This is a book about a crime in international law, written by a state that had exempted itself from being tried for it.
That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is recorded in the closing chapter by the book's own legal specialist. Victor Menzhinsky's "Judgement of the World Community" sets out, accurately and without embarrassment, that when the USSR ratified the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide it entered a reservation to Article IX — the article referring disputes over the Convention's "interpretation, application and implementation" to the International Court of Justice. The Soviet Union, he writes, "did not consider as binding upon itself" that provision. Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia entered the same reservation. Everything the book does well, and everything it will not do, follows from that sentence.
Genocide is a nine-chapter anthology commissioned and edited by Alexander Galkin, a serious Soviet scholar of German fascism, and put into English by Progress Publishers in 1985. Its latest substantive material dates from late 1983 and early 1984, which places its composition under Andropov and Chernenko, at the coldest point of the second Cold War, and its publication in the year Gorbachev took office. It also places it squarely in a particular campaign: on 29 March 1983 the CPSU Secretariat approved the formation of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, announced on the front page of Pravda three days later.
The contributors' list is 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 is a diplomat who sat on the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities; Valentin Shubin is a lawyer, Vice-Chairman of the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, who attended the 1979 Phnom Penh tribunal as an observer for the Association of Soviet Lawyers. And then, credited with no institution and no degree, there is Konstantin Telyatnikov, "a writer, publicist, historian", who was given Israel.
Take the good chapters first, because there are several and the reader is entitled to know which they are.
Galkin's own chapter on Nazi Germany is the strongest thing in the book and would not embarrass a Western textbook of the period. It is documentary, patient and sourced to the Nuremberg record: Himmler's Untermensch speech, Darré and Rosenberg on race as the key to world history, the Nuremberg Laws, the November 1938 pogrom, Heydrich's letter to Ribbentrop of 24 June 1940 — "A final territorial solution of the problem is essential" — the Madagascar plan, Viktor Brack's March 1941 report to Himmler on industrial sterilisation. It gives the Jewish dead their proper number without evasion or padding: "About 6 million Jews fell victim to fascist genocide." It says that most of them were shot on occupied Soviet territory. Nothing in it is falsified, and it contains none of the pathologies discussed below.
Ivanov's chapter, on the destruction of the Native American peoples, is honest work of the kind he did elsewhere in this series: the Trail of Tears, the scalp bounties, the 1871 reduction of the tribes to "internal, dependent nations", the Dawes Act, the Termination and Relocation Acts, the collapse of reservation land from 138 million acres in 1887 to 43 million by the early 1970s. None of it was invented in Moscow. His claim that over 70,000 Native American women were forcibly sterilised in the 1970s is at the extreme upper end of a genuine scandal; the 1976 General Accounting Office study of four Indian Health Service areas documented 3,406 sterilisations over three years and serious failures of consent. The scandal is real; the number is not established.
Cherkasova on apartheid needs no correction of substance; she opens with Verwoerd's 1963 statement to the House of Assembly that "'Keeping it white' can mean only one thing, namely White domination", and gives the floor to Saul Mkhize of Driefontein, then recently killed, in his own words.
Sofinsky's chapter on Guatemala has aged best of all. Writing in 1983–84, he insists that "terror in Guatemala is directed primarily against the Indians, and is therefore tantamount to genocide against the country's indigenous population" — a claim then largely absent from Western reporting, which preferred a story about the army and the guerrillas. He names Ríos Montt, names El Quiché and Huehuetenango, uses affidavits collected in the Chiapas refugee camps, and cites the International Indian Treaty Council and the new UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, reporting in 1999, found that state forces had committed acts of genocide against Maya groups, and that of more than 200,000 killed or disappeared some 83 per cent were Maya; in 2013 a Guatemalan court convicted Ríos Montt of genocide, a conviction annulled on procedural grounds within a fortnight. Sofinsky was right, he was right early, and he was right for reasons that had nothing to do with his government's convenience.
Now the Israel chapter.
Telyatnikov's argument has to be stated exactly, because a great deal of it is true and the untrue part is not where a hostile reader might assume. The chapter is a sustained account of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of June 1982, the siege of West Beirut, the Ansar detention camp, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila on 16–18 September 1982, the land confiscations in the occupied territories, and Israeli arms sales to El Salvador, Guatemala, Somoza's Nicaragua, Pinochet's Chile and apartheid South Africa. On the great bulk of that, the chapter describes things that happened. It quotes Yaakov Meridor on the refugees — "They should be driven eastward, in the direction of Syria" — and Golda Meir's Sunday Times interview of 15 June 1969 on the Palestinians, "They did not exist", correctly cited and genuinely said. It quotes Moshe Dayan's 1956 eulogy for Roi Rotberg at Nahal Oz — "We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home" — though it promotes Dayan, then Chief of Staff, to Defence Minister. The medical testimony on phosphorus and cluster munitions is grim and, so far as anyone has shown, accurate. The occupation was and is a system of dispossession; Sabra and Shatila was a massacre carried out under Israeli military control and lit by Israeli flares; Israel's own Kahan Commission found Ariel Sharon personally responsible and recommended his removal. None of that becomes less true because Moscow said it.
