Lipstadt and the Denial of Soviet Ethnically Targeted Deportations and Killings
The academic double standard regarding the crimes of the USSR and National Socialist Germany reached its height in the 1990s largely as a result of the efforts of Deborah Lipstadt, then a professor of religion at Emory University in Georgia. In 1993, Deborah Lipstadt wrote in Denying the Holocaust, “no citizen of the Soviet Union assumed that deportation and death were inevitable consequences of his or her ethnic origins.” (p. 212). Not only is this statement not true as the examples of the Russian Koreans, Russian Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks attests. But, it is near impossible to imagine that she was not aware of this. First, the total deportation of the Karachais, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, and Kalmyks to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Siberia had been denounced by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. His secret speech containing this denunciation was widely distributed that same year by none other than Mossad. Second, one of the first books to detail the near total deportation along ethnic lines and the inevitable mass deaths it caused among the Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Balkars, Kalmyks, and Crimean Tatars to Central Asia and Siberia was Aleksandr Nekrich’s The Punished Peoples published in English by W.W. Norton in 1981. Nekrich should have been an impeccable source for Lipstadt given that he was ethnically Jewish, a former member of the CPSU, a veteran of the Red Army fight against Nazi Germany, and the first historian to have indirect access to the Soviet archives on this subject through restricted doctoral theses. He was a captain in the Red Army in the war against Germany and won the Order of the Red Star twice. (https://www.yadvashem.org/research/research-projects/soldiers/aleksandr-nekrich.html). Yet, for political purposes Lipstadt deliberately ignored both these well known sources along with the works of Robert Conquest, N.F. Bugai, and others. The denial of the internal deportation of nearly the entirety of at least nine whole Soviet nationalities and the mass mortality that inevitably resulted in a book attacking so called “deniers” of the Holocaust takes chutzpah to a whole new level.
Lipstadt’s meteoric rise to a near rock star levels of acclaim and accolades came shortly after when David Irving attempted to sue her in British courts for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier in her 1993 book. Irving filed his case in 1996 and lost badly. Yet, ironically Irving unlike Lipstadt did not focus his work on WWII atrocities and up until 1993 his references to them in his published works was quite limited. Later, Irving would actively affirm that some four million Jews had been killed by the NSDAP regime during WWII. In contrast Lipstadt never retracted her false claim that “Stalin’s terror was arbitrary” (p. 212) and had no ethnic component in the selection of its victims despite a huge outflow of academic publications in Russian, German, English, and other languages on both the national operations of 1937-1938 and the near total internal deportations of targeted ethnic groups starting in fall 1937 with the Russian Koreans and continuing up until the November 1944 deportation of the Meskhetian Turks. Even Israeli scholars such as Yaacov Ro’i have noted that the Soviet government deliberately targeted for deportation on an ethnic basis peoples like the Russian Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars and that the conditions of this ethnic cleansing inevitably led to massive premature deaths. (“The Transformation of Historiography on the ‘Punished Peoples’,” History and Memory, vol. 21, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2009, pp. 150-176). It should be noted that Ro’i is deliberately referencing Nekrich here in the title of his article and Nekrich left the USSR on an Israeli visa. Despite the admission that these groups were targeted and deported on the basis of their ethnicity and deliberately sent to areas with living conditions that were known to be lethal by the Soviet government, Jewish scholars from the USSR, and even well established Israeli scholars, Lipstadt never retracted her initial denial. This is very different from Irving’s public later admission that the NSDAP regime did deliberately exterminate some four million Jews in Europe.
Currently Lipstadt’s vaulted reputation is suffering a setback due to her enthusiastic support of Israel’s massive and indiscriminate bombing since October 2023 of civilians in the Gaza Strip. At the same time as I write this piece, David Irving is quite ill and will probably die soon. Hopefully, in the future the current hagiography of Lipstadt and demonization of Irving will be replaced by a universal acknowledgement of the ethnically based crimes of the USSR and a rejection of the idea of the Holocaust as the only genocide committed in the European theater of World War II. There was not just a double genocide, but multiple genocides during this time committed by the Soviet regime. See the works for instance of Jewish historian Norman Naimark of Stanford University, most notably, Stalin’s Genocides published by Princeton University Press in 2010. But, the political power of people arguing Lipstadt’s position still remains extremely powerful in US academia today.