A few days ago, I published a long article about what Azerbaijan calls “the Khojaly genocide” as an exemplar of a false genocide claim that is generated for political reasons. The genocide claim, made in the immediate context of Azerbaijan’s war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh amid the Soviet Empire’s collapse, became a crucial pillar of Azeri nationalism, binding the population of the new State in a collective sense of victimhood and hostility towards a foreign neighbour that plots their destruction—and always has. For in Baku’s telling, Khojaly is only the most-recent of multiple genocides perpetrated by the Armenians against Azeris stretching back to the first decade of the twentieth century.

The Armenian response is that it is they who have suffered an interminable campaign of genocides by Turkic enemies, from the terrible massacres during the deportations in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 through to the pogroms against the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan, at Sumgait and Baku, in 1988 and 1990. This competitive victimhood has entrenched “divergent national narratives”, each denying the suffering of the other, which sustains the conflict by preventing the two sides finding even the minimal common ground that would be needed to begin working towards peace and reconciliation.

As discussed in the article, part of what makes the Khojaly case interesting is that, despite a general trend in academia since the 1980s—reflected in the media and popular understanding—to dissociate the word “genocide” from the Holocaust and apply it ever-more widely, the academic consensus rejects the Khojaly genocide claim. An important reason for this is the recognition that Khojaly is part of a broader phenomenon in the post-Soviet space, where “genocide” is widely used in official political discourse “with barely any reference to the international legal understanding of the term”.

An example of this tendency was furnished yesterday by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who tweeted: “Bucha. It was a genocide, recognized by everyone.”¹ Bucha refers to a small town, less than twenty miles from Kyiv, which the Russian army entered on 27 February 2022, during the first days of the full-scale invasion meant to destroy the Ukrainian State and incorporate the country into Russia. Bucha’s liberation a month later, as the invaders were driven back from the Ukrainian capital, disclosed a hideous scene. The occupiers, including some of Russia’s elite troops, had raped, tortured, and massacred the civilian population, leaving bodies in the streets.²

In the regional context, Zelensky is doing nothing unusual in choosing to call the Bucha slaughter, or indeed the entire Russian war, genocide. The Azeris frame Khojaly as one episode in an Armenian war in the Karabakh that was genocidal tout court. Even before that, right at the beginning of the post-Soviet world in 1989, Romania’s revolutionaries had put Nicolae Ceaușescu and his grisly wife, Elena, to death after a show trial that declared them guilty of genocide.³ Russia, meanwhile, claimed it invaded Georgia in 2008 to stop a genocide in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Tbilisi counter-claimed that Russian and its separatists were the perpetrators of genocide.

Alongside contemporary genocide claims, numerous post-Soviet States have raised such claims about the past. This often happened in the early phase of independence and was geared towards reinforcing the dual processes of nation-building, namely anathematising the Communist period as an alien imposition and forging a new national history, whether remembered, recovered, or invented. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all commemorate Soviet genocides against them. Poland has Katyn. Mutatis mutandis, Russia claims it, as successor State to the Soviet Union, embodies the victims of the Nazi “genocide of the Soviet people”.

At a sub-State level, the Crimean Tatars and Chechens have appealed for their deportations by Stalin to be recognised as genocide, and the Circassians have made the same appeal about their deportation by Imperial Russia in the 1860s.

What does make the Bucha genocide claim slightly unusual is that it comes from Ukraine. Ukrainian émigrés first seriously mobilised to campaign for recognition of the terror-famine during Soviet collectivisation in 1983, on the fiftieth anniversary, and the Holodomor was legislatively enshrined by independent Ukraine as the national genocide in the 2000s. Ukraine thereafter avoided making supplementary genocide claims for itself, even under the extreme provocation of Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, which (one may detect a pattern here) was justified by Moscow as protecting people in the Donbas from a “genocide” by “the Kiev junta”. The Ukrainians understood—as the Azeris and Armenians seem not to—that proliferation erodes, rather than enhances, the legitimacy of genocide claims.

There is an irony in the attempt to use politicised genocide claims as a mechanism to escape the Soviet legacy because there can be no surer testament to it. In 1946, before the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring genocide a crime under “international law”, the Soviets had already used the Nuremberg “trials” as a stage to blame the Germans for Katyn. The 1948 Genocide Convention had barely entered into force in 1951 when the Soviets started accusing the United States of genocide for its treatment of the Native Indians and African Americans at home, and for repelling Soviet aggression in Korea. It was in this era that the Armenian genocide-recognition campaign originated as a Soviet active measure to prevent and then punish Turkey for joining NATO. And the Soviet capture of the U.N. General Assembly in the 1960s, creating an in-built anti-Western majority via the amusingly named Non-Aligned Movement, made the U.N. the key theatre for launching an endless series of KGB global influencing campaigns based on fabricated genocide charges.⁴ The most intense and enduring such campaign was against Israel.⁵

I got a bit of blowback for saying Zelensky was not quite correct that “everyone” agreed Bucha was a genocide. The basic objection was that this was in some way downplaying the seriousness of the atrocity. In a strict sense, this is unfair: to argue that an event does not meet the technical definition set out in the Genocide Convention is to say no more than that. It does not necessarily involve contesting the facts of the case nor their criminality; the issue is why the crime happened, and whether the perpetrators had the “special intent” for genocide. Emotionally, of course, the objection lands because those making a genocide claim do so precisely because genocide is viewed as the top of a hierarchy of atrocity—“the crime of crimes”—and events so recognised thereby enter the same category as the Holocaust; to refuse this will incur resentment. The only way through is to reiterate that the Convention definition is what it is; “genocide” is not a synonym for “a bad thing”. And a crime does not have to be genocide to deserve attention, condemnation, and retribution.

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