The chapter is nonetheless dishonest in its figures, and the pattern is consistent: every number goes up. It opens with "Over 30,000 Lebanese and Palestinians... killed and some 70,000 wounded". The Lebanese authorities' own count for the 1982 war was 19,085 killed and about 30,000 wounded; the An-Nahar survey of police and hospital records gave 17,825 killed. At Sabra and Shatila "some 3,300 Palestinians were massacred in these camps"; estimates run from Israeli military intelligence's 700–800 to Palestinian figures approaching 3,500, and the chapter silently takes the ceiling as the fact. At Deir Yassin, "all 300 persons present in the village at the time were murdered by a gang led by Shamir" — above every serious estimate, the Birzeit University research finding evidence of no more than 107 dead, and an attribution the chapter's own next sentence undercuts by identifying Begin as the Irgun's leader. Qibya, in October 1953, becomes a massacre "in which 54 children were murdered"; it killed around 69 people, roughly two-thirds of them women and children. These are real atrocities being inflated, which is the particular kind of falsification that hands the argument to the other side.
And the chapter never once names the Kahan Commission. It calls it only "the special committee", sources its contents to Pravda of 17 September 1983, and reports that it found the massacre "perpetrated with the knowledge and connivance of Tel Aviv and Washington". It found nothing of the kind about Washington, and what it found about Israel was a chain of indirect responsibility the chapter converts into sponsorship. The reason not to name it is obvious: an Israeli government commission that forced out its own Defence Minister four months after the event is an awkward object for a thesis about "fascistization", and it has no counterpart anywhere else in the volume.
Then there is the comparison, which is the reason this chapter needs to be discussed at length rather than filed with the others.
The equation is stated on the chapter's second page and never qualified: "The bloody crimes of Zionism in Lebanon are only comparable in their ruthlessness with the crimes of nazism in World War II and the atrocities of the American military in Vietnam." It recurs — "Just like the leaders of Hitler's Reich, the Zionists openly promulgate their expansionist goals" — and it is given a theoretical form: "The crimes of the Israeli military in Lebanon are not sporadic acts of cruelty and sadism by an embittered soldiery. They constitute the logical practice of the misanthropic ideology of Zionism."
It is worth being precise about what makes this the antisemitic move rather than merely an overheated one, because the distinction matters in both directions. Criticism of Israeli state policy is not antisemitism, and treating it as such is a slander that has done real damage to Palestinians and to honest argument. What is happening here is different, and it can be located in three specific operations.
First, the selection. Of all the comparisons available for a modern army's conduct in an invaded country — and the chapter itself reaches for My Lai, Guernica, Lidice and Oradour in a single sentence about Sabra and Shatila — the analysis returns, again and again, to the one crime committed against Jews as Jews. Nothing in the argument requires it; every point the chapter makes about Lebanon could be made without it. What the choice accomplishes is to inform Jewish readers that the Holocaust was not something uniquely done to them but a technique they have inherited and are now applying.
Second, the essentialisation. Once the crimes are "the logical practice" of an ideology rather than the acts of a government, and once soldiers are described as "impregnated with the pernicious spirit of Zionist ideology", the people holding that ideology have stopped being political actors capable of choosing otherwise and become carriers of a contaminant. That is the grammar of racial thinking, applied here to the victims of the original.
Third, the slippage. The chapter is formally careful with its vocabulary: across forty-one uses of "Zionist" and "Zionism" it uses the word "Jewish" exactly once, and that once is inside a quotation from someone else. The distinction holds at the level of nouns. It fails at one sentence: "Zionist propaganda, the systematic brainwashing of the population, education of the youth in the spirit of Judaic dogmas have ensured the Zionist rulers of Israel the support of a substantial part of the country's population." Judaic dogmas. At the point where the chapter has to explain why Israelis believe what they believe, the political category gives out and a religious one takes its place. One sentence is not a doctrine, and it should not be inflated into one; but it is the sentence in which the vocabulary stops holding the argument back.
Two things must be said against overstatement, and they matter.
This book does not make the worst of the charges that disfigured Soviet anti-Zionist publishing after 1967. There is nothing here about the Ha'avara transfer agreement, nothing about the Judenräte, nothing about Kastner, no suggestion anywhere that Zionists collaborated in the destruction of European Jewry. Some Soviet titles of the period did make that claim; it is absent from this one, and Galkin's chapter on the Holocaust treats the Jewish dead as victims and nothing else.
