Raphael Lemkin: the man who gave the world the concept of genocide and exposed Soviet crimes against Ukraine

Raphael (Rafał) Lemkin was born in 1900 in the village of Bezwodne near Volkovysk (today in the Grodno region of Belarus) to a Polish-Jewish family. At that time, the area was part of the Russian Empire; after World War I, it became part of the reestablished Polish state.

From a young age, Lemkin was fascinated by questions of international law and how mass crimes against groups of people could be prevented. One event left a particular mark on him: in 1921, in Berlin, Armenian student Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated Talaat Pasha, the former Ottoman minister and one of the chief organizers of the Armenian genocide. Tehlirian was acquitted, and this raised a troubling question for Lemkin: why does international law allow organizers of mass atrocities to go unpunished?

Why is the killing of a million people considered less of a crime than the killing of a single individual?

— Raphael Lemkin’s reflections on mass murder

Lemkin studied law at Lviv University and later earned his doctorate in law in Poland. His years in Lviv shaped his ideas about legal responsibility for mass crimes.

In the 1930s, he spoke at international conferences and proposed the new legal concepts of “barbarity,” the deliberate destruction of peoples, and “vandalism,” the destruction of cultural heritage. Though his ideas gained little traction at the time, they became the foundation for his later conceptualization of genocide.

When Poland was partitioned in 1939 after the start of World War II, Lemkin first fled to Sweden and later to the United States. In 1944, he published his landmark book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, where he introduced and defined the term “genocide” as part of his analysis of Nazi occupation policies.

According to Raphael Lemkin, genocide is “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves”.¹ Lemkin argued that acts of physical or biological extermination are typically preceded by cultural destruction — assaults on a group’s symbols, traditions, or religious life. To prevent genocide, he emphasized, the world must act at the earliest stages, when these cultural attacks begin².

This work laid the foundation for the prosecutions of the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials and became the intellectual bedrock of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Despite his achievements, Lemkin died on August 28, 1959, in New York City, in relative poverty and with little public recognition. Only a small group of mourners attended his funeral.

Lemkin and Ukraine

Ukraine held a special place in Lemkin’s life and thought. He maintained close ties with the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States.

In 1953, at a New York commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Holodomor, Lemkin delivered his lecture “The Soviet Genocide in Ukraine,” in which he unequivocally described Stalin’s policies as genocide against the Ukrainian people.

He identified four key components of the Soviet genocide in Ukraine:

1. The destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia — “the brain of the nation.”
   
2. The liquidation of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — “the soul of Ukraine.”
   
3. The extermination of the peasantry through famine — the keepers of language, traditions, and culture.
4. The resettlement of Ukraine’s territory with other populations to change its ethnic makeup.

In doing so, Lemkin became the first scholar to frame the Holodomor not merely as an artificial famine or political repression, but as a deliberate strategy of national destruction.

¹ Lemkin, R., 1944. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, p. 79. Available at: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/b989dd/pdf 

² Lemkin, R., 1948. Memorandum on the Genocide Convention, Raphael Lemkin Papers, American Jewish Historical Society (AHJS), p. 154, Box 6, Folder 5, as cited in Moses, A.D., 2010, Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide, in Bloxham, D. and Moses, A.D. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, Oxford University Press, available at: https://www.dirkmoses.com/uploads/7/3/8/2/7382125/moses_lemkin_culture.pdf