Nations have tugs of war over the official definition of the word “genocide” – which mentions only national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. Look at the annual international tussle over whether the 1915 Turkish massacre and deportation of the Armenians “counts” as genocide.Norman Naimark, author of the controversial new book Stalin’s Genocides, argues that we need a much broader definition of genocide, one that includes nations killing social classes and political groups. His case in point: Stalin.The book’s title is plural for a reason: He argues that the Soviet elimination of a social class, the kulaks (who were higher-income farmers), and the subsequent famine which killed 3-5 million Ukrainian peasants – as well as the notorious 1937 order No. 00447 that called for the mass execution and exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people” – were, in fact, genocide.“I make the argument that these matters shouldn’t be seen as discrete episodes, but seen together,” said Naimark, a respected authority on the Soviet regime. “It’s a horrific case of genocide – the purposeful elimination of all or part of a social group, a political group.”Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the 1930s. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin’s henchmen.The term “genocide” was defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention’s work was shaped by the Holocaust – “that was considered the genocide,” said Naimark. …“There was more similarity between Hitler and Stalin than usually acknowledged: Both chewed up the lives of human beings in the name of a transformative vision of Utopia. Both destroyed their countries and societies, as well as vast numbers of people inside and outside their own states. Both, in the end, were genocidaires.”All early drafts of the U.N. genocide convention included social and political groups in its definition. But one hand that wasn’t in the room guided the pen. The Soviet delegation vetoed any definition of genocide that might include the actions of its leader, Joseph Stalin. The Allies, exhausted by war, were loyal to their Soviet allies – to the detriment of subsequent generations. …Accounts “gloss over the genocidal character of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, which killed systematically rather than episodically,” said Naimark. In the process of collectivization, for example, 30,000 kulaks were killed and 2 million deported.We will never know how many millions Stalin killed. “And yet somehow Stalin gets a pass,” Ian Frazier wrote in a recent New Yorker article about the gulags. “People know he was horrible, but he has not yet been declared horrible officially.”Russian public opinion polls still rank him near the top of the greatest leaders of Russian history.There’s a reason for Russian obliviousness. Every family had not only victims but accomplices and perpetrators. “A vast network of state organizations had to be mobilized to seize and kill that many people,” Naimark wrote.“How much can you move on? Can you put it in your past? How is a national identity formed when a central part of it is a crime?” Naimark asked. “The Germans have gone about it the right way,” he said, pointing out that Germany has pioneered research about the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime. “Through denial and obfuscation, the Turks have gone about it the wrong way.”Without a full examination of the past, Naimark observed, it’s too easy for it to happen again.