And the chapter's authority for the Nazi comparison is not Soviet but Jewish and Israeli: Yeshayahu Leibowitz on a "Judeo-Nazi policy", Israel Shahak on a "Judeo-Nazi mentality", the Communist Party of Israel and MAPAM on "fascistization", and above all Uri Davis, quoted at length. Two things follow, and the second is the more damning.
The sourcing is thinner than it looks. The Leibowitz claim — that the Israeli government pursued a Judeo-Nazi policy, and "that Israel had accomplished about the same as Hitler had done after six years in power" — carries no footnote at all. The Shahak phrase, the Davis passage and the Dayan quotations are all cited to a single pamphlet from a single Washington conference, Judaism or Zionism: What Difference for the Middle East (6–7 May 1983), and three of them to the same page of it, page 23. The chapter's Israeli chorus is one page of one pamphlet.
More important: Telyatnikov's own claim goes far beyond his witness's. Read what Davis actually says in the passage the chapter prints. He compares the legal position of Palestinians under occupation to that of German Jews between the 1935 Nuremberg Laws and 1939 — and then stops, deliberately, to disavow the rest: "I wish to make completely clear that I am not saying the Palestinian Arabs are being murdered in Israeli gas chambers. Nor am I saying that it is likely that Palestinian Arabs will be murdered in the future in Israeli gas chambers." Davis draws the line. The chapter quotes him drawing it, and has already crossed it forty pages earlier, in a sentence of its own about the crimes of nazism in the Second World War. That is the whole method in miniature: borrow a Jewish anti-Zionist's carefully bounded analogy, print the boundary, and argue as though it were not there.
The tradition this series writes from has never had a difficulty holding both halves of this. Palestinian national rights — return, self-determination, an end to occupation — and implacable opposition to antisemitism are not in tension and never were; they are the same commitment to not judging people by their descent. The equation of Zionism with Nazism is not a stronger version of the first. It is a surrender of the second.
There is one more thing in the chapter, and Telyatnikov cannot use it. He records that on 25 September 1982, after Sabra and Shatila, "400,000 Israelis — young people, office employees, students, scientists and military men, who were outraged because of the bloodbath in Lebanon — demanded that the government put an end to the invasion of that country." He records Peace Now's hundred thousand on 3 July. If Israeli society is "impregnated" with a misanthropic ideology and undergoing fascistization, who were those people? The chapter reports them and has no theory that can accommodate them. As so often in this series, the best argument against the book is in the book.
Which brings us to the silence, and here the finding is arithmetical.
Search this anthology on genocide, published in Moscow in 1985, for the Crimean Tatars: nothing. For the Chechens and Ingush: nothing. For the Volga Germans, the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Karachais, the Meskhetians: nothing. For collectivisation, for the famine of 1932–33, for Katyn: nothing. For the "rootless cosmopolitan" campaign of 1949 or the Doctors' Plot of 1953: nothing. The phrase "anti-Semitism" occurs exactly once in sixty-five thousand words, in Galkin's account of Weimar Germany, where it names a thing that had "been implanted in the German minds since the Middle Ages" and stayed there. The Soviet Union appears in this book in one capacity only: as the liberator of Oświęcim and the largest victim of the fascist enemy.
Robert Ivanov also wrote Blacks in United States History, published by Progress in the same year and introduced elsewhere in this series, where the identical silence was found. There the omission could at least be called a matter of scope. Here it cannot, because this book is about the legal category itself — and because it tells the reader, in its own voice, why the category was built the way it was. Menzhinsky records that the Soviet delegation proposed a preamble stating that genocide "was organically related to fascism and misanthropic racist theories", and complains that its defeat left the Convention with "shortcomings". Galkin's preface supplies the same proposition in the language of historical materialism: genocide is "not a natural and objective form of relations between nations, not an integral phenomenon of human history, but a hideous deviation born of decrepit and outdated social relations."
If genocide is organically related to fascism, and a deviation produced by outdated social relations, then a socialist state cannot commit it — not as a matter of evidence but as a matter of definition. That is why there is no chapter on the deportations. The silence is not an oversight and it is not only censorship; it is the doctrine working as designed. It is also the reason for the Article IX reservation: a state that has defined itself out of the offence has no reason to accept a court that might disagree.
The deportations of 1943–44 were forty years in the past, and within the professional lifetime of every contributor. On 14 November 1989 — four years after this book appeared — the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a declaration recognising the forcible resettlement of the deported peoples as illegal and criminal acts. The word the book could not print about its own state, that state's own legislature printed within five years.
