There is little doubt that Joseph Stalin, despotic ruler of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) for more than a quarter century, was responsible for atrocities that included mass murder. The question for Norman Naimark is whether those atrocities, individually and collectively, amount to genocide, and how Stalin's crimes compare to Hitler's. In answering, Naimark proposes a broader than usual definition of genocide, albeit one with historical pedigree, and insists on blaming Stalin for indirect forms of killing as well as direct ones. If one accepts these two premises, it is easy to declare Stalin a perpetrator of genocide(s), which is the core argument of Naimark's elegant book.

The coiner of the word “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, wanted the word to be applied to mass killings based on not only genos (race or ethnicity) but also other social categories, such as religion, class, and political beliefs. The early drafts of the genocide convention included political groups, but this category was removed from the final version of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide at the insistence of the Soviet Union, whose leaders understood their own vulnerability. Naimark proposes that analysts return to the original broader understanding and treat as genocide the killing of groups defined by class or politics, as well as race, ethnicity, and religion. For historians of the U.S.S.R., this approach renders moot the longstanding debate over whether the artificial famine in the Ukraine (in 1932–1933) was directed against peasants or ethnic Ukrainians; either way it could still qualify as genocide. (Even with the traditional definition of genocide, the Ukrainian Holodomor may still count, as long as one includes, as does Lemkin himself, the earlier Soviet attacks on Ukrainian intellectual and religious leaders.)

Although Stalin's crimes did feature instances of direct killing (such as the massacre of Poles at Katyn or Stalin's identifying persons to be shot during the Great Terror), many of his worst atrocities constituted indirect killing. The deportation in the early 1930s of several million peasants declared to be “kulaks” (rich peasants) and the forced relocation of ethnic minorities (Koreans in the 1930s, Chechens and other Caucasian peoples in the 1940s) resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, whereas the unwillingness of Stalin to stop taking grain from peasant growers in Ukraine, West Siberia, and the North Caucasus ensured death by starvation of at least several million persons.

Naimark rightly insists that Stalin's repeated mass killings were a product of his personality, including its paranoid elements, rather than of the Soviet system per se, and he treats Lenin's moments of savagery as serving concrete goals, in ways that Stalin's did not. He pictures Stalin as becoming genocidal gradually. Although Naimark recognizes that the Holocaust was the worst genocide of modern times, because of its scope, direct killing, and goal of exterminating a people, he still sees Stalin's culpability for mass murder as “not unlike that of Hitler's,” surely a debatable proposition (137).

The book includes chapters on Stalin, dekulakization, the famine in the Ukraine, the removal and deportation of ethnic groups, and the Great Terror, each of which provides a terse and compelling account based on the latest archival research. Some readers might learn for the first time about the repeated persecution of ethnic Germans and Poles (key targets before and during the Great Terror) or about the targeting of social marginals (including returning kulaks and criminals) in the same periods, and the inclusion of both groups in the regional quotas for repression by security police. Ethnic groups and social marginals accounted for the bulk of the persons shot or sent to labor camps during the Great Terror, as Naimark recognizes. For my taste, however, he gives too much emphasis to the traditional view of the Terror, including its political dimension and the supposedly random or capricious aspect of the killings. But this does not detract from his argument that Stalin was a mass killer.

Naimark's is a passionate and carefully constructed account, fairly and judiciously elaborated, respectful of the viewpoints of others, and thought provoking. His call for a broader understanding of genocide makes sense from a moral point of view; mass killing of innocent persons chosen on any basis is wrong. This approach also makes sense for historical analysis, especially if one understands concepts such as nationality and race as constructs rather than permanent categories. Just who is thought to belong to an ethnic or racial group may be just as arbitrary as who is seen as belonging to a social class or political group, and arbitrary attributions seem especially common when groups are treated as alien or deviant. At least this was the case with Stalin and Soviet history.