On one of those legendary California afternoons, full of
sunshine and overlooking the magnificent San Francisco Bay, I
sat on the patio of the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, talking with Norman Naimark about genocide.
It seemed a incongruous way to spend an afternoon in the crisp
air and almost oppressive sunlight, but so it was. Naimark’s
contention, in his controversial new book Stalin’s Genocides: We
need a much broader definition of genocide, one that includes
nations killing social classes and political groups. His case in
point: Stalin. He argues that the Soviet elimination of a social
classes (e.g., the kulaks), as well as the mass execution and
exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people”
were, in fact, genocide. We miss the big picture when we treat
these as discrete episodes. I had wondered at the time, and
still, about the role technology in the last century’s explosion
of genocidal episodes. Clearly, incidents within archaic society
— for example, the Old