The Russian Duma has passed a resolution rejecting claims that the mass starvation in Ukraine in the 1930s amounted to genocide.

This AP report on the resolution has been picked up widely. It quotes the resolution thus: There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines. Its victims were million of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country…

Also:

The Duma warned the West to stay away from the issue. "This tragedy does not have — and cannot have — any internationally recognized indications of genocide and should not be used as a tool for modern political speculation," it said.

Elderly Alexander Solzhenitzin has weighed in to support the Duma position, denouncing those who argue that the famine was an act of genocide are telling ‘musty lies’.

It is not easy to find a full text of the resolution in English. In fact, I have failed to find one.

But the RIA Novosti report does add a point missing from the AP version: The lawmakers condemned the Soviet regime’s "disregard for the lives of people in the attainment of economic and political goals", along with "any attempts to revive totalitarian regimes that disregard the rights and lives of citizens in former Soviet states."

What exactly is genocide? The 1948 UN Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide gives a definition:

…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.

So the Ukraine famines, undoubtedly part of Stalin’s policy to crush the farming classes in Ukraine, might be said to qualify under (c). It is noteworthy that as the Convention was being negotiated the USSR (under Stalin) objected to the definition covering political or economic groups.

What to make of this Duma resolution?

Stalin’s catastrophic policies did not wreak havoc only on Ukrainians, of course. But the sheer numbers of Ukrainians who died give this disaster a special quality.

There must be few Ukrainians alive today who did not have a relative perish in this unique European horror, so it is not surprising that the question has huge contemporary relevance there and more widely. The more so since the Soviet authorities for decades suppressed open discussion about it or any proper investigation into how this crime was carried out and by whom.

So when the Russian Duma says that issue should not be used as "a tool for modern political speculation", one answer is "Why not, if that is how you want to describe it?" Surely far more still needs to be done and can be done to raise international awareness of this catastrophe and cast light on who perpetrated the worst excesses?

Imagine if the Duma had not only condemned in seemingly rather bland terms the Stalin regime’s ‘disregard for human life in attaining its economic goals’, but also had called on the Russian authorities to release forthwith all documents on the issue and to remove from the Kremlin Wall Necropolis the remains of Stalin and anyone else associated with causing the famine, plus had urged a major new monument to the victims to be erected in a prominent place in Russia.

But of course that did not happen. And won’t.

Official Russia finds it impossible to come to terms with the sheer scale of the suffering caused by Soviet Communism, and fiercely denounces others trying to do so, lest such activities cause Russians too to start demanding greater detail about their own history. 

Europe has to keep at the forefront of its attention the fact that some of those Soviet leaders whose orders deliberately led to millions of peacetime deaths are still given places of honour in Red Square.

Perhaps that fact indeed should give rise to ‘modern speculation’ about the current Russian elite’s intentions – about why so many people in and around Russia have very good reasons for keeping the past firmly under their own control…