A Millennium of Conflict 

An argumentative edge is a risky thing, especially in a book of history, even popular history. We want authors to have views—to see their material in a fresh light, to tell us what’s important, and to impose a frame on the raw facts that deepens our understanding of the past. Some readers even seek out history told from a particular point of view—Marxist history, for example, or postmodern history. But it’s easy for a historian to go too far, for a point of view to start to feel like a tendentious slant. Readers looking for truth quickly come to mistrust a writer who they feel has an ax to grind—especially when the case being made is an argument about genocide.

Eugene Finkel, now a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was born in Lviv, in western Ukraine, into a Jewish family deeply scarred by the Holocaust. As he tells us in his new book, Intent to Destroy, his grandfather Lev Finkel returned home from fighting in World War II to find that his extended family—parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews—had perished. Eugene, born in 1977, went on to become a scholar of the Shoah, studying first in Israel, then the U.S. In 2017, he produced a well-received scholarly book, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival During the Holocaust. Clearly, he knows a great deal about genocide and has some authority to make a case about the violence being perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine. 

What he doesn’t seem to grasp is just how overused and muddy the word genocide has become, and how it might undermine rather than strengthen his case about Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine.

Perhaps fortunately for the reader, Intent to Destroy is really three books. Some 200 pages, more than three-quarters of the text, is solid history, a retracing of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine from medieval times through the present day. The second book, around 50 pages, is the case about genocide: a gruesome, litigious account of the past two and a half years of war. The third book, brief but thoughtful, is a discussion of what can be done: how Russians, Ukrainians, and Ukraine’s friends in the West can address the deeply rooted Russian attitudes that have given rise to the bitter history described in the book.

The history of Ukraine and Russia is a long, winding story, told very differently over the years by Ukrainians and Russians. It starts with a medieval principality, the Kyivan Rus, that flourished in the 11th century and at its height stretched from what is now Odesa to the Murmansk peninsula in northern Russia. Muscovy, founded in the second half of the 13th century, and the Russian Empire, which arose in the 18th century, claimed to be the principal cultural and political heirs of the Kyivan Rus. Many Western historians question this claim. But even if they sprang from the same seed, the two nations, Russian and Ukrainian, diverged sharply in the 13th and 14th centuries when Moscow was dominated by the Golden Horde, an authoritarian Central Asian political culture, and when Kyiv was swallowed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, firmly anchored in the West.

In the centuries that followed, Russia grew into a powerful global empire. Ukraine remained more an idea—a people and a national aspiration—than an established polity, with no state of its own except for a brief interlude in 1917–19, until the country we know today was born in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But this discrepancy in no way diminished the tensions between the two peoples or Ukraine’s significance for, first, Muscovy, then Russia and the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation.

Finkel’s narrative centers on six flashpoints in this serpentine conflict: relations between Ukraine’s nomad Cossacks and early tsarist Russia; the 19th-century consolidation of the Russian Empire; World War I and the Russian Revolution; World War II; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the present day.

It’s not a new story, and Finkel draws on no primary sources. But his history unspools briskly. He’s a good storyteller, mixing large sweeps with close-up detail and a few emblematic anecdotes. And his pointed argument helps distinguish the book from others that explore the same broad territory. 

Finkel’s thesis: “Since the mid-nineteenth century, dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, have been the cornerstone of imperial, Soviet, and, eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies.” It’s an unimpeachable argument, and whatever Finkel’s lapses in nuance and shading, it is useful to have it laid out concisely and compactly in a single volume.

An important secondary argument centers on Russia’s motives. Have leaders from Catherine the Great through Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin been driven primarily by concerns about security—threats from Ukraine and its Western allies—or national identity? How a much smaller, weaker, poorer, historically less educated people without a state could threaten the identity of the Russian colossus is the deep story of the book, and Finkel lays it out well, focusing as much on intellectual and political currents in Russia as on Ukraine. 

Russian perceptions of the threat took various forms over the years. Already in the 18th century, when Catherine began colonizing and annexing parts of Ukraine, Russian popular opinion viewed the Kyivan Rus as the crucible of Russian civilization. By the 19th century, when the Russian Empire had grown so big that losing Ukraine would reduce Russians to an ethnic minority in their own land, Moscow elites tightened their grip, determined to hold on at any cost, including brutal subjugation. Under Putin, the argument takes a new twist that Finkel stretches to classify as identity driven: a national myth of Russian power and military prowess that derives its potency from a perception of external threats—in this case, Western influence on Russia’s soft underbelly, Ukraine. 

