The Rimlands: A Geography of Genocide

Studies of genocide have a habit of isolating discrete examples from any bigger picture. This tends to be in line with a general treatment of the phenomenon as a product of a particular country's problematic development, the emergence of radical and uncompromising ideological tendencies, and, very often, the role of megalomaniac, power-crazed leaders who have driven this or that polity towards extreme outcomes.

Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands has been suggestive of this historical- geographical intermeshing at least in relation to the Holocaust and Holodomor.^[638] The very title of his study underscores the idea of an extended region in which many peoples - Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Germans amongst others - suffered mass violence leading to the death of millions.

The key question here is can (indeed should) we emplot (to borrow a term of Paul Ricoeur) all these examples within a single narrative and at the same time legitimately embrace them within one map? Snyder's analysis did not require him to do that, not least because his main interest was in the Hitler- Stalin contest not genocide per se. Even so, Snyder implicitly reinforces the standard liberal view that the phenomenon is aberrant, each genocide thus a separate deviation from the normal course of historical development. An alternative view, however, might argue that modern genocide is an aspect of a systemic dysfunction and so a good indicator of humanity's direction of travel towards a globalised political economy founded on the creation of an international system of nation states. As such the spatial emplotment of genocide could be as a series of similar or even linked events.

For instance, a major clustering of genocides occurred towards the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as very diverse but premodern societies in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Antipodes sought to resist Western imperial encroachment, penetration and ultimate colonial-settler subjuga­tion.

This returns us to the European rimlands as the primary 1912-53 locus of genocide. Let us attempt a clearer geographical delineation. Though he uses the more politically neutral term ‘borderlands', Terry Martin's description of these regions, as an L-shaped swathe of territory ‘extending southwards from Leningrad through the Balkans, and then eastward across southern Ukraine and Turkey into the Caucasus region', serves well.^[640] However, the delineation could be made stronger through the identification of three sub-zones.

Does this confer a coherent geography of genocide in the rimlands? Not exactly. There were, to use a more volcanic metaphor, parts which we might visualise as a central, ‘hot' core, with, by degrees, cooler, outer layers which at critical moments seemed to be drawn by the core's heat. There could be spill-over too, into adjacent regions, extreme violence, like any seismic shift, being no respecter of pre-existing boundaries. If there is fuzziness here, that is because - still utilising the geological language of fault lines, stress points and volcanic eruptions - the way in which the genocidal reshaping of the political, social and, above all, ethnographic landscape of the rimlands took place did not come all at once through one single catastrophic event, but rather might open up at one point, close down again for a while, and then re-emerge further down the fault, coales­cing with other feedbacks, to produce a sequence of blasts, spasms and after-shocks. Only when the zone had ‘cooled' into new political building blocks was the genocidal sequence brought to a close, though even then - particularly by reference to what happened in post-1990 Bosnia and the Caucasus - some regions were plunged once more into genocide, sugges­tive again of the resilience of fault lines.

Yet despite all this, there was nothing intrinsic in the human geography of these regions to suggest the inevitability of genocide. On the contrary, the fundamental paradox of the rimlands is that, while their diverse peoples may have been living on pre-existent political fissures, their consistent record was one of co-existing with each other for centuries without recourse to mass, inter-group violence. This does not mean there was no violence. However, Arnold Toynbee's 1923 verdict on the specifically Ottoman scale of it was that the previous dozen years had been ‘worse than during the rest of the previous century, worse again during that century than between the years 1461 and 1821'.^{[641] [642]} In other words, what was at stake was not a continuity of ancient inter-ethnic hatreds - the repeated Western presumption as to Balkan and Middle Eastern mindsets - but rather a case of radical rupture. The key questions are how we explain the rupture and, if it wasn't from within the traditional fabric of traditional rimlands' society, from whence it came.

Toynbee's answer was simple: it came from the outside, as a Western import, in the form of nationalism. But once more we have a paradox. The notion that nations were or, to follow Brailsford's dictum, should by rights have been existing on this or that piece of territory cut across a premodern ethnographic reality in which an extraordinary mosaic of different ethno­religious and linguistic communities, whether peasant or mountaineer, nomad or transhumant, socially, economically and culturally interacted in the same plural environmental space. Worse, from the nationalist perspec­tive, they did so with no reference whatsoever to national difference. Here is a classic observation from the British author, Arthur Ransome, on his trip to Russian-occupied eastern Galicia early on in the Great War:

The peasants working on the land were very unwilling to identify themselves as belonging to any of the warring nations.

It was not then that rimlands' inhabitants did not recognise distinctions between themselves. But those distinctions were fundamentally based on religion, supported by an understanding of self embedded in clan, family and habitus, and thus completely at odds with the nationalist ‘imagined commu­nity' of language, primordial identity and terrestrial goal-driven purposeful­ness across time and space.^[643] Such notions began as the preserve of schooled, literate, usually urban people, more often than not of people aware - through the cognitive map of the world they imbibed through newsprint - of the rapid pace of change in the wider world, including as it impinged on their own patch, and hence of all manner of existential dangers which lurked just over the horizon.

