Presentation of Raphael Lemkin’s “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine”

We presented the book “Raphael Lemkin: Soviet genocide in Ukraine. The article 33 in languages”. 

The first edition of this book had a small circulation, it did not go on sale, and only a limited number of copies were donated to Ukrainian and foreign libraries and organizations. This is a supplemented edition of Raphael Lemkin’s famous report on the genocide of the Ukrainian nation committed by the communist regime. In the book the speech is translated into 6 official UN languages ​​and 27 other languages.

Raphael Lemkin is a scholar and lawyer, known primarily for the introduction of the term “genocide”. He was the first expert in international law to classify the crimes of the communist totalitarian regime against Ukrainians as genocide.

On September 20, 1953, Ukrainians held a grand demonstration in downtown New York and concluded their march with a public assembly at Manhattan Center. Among the invited guests was Rafael Lemkin. The speaker condemned Moscow’s communist imperialism in Eastern Europe and the genocide of Ukrainians.

However, in a short speech, he did not have time to tell everything and explain the manifestations and mechanisms of this crime. Lemkin did not publish the full text of the report during his lifetime, and his innovative approach and legal analysis remained unknown for a long time.

Fortunately, the original typescript has been preserved, and it was later transferred to the Manuscripts Department of the New York Public Library. The document became available in 1982, but it entered scientific circulation only at the beginning of the 21st century.

The 2020 edition is supplemented with five more translations ​​(into Georgian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Hungarian). The original text of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948, and its exact translation into Ukrainian are attached to the collection.

The book was shortlisted for “Research / Documents” in the “Past” category of the All-Ukrainian rating “Book of the Year 2020”. And in March 2021, the Prime Minister of Ukraine presented the book to Pope Francis.

You can buy the book in a museum shop, supporting the museum, or on the publisher’s website.