Finkel grasps, as he puts it thoughtfully, that “concerns of identity [invariably] shape perceptions of security.” But he argues, mostly persuasively, that “identity, not security or the fear of NATO, has historically been the main driver of Russian aggression” toward Ukraine.

The consequences of this hostility make for painful reading. Again and again, Russia suppressed Ukrainian language and culture, targeting teachers and libraries, changing city and street names, blanketing the territory with Russian monuments, imposing Russian curriculum, appropriating Ukrainian artists and ideas as its own, imprisoning and eradicating intellectuals. This oppression often went hand in hand with economic exploitation and, when it was deemed necessary, economic depredation. (Putin is not the first Russian ruler to think that if he can’t have Ukraine, he must destroy it.) The apogee of this horrific urge was Joseph Stalin’s truly genocidal Holodomor, the government-driven grain and food shortages that killed some 4 million Ukrainians in 1932–33. 

Finkel’s focus on Russia—Russian intellectual history and internal political dynamics—generally serves him well. We meet several generations of militant Russian nationalists, eavesdropping on their meetings and reading their journals. We learn how Russian popular opinion was often the tail that wagged the dog of policy, as when the late Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin, who knew better, caved to public craving to maintain a hard line in Ukraine. Perhaps most chilling for today’s Western readers are the vignettes about otherwise widely revered dissident writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, who both called venomously for the eradication of Ukraine. 

But the book also pays a cost for this Russian focus. It sometimes seems that Ukraine—Ukrainian intellectuals and patriots—gets short shrift in the story. The protagonists of Intent to Destroy are mostly Russian, with Ukrainians often appearing more as objects than subjects, deprived of agency and treated oddly scantily in many sections of the book. 

Finkel rarely misses an opportunity to dwell on what he sees as Ukrainian collaborators in Russian oppression: Cossack elites who craved the tsar’s protection; 19th-century intellectuals who sided with the then-dominant imperial culture; 21st-century communist sympathizers nostalgic for the good old days of the Soviet Union. It’s a long list that sometimes seems unduly prominent in the narrative. 

Finkel also goes out of his way to emphasize the moments when modern Ukrainian leaders used policy to advance national identity, as if this were something driven largely top down by politicians and not a product of genuine popular yearning. Ordinary Ukrainians—peasant farmers, urban workers, intellectuals, and artists—have been chafing at Russian domination for centuries and often resisting fiercely. What’s missing from Finkel’s story, never fully evoked, is the dynamism and intensity of the Ukrainian national feeling—several hundred years of pent-up national feeling—that is now powering the response to Putin’s war of aggression.

Still, even with this skew and some quibbles about Finkel’s tendency to assert rather than demonstrate his arguments, the book makes a powerful, important case that should be required reading for Americans, both those who sympathize with Ukraine and those, like Donald Trump, who argue that the West provoked today’s war by considering NATO membership for Kyiv. “Ukraine’s desire to join NATO was met with such outrage in the Kremlin not because the move endangered Russia,” Finkel writes, “but because Kyiv sought to break free from Russian dominance … The real threat that Ukraine poses is not to Russia’s national security but to the stability of its autocratic regime.” 

It must have been a heady moment for Finkel in early 2022 when his comments about the war made headlines: “Killings in Ukraine Amount to Genocide, Holocaust Expert Says.” He and no doubt his publisher are likely hoping for the same effect with Intent to Destroy, and he spares nothing in his effort to make a grisly case. 

Finkel’s introduction includes a paragraph pointing to the first uses of the term genocide and citing the UN definition: the “intent to destroy” an ethnicity, race, or culture, a phrase that serves as the title of his book. Then, in two later chapters, he offers a selective narrative of the current war, a litany of shocking stories taken from Western and Russian media and a handful of Ukrainian interviews. We hear Russian nationalists fulminating about Ukraine and egging Putin on, as if he needed it. The goal of the operation, one militant argues, must be rendering Ukraine “impossible as a nation state.” After the victory, the writer goes on to claim, the population at large will require “reeducation” and “de-Ukrainization”; the elite must be “liquidated.” 

