88. Golfo Alexopoulos, “Soviet Citizenship,” p. 521. It should be noted here that Alexopoulos makes this statement in agreement with Weitz’s racialization thesis.
89. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provides the following definition: “Genocide means 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; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
90. Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 17.
91. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 281-302.
92. Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key,” p. 175.
93. Both quotations are from David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 397-98 and 388.
94. For the role of excision in Soviet population politics, see Amir Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (October 1999): 1114-55.
95. Andre Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
96. Michael Scammell, “The Price of an Idea,” p. 41.
97. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 332-33. See also Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (London: New Press, 2003), pp. 136 and 144.
98. Nicolas Werth, “Strategies of Violence in the Stalinist USSR,” in Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, ed. Henry Rousso, English language edition edited and introduced by Richard J. Golsan, trans. Lucy B. Golsan, Thomas C. Hilde, and Peter S. Rogers (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 90. As pointed out by Werth, Overy, Martin, and Applebaum, legal decisions such as Article 58-10 of the Soviet Penal Code, the State Theft Law of 1947, the 1933 instructions adding to the existent 1924 resolution of the TsIK regarding sotsvredbye (socially harmful) elements, NKVD Decrees 00447 and 00485, etc., generated an ever-widening array of criteria for criminalizing larger and larger sections of Soviet society.
99. Both quotes come from Dan Diner, Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), p. 185. For his discussion of the role of forced labor under Soviet Communism, see pp. 191-93.
100. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 595.
101. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1943-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.
102. For discussions about “Soviet subjectivity,” see Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key” and Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igor Halfin, pp. 114-35. See also Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 71-96; and Igal Halfin, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 34-40. For a critique of this approach, see Aleksandr Ėtkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 171-86.
103. Quoted in David Priestland, Stalinism and The Politics of Mobilization, p. 293.
104. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. 94.
105. For this point, see Richard Overy, The Dictators, p. 633.
106. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” p. 14.
107. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 116.
108. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, pp. 192-93. A side comment to this discussion could be a reminder that in a Communist system the meaning and significance of forced labor should be explained starting from Marxian terminology. According to Marx, labor was “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities which a human being exercises whenever he produces.” Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton), p. 309. Therefore, forced labor in the gulag represented a method of exhausting individuals, of absolute takeover of the self. The zeks were spent human beings. This is maybe one of the crucial lessons offered by authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nadejda Mandelstam, and Varlam Shalamov. For the liminal nature of gulag experience, what German philosopher Karl Jaspers defined as Grenzsituationen (limit-situations), and the impossibility of communicating it, see the chapters “Return” and “Memory,” in Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 535-656.
109. After 1945, the gulag increasingly merged with the civilian economy, which was being transformed into “a vast industrial empire” (in the words of Figes). It also became more and more unmanageable, and the consequences of “the culture of the champs” deepened its “contamination” potential. Upon Stalin’s death, but also before it, the gulag was seriously shaken by large uprisings such as that of Norilsk. For a short history of the latter, see Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 529-34.
110. Overy, The Dictators, p. 643.
111. Werth, “Stalin’s System during the 1930s,” in Stalinism and Nazism, ed. Henri Rousso, pp. 74-75. In this contribution Werth identifies four interrelated types of violence in Stalin: “The first arose out of the paranoia of a dictator constructing his own cult against ‘comrades in arms’;… terror directed at Party or economic cadres;… virtual criminalization of the daily behavior or ‘ordinary’ citizens;… violence exercised against a number of non-Russian ethic groups.” This rule of arbitrariness for the sake of the etatization of Utopia is best summarized by Dan Diner in the following statement: “In the heyday of Stalinism, despotism and fear were the elixir of rule.” Diner, Cataclysms, p. 191.
112. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality” New York Review of Books 56, no. 12, July 16, 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875.
113. Ibid.
114. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 406.
115. Peter Fritzsche, “On Being the Subjects of History: Nazis as Twentieth-Century Revolutionaries,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igal Halfin, p. 151.
116. Norman Naimark, “Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide,” Telos 136, (Fall 2006): 14. In his piece, Naimark underlines the fact that the author of the concept, Raphael Lemkin, “was convinced that the international community should mount a legal initiative against states that attacked peoples, religious groups, racial minorities, and outlier political groups” (p. 15). Moreover, “all of the early drafts of the Genocide Convention, including the initial U.N. Secretariat draft of May 1947, included political groups in their definition. The Soviets, Poles, and even some non-communist members of the committees and drafting commissions objected” (p. 17).