Ukraine’s commemoration of the Holodomor fell "Genocide is a uniquely modern crime".

It is deeply significant that Ukraine’s commemoration of the Holodomor fell on the same week Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic was convicted of crimes against humanity. Unlike Mladic, who was given a life sentence and is likely to die in jail, those who ordered and supervised the systematic starving to death of up to ten million Ukrainians lived out their lives in peace and died in their own beds.

The top criminal, Stalin, is still revered in Russia. Chances are also slim that those who are still massacring civilians in many countries of the world will ever be brought to justice. But at least in the case of former Yugoslavia some of the more grotesque butchers and their sponsors have been convicted and, moreover, genocide has been condemned by the international community in the court of law.

Genocide is a uniquely modern crime. True, the extermination of native populations in the Americas was certainly genocide, and there had been even earlier instances throughout history, but the practice got going on a truly industrial scale only in the 20th century. It was the century that began with the Germans attempting to wipe out the population of Namibia and the Ottomans massacring their Armenian subjects in Anatolia in 1915. Then there was the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the extermination of the Gypsies and crimes against other nations committed by the Nazis, the deportations of entire nations by Stalin, etc.

Paradoxically, genocide is one of the byproducts of the Enlightenment, an era which declared human life sacrosanct, celebrated the individual and brought rational order into social organization. The thinkers of the Enlightenment also invented the idea of progress – a development path from barbarism to civilization.

Progress could also mean that entire groups of population were useless or harmful and did not fit into the bright future. They should therefore be eliminated in order to make societies better. World War I, in which an unprecedented number of people were slaughtered – some 15 million altogether, including as many as 6 million civilians – somehow served to normalize mass killings on a major scale.

Knowledge and education means power, and most cases of genocide involved better educated, cultured and technologically more sophisticated people killing less educated ones. This may be the reason why the scale of genocide often remains unacknowledged: its victims all too often lack a voice to describe their experience.

Even the Holocaust, the most exhaustively documented case of genocide, for many years was seen from the point of view of German, French, Dutch and Italian survivors of Nazi death camps, who had gone on to write about them. The story of the millions of small town Jews across Eastern Europe murdered on the spot is only now being told.

The Holodomor was committed on the countryside and its victims were largely illiterate Ukrainian peasants. Cordoned off by the horrors of a man-made famine by lines of soldiers and secret police, urban populations even in Ukraine never felt it. Of course something still filtered through the silence, but it happened out of sight and therefore could be put out of one’s mind.

The sheer scale of genocide – the totality of one nation trying to wipe another off the face of the earth, including women and children – necessarily entails collective responsibility. This is why perhaps nations are so determined to deny this crime. Germans are the only people who fully admitted their responsibility and accepted their complicity; even the Japanese don’t easily acknowledge their genocidal crimes in Southeast Asia and Turkey is yet to admit its guilt in the Armenian genocide.

Today’s Russia is a special case. It has often been described as neo-Soviet, but it seems to become neo-Stalinist by the day. Not in the murderous repressiveness of Stalin’s regime or its pervasive terror, but in its rejection of universality accepted morality. 

The Solovyev-Kiselyev circus on state television is a nightly exhibition of modern Russian shamelessness – xenophobic garbage put out by highly paid cynics who have squirrelled away enough assets abroad to spend there comfortable retirement when the time comes. 

These shows are especially outrageous, but the populace at large clearly refuses to believe any of the crimes committed by the Russian government either before or after the revolution. Even more damning, they clearly don’t find any of those crimes, including genocide, a big deal.

It’s the same mentality that produced celebrations of death sentences imposed by the show trials of the 1930s – except at that time if you didn’t show enough enthusiasm you were likely to end up in the GULAG yourself. Now, it’s a voluntary display of immorality – like Pavlov’s dogs who salivate when they hear the bell ring even when no food is put out.

And, just as George Orwell described it in his 1984 – based on his observations of Stalinism – Russians today easily switch on the hatred of Georgians, Estonians or Ukrainians or begin to love Chechens the moment the Kremlin propaganda tells them to.

Nations that suffered genocide are deeply scarred by that experience. The genocide in Anatolia informs the worldview of Armenians both in Armenia and among their worldwide diaspora. However, genocide can provide an inspiration, too.

The State of Israel emerged from the ruins of the Holocaust and the Jewish State’s policies can only be understood in light of the tragedy of European Jewry. Crimean Tatars are one of the most cohesive and brave nations in the former Soviet Union, having struggled for decades to return to Crimea and now resisting once again the Russian occupation of their homeland. And we have not yet seen how the destruction and rebirth of another destroyed and reborn nation, the Chechens, will ultimately play out.

For Ukrainians Holodomor provides a point of departure. Ukraine is a very diverse country and it is still in the process of coming together and building a nation. There are various forces that pull at it, not least of which is the hostile Russian influence. Russia’s disdainful, cynical attitude to the Ukrainian national tragedy may in the end prove to be an even deeper divide than the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine.