In his book Crisis, War and the Holocaust in Lithuania, which I recently reviewed on these pages, historian Saulius Sužiedėlis virulently attacked those who in the past had opposed the Prague Declaration of 2008. When I read the list of signatories to the Prague Declaration signed in 2008, it makes me think of prisoners or detainees becoming free after having spent 45 years between four closed walls.

Getting free in the outside world and knowing next to nothing that has happened in the world at large during their detention. Most of these signatories, people of esteem, some of them heroes in their fight against Communist yoke, have suffered greatly and they yearn for recognition as victims of totalitarian crimes. But the only tangible contemporary phenomenon with some kind of kindred inhuman similitude they want to equate it with is — the Holocaust. So, oblivious to the manifold scourges the twentieth century has known worldwide, they signed on to the conclusion that “both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted the 20th century” and “recognition of Communism as an integral and common part of Europe’s common history.” The declaration contains the word “same” five times, in support of the declaration’s underlying thesis that Nazi and Soviet crimes are absolutely — the same.

Is it possible to be so self-centered on one’s suffering as to become blind to history?

The Austrian and German Empires started a bloody war of revenge and conquest in 1914, and it was near where I now live that gas as a weapon was first used in April 1915 by the Germans. By then, they had already committed a genocide in Namibia between 1904 and 1908. Turkey, in guise of the Ottoman Empire, followed their example in 1915, wiping out a large part of their Armenian fellow citizens. At the end of World War I, the Spanish flu wiped out twenty million lives. Imperial Japan unleashed a cruel, aggressive and devastating war in the 1930s, first in Manchuria, later in China. During the months of the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, 200,000 Chinese civilians were killed, and thousands of women raped and then cruelly killed. Japan attacked the United States in Pearl Harbor, but in many occupied Asian countries, hundreds of thousands of people died under their “Samurai” regime including white and Asian civilians in internment.

Europe’s common history should also keep alive the memory of colonialism when Belgium, France, Portugal, the Netherlands and the British Empire, Germany (the case of Namibia) held hundreds of millions of citizens as mere cogs to produce riches for their countries. Some estimate that millions had been victims of Belgian colonial administration in the Congo. Several wars were fought by France (Algeria, Vietnam), Portugal (Angola, Mozambique, Guineas-Bissau), the Netherlands (Indonesia), the British Empire (Malaysia, Kenya) while the botched partition of India in August 1947 had led to a million and a half deaths in sectarian clashes of violence between Muslims and Hindus.

And “natural” illnesses? It is estimated by official health institutes that there have been between 150 and 300 million dead from malaria in the twentieth century. Around 300 million died from smallpox. Millions from tuberculosis. Some of these diseases could have been eradicated had the world powers not been first and foremost interested in producing weapons, including (in terms of the era) weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, some months after I was born in 1945, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, causing about 200,000 immediate deaths and multitudes of related casualties over many years. The start of the atomic race.

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The primary contentious point in the Prague Declaration is plainly described in article 1 proclaiming that the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes had as part of their ideologies “exterminating and deporting nations and groups of population” which is in fact puts the accent on the “group” rather than the “victims” in effect paraphrasing articles 1, 2, and 3 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

In the final section of his  book, Sužiedėlis mentions that according to a report by Beria, 276,000 Lithuanians had been repressed between 1944 and 1952, a figure I found confirmed in a biography of Beria by French author Françoise Thom.

Had these victims of Soviet Communism as well as the dozens of million others who came before and after the death of Stalin been victims of genocide?

Let us look first at Russia in 1917 an later under Soviet rule.

Historian Nicolas Werth, son of journalist and famed war correspondent Alexander Werth, fully fluent in Russian, describes in La Terreur et le Désarroi – Staline et son Système (‘Terror and Dismay – Stalin and his system’) how even before the Bolsheviks imposed their revolution in October 1917, under the Kerensky provisional government, starting in the summer of that fateful year, immense bands of armed deserters or mutinied soldiers – on the whole peasant-soldiers, freed political prisoners, roamed the countryside and the cities, playing havoc with populations, properties, attacking arsenals, sometimes killing property owners and landowners.