The Kampuchea chapter shows the same machinery at work on recent history. Shubin was in the room at the Phnom Penh tribunal, and his account of the Khmer Rouge is substantially accurate and in places unbearable: the emptying of Phnom Penh, the three categories of population, the near-annihilation of the Cham, the destruction of the mosques and pagodas, Tuol Sleng. He still uses the three-million death toll adopted by the People's Republic of Kampuchea; the serious range is roughly 1.5 to 2 million, Ben Kiernan's much-cited estimate around 1.7 million, which is a fifth of the country. But the striking thing is his first sentence: "In January 1979, a popular uprising swept away the bloody clique of Pol Pot from the longsuffering land of Kampuchea." The word "Vietnam" does not appear in the chapter. Not once. In the 1979 Progress anthology Kampuchea: From Tragedy to Rebirth, the Vietnamese invasion at least had to be argued away — Burchett and Ozerov spent paragraphs denying it. By 1985 the argument has been retired and the fact deleted. The chapter assigns the catastrophe to Mao, and says nothing about what Moscow said or failed to say between April 1975 and late 1978.
One last structural observation. Hitler is this volume's universal solvent. He is invoked against Israel, against the United States, and — most revealingly — in Edgar Cheporov's chapter on Northern Ireland, which honestly concedes that "there is no more of the mass extermination of the indigenous population in Ulster" and then asks anyway: "In his time, Hitler turned the better half of Europe into a giant concentration camp... And isn't it genocide that the British authorities are practising in Ulster?" Discrimination in housing and employment, internment, and the Derry killings of January 1972 are all real and all worth condemning in their own terms. Calling them genocide, in a book that has just described Treblinka in detail, does not raise their gravity; it lowers the word's. A comparison available for every case discriminates nothing — and a book that will make it in seven directions but never in one has told the reader where its limit is.
Every argument in this introduction was made in print before the book was written, in the same tradition, and mostly in the Trotskyist press.
On the Soviet campaign itself, the decisive text is fourteen years older than this volume: Nathan Weinstock, "The Soviet Bureaucracy as a Source of Zionism", Intercontinental Press vol. 9 no. 3, 25 January 1971, written on the Leningrad trials. Weinstock names Trofim Kichko, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences author whose antisemitic caricatures had embarrassed even Western Communist parties, and states the finding flatly: the "anti-Zionism" of the USSR "has a strong odor of anti-Semitism", and this is "a crime — a crime against the Jewish community, against the cause of socialism, and against the Palestinians". Three victims, in that order, from one act. He returned to it in "Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism", Inprecor no. 44, 19 February 1976, observing that the anti-Jewish purge in Poland after 1967 was conducted "in the name of 'anti-Zionism'", as the campaigns of Stalin's last years had been conducted under the banner of "cosmopolitanism".
That same issue of Inprecor carries G. Stepanovich's "Crimean Tatars: The Struggle of an Entire People", part of a dossier on the imprisoned Tatar leader Mustafa Jemilev. It gives the night of 18–19 August 1944, the twenty minutes to pack, the 238,500 deported of whom 205,900 were women and children, and the finding that slightly more than half survived. It names the Volga Germans, Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Meskhets, Kalmyks and Black Sea Greeks, dates each deportation, and disposes of the collaboration pretext. One issue of a small European Marxist fortnightly, nine years before this book, printed both halves of the argument that a Moscow anthology on genocide could not print at all.
On Lebanon the reply was immediate and conceded nothing to Israel. Intercontinental Press vol. 20 no. 31, 4 October 1982, carried a joint statement issued on 21 September by the French LCR, the Italian GCR and the American SWP, observing that the massacre "had to take place" before Reagan, Mitterrand and Pertini "'discovered' that the Palestinians were threatened with real genocide by Begin and his Lebanese fascist friends". The same issue carries "400,000 demonstrate in Tel Aviv", built from first-hand reports by members of the Fourth International's Israeli section — Michel Warschawski, Lea Tsemel and others — which is to say from precisely the movement Telyatnikov could count but not explain. And in the same issue David Frankel states this introduction's position in eleven words: the programme for Palestinian national liberation "is anti-Zionist, but it's not aimed against the Jewish people." International Viewpoint no. 14, 4 October 1982, added what Moscow could not: that the crocodile tears flowed in Washington, Paris, Rome, Riyadh, Damascus "and even Moscow whose silence and passivity largely contributed to the isolation of the Palestinians."
And on Guatemala, where this book was right, the same press was right alongside it: Fred Murphy, Intercontinental Press vol. 21 no. 16, 5 September 1983.
Read Galkin on Nazi Germany, which is scholarship. Read Sofinsky on Guatemala, which was ahead of its time and has been vindicated by a truth commission and a court. Read Cherkasova on apartheid and Ivanov on the reservations for accurate history that Cold War convenience did not have to distort. Read the Israel chapter with the Kahan Commission open beside it, and with the Palestinian claim held firmly in one hand and the Nuremberg analogy refused in the other — the two are not alternatives. And read the whole as the deposition it is: sworn by a state that had, in the same instrument, reserved the right not to be cross-examined.