ALGORITHMS OF THE SOVIET-RUSSIAN GENOCIDE TO THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF R. LEMKIN'S REPORT "SOVIET GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE"

Abstract

The article is devoted to the actual theoretical and practical issues related to the factor of genocide in the being of the Ukrainian nation in the 20th and 21st centuries. The author of the article aims to study the impact of the genocide committed by the Russian Bolsheviks in the 1930s on the character traits of Ukrainians, outline the relationships between Soviet totalitarianism and Russian colonialism. The current genocidal practice of the Rashists is shown as a direct continuation and development of the "classic Soviet genocide", as it was characterized in 1953 by a prominent international lawyer, the author of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin. The article presents the key points of Lemkin's text "Soviet Genocide in Ukraine", shows their significance for understanding the events of the past and present. According to Lemkin, the four main components of the Russian-Soviet genocide are: large-scale destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, attempts to liquidate the Ukrainian Church, purposeful depopulation of the Ukrainian peasantry and elimination of its subject features, settlement of Ukraine with foreign ethnic elements for a radical change in the composition of the population. All these components, in a slightly transformed form, are also relevant in 2022-23, during the Russian large-scale invasion. They are peculiar algorithms of genocide - with the difference that in the 1930s the goal of Russian Bolshevism was the destruction of millions of the most active and conscious Ukrainians and the lowering of the Ukrainian nation to the level of a Moscoworiented ethnographic community, while today it is about the complete denial of the separate existence of Ukrainians, their transformation into a stateless object component of the Russian people, on the element of the "Russian world". The author of the article emphasizes that there is only one way of "recovery" for Ukrainians as a post-genocide nation. Such a nation can be cured of the fear of living a full-blooded national life only by a mass heroic act, in all forms and manifestations. Only in this way will the Ukrainian nation fully restore its subjectivity and become a real geopolitical and geocultural actor.