When the Bolsheviks reached power, they were confronted by anarchy in the countryside and rashly imposed Lenin’s instructions to “encourage violence by the masses to complete the task of destruction, instrumentalize it, organize it, and subordinate it to the interests and necessities of the workers’ movement and the general revolutionary fight” (translation cited by Nicolas Werth, from Lenin’s Complete Works, in Russian). Werth also mentions that, much later, Gorki and the Bolsheviks came closer when it became clear to them that it was no longer necessary to stimulate the violence of the masses, but it was, instead, necessary to repress the “Asiatism of the Russian peasant.” And, when the Soviets came to power the peasantry’s violence, this time against the Communist authorities, continued under different forms and in different regions of the country. One of the major tasks of the Communist leaders had thus been to vanquish the exterior forces during the civil war, and, on the other side, to  tame an unruly and unwilling population. Civil disorder was then replaced by state violence.

The Red Terror and violence in the USSR and later in the enslaved Eastern European countries had been founded on the notion of “enemy of the people” (‘Враг Народа’ – coined at the end of March 1917 in Soviet resolutions, according to Werth). Over decades, dozens of millions had thus been arrested, sent to the gulag or killed outright. To give one example, in his revised edition of  The Great Terror on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Robert Conquest mentions these astounding figures for the years 1937-1938: 7 million arrested, 1 million executed, 2 million died in camps. But are these staggering figures of murder victims of Soviet Communism to be considered as a group in the sense of the Prague Declaration and the 1948 US convention on Genocide?

We know from many authors and research that the victims of Red Terror were arbitrarily, sometimes haphazardly, chosen according to quotas imposed per district to the organs, according to denunciations from upright and concerned citizens (sometimes caused by jealousy, fear of losing one’s position due to a competitor, in the hope of getting noticed by the authorities, etc.). In his Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes a worker coming to work in a room, wanting to hang his cap on something. Seeing a bust of Stalin, he hung his cap on Stalin’s bust and found himself in the gulag by denunciation. Poet Yossip Mandelstam was sent to the gulag and died there after having written a satirical poem on Stalin and been denounced to the NKVD the very next morning after its unique private rendition (according to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs). Stéphane Courtois, one of the authors of the Black Book of Communism said that “the Communist regimes have erected mass crimes as a real system of government in order to establish their power.” Nicolas Werth qualifies that system of Bolshevik violence as Перегиб (pereguib: a deviation from the political line, an excess, a deformation…).

As one can see, with the Soviets there had been no scientific approach to their violence, no thought-out supposedly (or quasi-, or pseudo-) scientific process, no plans, no groups targeted unless — other than Stalin’s mind. Rather an anarchical, almost Asiatic form, vaguely similar to what Ivan the Terrible did to the population with the help of his Oprichniki in the sixteent century. Although one could concede that the famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933 (Holodomor) had been “a mass predation becoming genocidal” (Nicolas Werth’s formulation), as well as the mass deportations of the Chechens, Crimean Tatars, the Ingush people, the Germans from the Volga during World War II and more.

As for Germany, the followers of the philosophers Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel had a more rational, purportedly scientific, approach as how to deal with the “enemies of the people.” First, by way of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, the Nazis had crafted a precise scientific definition of The Jew. And when the time had come to get rid of them, the Nazis put in place a sophisticated industrial structure. On the one hand industrialized death factories located in remote places in Poland, with gas chambers — or trucks — and ovens to burn the corpses.

On the other hand, and this had started in a nearly amateurish way as from September 1939 in Poland, an elite corps had been created of professional killers: the Einsatzgruppen. Only 3,000 men with local helpers who on their own killed more than a million Jews in the then western republics of the Soviet Union, including in the Baltic States.And during the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942 where master mass-murder organizers Heydrich and Eichmann had been present, the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem had been finalized and put on paper, aiming at the total extinction of the Jewish ‘race’ in occupied Europe. This is unique: the Jews had been targeted as a distinct ‘race’ in Europe slated for complete extinction. An endeavor that very largely succeeded.

I find very sad the lack of historical perspective of the esteemed signatories of the Prague Declaration, almost a global blindness, who have been incapable of seeing the difference between the criminal USSR regime, a murderous bloodthirsty regime that killed indiscriminately its own citizens irrespective of age, creed, faith, race, nationality, gender, not as a group but as individuals, and the Nazi regime — also a criminal and bloodthirsty one — that had set as one of its essential and basic political and military goals to exterminate the Jewish “race” as a group, in its entirety, not only in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia (the pre-September 1939 Reich’s lands), but in every single country it had occupied and enslaved during the war. And, with the explicit policy of doing so in any and every corner of the planet where it might one day find them.