Genocide

A nine-chapter anthology on genocide as a crime in international law and as a historical practice, commissioned and edited by Alexander Galkin, a serious Soviet scholar of German fascism.

The contributors are worth reading before the contents. Galkin and Robert Ivanov are both Doctors of Historical Science; Inna Cherkasova is an economist specialising in southern Africa; Vsevolod Sofinsky a diplomat who sat on the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities; Valentin Shubin a lawyer and Vice-Chairman of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR who attended the 1979 Phnom Penh tribunal as an observer.

Galkin's own chapter on Nazi Germany is the strongest thing in the book and would not embarrass a Western historian of the subject. The legal chapter, by Victor Menzhinsky, is unusually candid: it sets out accurately that when the USSR ratified the 1948 Genocide Convention it entered a reservation to Article IX, the article referring disputes over the convention's interpretation and application to the International Court of Justice, and did not consider that provision binding upon itself. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia entered the same reservation.

Everything the book does well, and everything it declines to do, follows from that sentence.

Its latest material is of late 1983 and early 1984, which places composition under Andropov and Chernenko and publication in the year Gorbachev took office.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.