In late March, the State Duma rushed through a bill introducing penalties for denying the so-called “genocide of the Soviet people.” This happened weeks after news broke that Moscow’s shuttered Gulag History Museum is being turned into a museum on the same subject.

Taking place while Russia draws international condemnation for its war in Ukraine, the pushing of the “genocide of the Soviet people” into the public debate shows that the Kremlin is trying to frame Russia as a victim while waving away its own crimes, such as the deportations of Crimean Tatars, Chechens and other Indigenous peoples.

From a legal perspective, expanding the concept of genocide to the vague category of the “Soviet people” raises serious questions.

Do the people who introduced this bill actually understand the definition of genocide? Have they read the Genocide Convention, which Russia itself has ratified?

If the authors of the bill had consulted the Genocide Convention, they would better understand how international law works — and that genocide is, among other things, a legal category. That immediately raises several important questions that deserve answers.

First, according to Federal Law No. 74-FZ, “genocide against the Soviet people” is defined as the actions of Nazi Germany and its accomplices aimed at the destruction of groups inhabiting the territory of the USSR. 

However, when assessed against the criteria of international law, a fundamental problem emerges: there is no evidence of genocidal intent directed at the “Soviet people” as a single, unified group.

In practice, Nazi policy did have a genocidal character. But many of the crimes committed on Soviet territory, including mass killings of civilians, punitive operations, and the siege of Leningrad, are legally classified as war crimes or crimes against humanity, rather than genocide. As historian Konstantin Pakhlyuk, a scholar of memory politics and Nazi crimes, warns, “the term ‘genocide’ gets diluted into a synonym for ‘mass killings’,” eroding its legal and conceptual precision.

If fundamentally different forms of violence are collapsed into a single category of genocide, it becomes harder to distinguish between them, to analyze them accurately, and, ultimately, to prevent them.

Furthermore, the concept of the “Soviet people” itself is highly problematic. The U.S.S.R. was a........

© The Moscow Times