental compromise
4. Raphael Lemkin: caught in the Cold War’s vortex
5. “We accuse you of genocide!”: the propaganda war between the USSR and USA.
Sources include, but are not limited to, the UN negotiations, legal studies, literature on genocide, Soviet legal literature and personal documents belonging to Raphael Lemkin, who was a driving force behind the Genocide Convention.
The project’s preliminary conclusions were published as articles by Anton Weiss-Wendt: The Soviet Union and the Genocide Convention: An Exercise in Cold War Politics in: Agnieszka Bieńczyk-Missala and Sławomir Dębski, Rafał Lemkin: A Hero of Humankind, Warsaw, The Polish Institute of International Affairs, 2010: 179–93; Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide’ in: Dominick Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence, Milton Park, Routledge, 2009: 107–15.