The Raphael Lemkin Society

The ideological and intellectual inspiration behind the Society is Raphael Lemkin, the prominent 20th-century lawyer and author of the concept of the crime of genocide. He played an active role in drafting the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Raphael Lemkin was born into a Polish-Jewish family and studied law at Lviv University (historical Poland, contemporary Ukraine). During World War II, 49 of his relatives were killed by the Nazis, including his parents.

Lemkin understood genocide not only as the physical or biological destruction of a group, but also as the systematic eradication of its culture, language, spirituality, and traditions — everything that constitutes a people’s identity. However, in the process of preparing the 1948 Convention, the notion of cultural genocide was removed from most of its provisions.

When reflecting on Soviet policy toward Ukraine, Lemkin underscored the cultural dimension of national destruction. He described it as a deliberate, staged process: first came the assault on the nation’s “brain,” with teachers, writers, and cultural leaders targeted; then the attack on its “soul,” as Ukrainian clergy were arrested and persecuted; next, the forced displacement of communities; and finally, the famine that decimated the peasantry — the very people who carried forward Ukraine’s language and folk traditions.

“If the Soviet program achieves complete success,” Lemkin argued, “if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, then Ukraine will perish just as surely as if every Ukrainian had been killed, because it will have lost that part of the nation which preserved and developed its culture.”