If the emergence of nationalism in the rimlands thus began as a minority creed, it usually also carried feelings of both acute anxiety and grievance. However, their common corollary was a powerful proactive urge towards rapidly cohering and mobilising the ‘nation' - even where the majority of that constituency were not yet aware of their alleged commonality. It was the accruing of national assets - firstly the very numbers of people whom one could call one's own (the assumed marker of which was usually ‘language') followed by a designation of the territory upon which they had supposedly lived since time immemorial - that, by means of modern maps and censuses, as well as lexicons, novels and historical accounts, became the legitimating tools through which the nation's entitlement was presented or demanded of a wider international (usually meaning metropolitan) community. Herein also implicitly lay the pre-1912 limiting factors on the making of national destiny. There were already putative nation states - including Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia - in the rimlands' zones. But these had emerged at the margins of still existing empires and could not expand further without either militarily confronting them singly or in combination, or having the support of other, great powers. Equally crucially, none was a true nation­state in the sense that each included ethno-religious communities who were perceived by the political elites of these countries as extraneous, alien or downright subversive to the national cause. Given the weakness of these states, the possibility that ‘minorities', as they now increasingly became called, might act as some fifth column for the dominant imperial or some other state interest became nationalists' recurring nightmare.

Therein lay the origins of genocide in the rimlands even before the violent removing or killing of ‘minorities' had begun in earnest. One could of course seek to absorb such problematic peoples (forcibly or otherwise) into the tissue of the nation in what Zygmunt Bauman would call an anthropophagic approach. Or one might opt for an alternative anthropoemic route, vomiting out the unwanted elements from society and polity.^[644] Either route could be seen as Social Darwinian and zero-sum, which is why Lemkin tended to view both of them as potentially genocidal. However, before 1912, while there had already been a whole series of massacres and mass flights as Muslim muhajirs (refugees) in particular had fled regions where Ottoman power in the Balkans and Transcaucasia had been reduced, no up-and-coming national state had been strong or foolhardy enough to undertake a systematic ethnic cleansing. Paradoxically, the best prior model for how to achieve that came through one of the empires: Russia's early 1860s deportation of the Circassian peoples from the north-west Caucasus onto Ottoman shores offered an indubitably genocidal precedent.^[645]

Another such imperial precedent came through the Ottomans themselves, plans for wholesale mass relocations of non-Turkish national groups at the far corners of the residual empire emerging in the wake of the Committee of Union and Progress's 1908 usurpation of power. Significantly, though in principle upholders of empire, the CUP were increasingly focused on achiev­ing this goal through a nationalist ‘Turkey for the Turks' path. Further radicalised through the depredations of the Balkan wars in 1912-13, it was above all the CUP's decision to enter the Great War that unlocked the potential for mass deportations of people being turned into wholesale opera­tional practice. The first great casualties were the Armenians, the most concentrated element of whom inhabited eastern Anatolia.^[646] But if what was broadcast by the CUP as deportation in summer 1915 was actually full­scale genocide it was also the first of many such ‘national' assaults on the non­Turkish elements of the residually multi-ethnic empire.^[647]

Writ large, the 1914-18 war opened up the prospect for a mass ethnic reordering of the resulting rimlands' shatter zones by whichever national or postimperial forces had the wherewithal with which to stamp their territorial writ on them. The most drastic of such reorderings would be conducted by the Soviets and the Nazis, Stalin's great advantage over his Hitlerian antithesis, in the central Asian, far eastern and northern expanses of the Russian empire to which the Soviets had succeeded, providing a vast spatial dumping ground for any and all of his unwanted ethnic and social enemies.^[648] Genocide, if one prefers, at one remove. Denied these possibilities through the failure of his 1941 military campaign against the USSR, Hitler's only recourse was directly to exterminate the Jews and vastly reduce Slavic peoples, as envisaged in Generalplan Ost within what amounted to the much more limited geographical scope of the rimlands.^[649]

However, focus on the vast scale of Hitlerian and Stalinist killings should not deflect us from who were the ultimate beneficiaries of totalistic efforts to recast rimlands' geography. When the dust settled and their territorial integrity was confirmed, albeit with boundaries truncated or redesignated thanks to a triumphant Stalin, it was the ‘New Europe', even paradoxically for the next forty or more years a communist ‘New Europe', that was the heir to the genocidally cemented process of people-homogenisation begun between 1912 and 1923. Nor was it only Hitler and Stalin who were protagonists in this extirpation of rimlands' plurality. The Western Allies, despite their 1919 treaties' commitment to safeguard the minorities of the shatter zones, had also given their imprimatur to the ‘unmixing of peoples' between Turkey and Greece at the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, effectively a mandate for ethnic cleansing.^[650] Twenty-two years later at Yalta they repeated the formula when, in association with Stalin, they endorsed the even larger compulsory removals of millions of ethnic Germans plus many Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians and other peoples.^[651] The protection of minorities was thereafter a dead letter. In short, the genocidally supported destruction of a historic human geography involved diverse geopolitical protagonists from conflicting ideological systems. That said, as we will see by way of the final ‘cleansings' from Macedonia- Thrace at the onset of the Cold War, the liberal reaffirmation of the culturally homogeneous nation state was also closely aligned to the emergence of a Western led, ultimately hegemonic world system of such states.