We also learn about the horrific behavior of Russian troops on the ground: cultural destruction—looting museums and libraries—along with filtration camps, detention centers, torture, summary execution of prisoners, and the kidnapping of perhaps a half-million Ukrainian children. Then there is Bucha, where several hundred Ukrainian civilians were killed and left in the street to rot or buried in mass graves, followed by the destruction of Mariupol, a city all but razed by Russian missiles, where thousands of civilians died.

These facts make for a bitter indictment. But do they add up to genocide? Finkel doesn’t so much argue as assert the case, never considering the possibility that the Russian invasion, monstrous as it is, might not merit his dramatic charge. “Violence against Ukrainian civilians is the defining feature of the conflict,” he writes, “an orgy of uncoordinated mass murder … a genocidal campaign.”

Even as someone living in Ukraine, at risk daily from Russian missile strikes on critical infrastructure and other civilian targets, I find this claim somewhat exaggerated. Civilians have been targeted; many civilians have been killed. But “an orgy of mass murder” comparable to the Holocaust? I think that obscures more than it clarifies. 

In the end, no doubt, this is a matter of judgment, and hindsight may vindicate Finkel’s view. But in an age when even college curricula and museum exhibitions can be tarred with the brush of genocide, I agree with the poet and critic Adam Kirsch, who has argued that perhaps the term should be “retired.” As Kirsch wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, 

“Genocide” has become one of those contested words that can only impede communication; rather than illuminating a wrong, all too often it just provokes debate about whether the wrong meets the definition of the word.

Dropping the term is no doubt out of the question for Finkel, but he could have made a stronger case for his claims if he had been even a little circumspect in asserting them. There’s not much discussion in the book of historical debates about what constitutes genocide: Is the main criterion mass murder or intent to destroy national identity, or, as Hannah Arendt proposed, both in combination? Finkel makes no mention of ongoing disputes about whether Stalin’s Holodomor, surely the worst episode in Russian-Ukrainian history, was indeed genocide. The journalist Anne Applebaum, arguably the West’s leading expert on the Holodomor, argues yes, but many international legal scholars are more hesitant. Finkel could also have bolstered his case with more careful consideration of the numbers. 

There’s a reason that human rights monitors, who know how essential it is to be credible, offer painstaking estimates, detailed methodological explanations, and ranges of casualties rather than absolute numbers. Finkel, in contrast, invariably claims the highest number he can find, with little or no explanation. Were 501 civilians massacred in Bucha, as he maintains? Or 458, the official Ukrainian number? Or somewhere between 73 and 178, as the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights estimates? Any of these totals would be horrific—and inexcusable—but Finkel does his case no service when he fails to examine the numbers more closely. 

Finkel’s concluding section returns to the sober, measured tone of the early part of the book: a compact but probing review of what can be done to address the deep-seated Russian attitudes that have given rise to the present war. He frames the discussion with an unsettling question: “Is coexistence between the two nations even possible?” Full reconciliation is, he recognizes, highly unlikely unless Russia is roundly defeated, an outcome hard to envision given the situation on the battlefield today. This leaves a variety of policy options, some better than others, for Russia, Ukraine, and the West. 

Of the two types of threats driving Russian belligerence—concerns about security and national identity—security is easier to address, although even there, in Finkel’s view, there are no airtight solutions. He dismisses proposals for Ukrainian neutrality, such as promising not to join NATO, and Ukrainian development of nuclear weapons as unrealistic and dangerous. So too the idea, touted by Volodymyr Zelensky and others, of turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” a heavily militarized state, constantly on alert and ready for war. Without nuclear arms, Finkel argues, an Israeli approach is likely to go only so far. This best option, Finkel rightly says, is admitting Ukraine to NATO, the sooner the better. But even this could do only so much, leaving plenty of options—“electoral interference, support for corrupt politicians, economic pressure [and] disinformation”—for continued Russian aggression.

Finkel sees even fewer effective responses to Russians’ aggressive fixation on national identity. The West can help to contain Russia militarily; it can support Ukrainian democracy and ensure that Kyiv has the means to protect itself. But there’s very little Europe, the U.S., or Ukraine can do to drive meaningful change in Russian attitudes. Postwar Ukraine’s best course—arguably, its only course—will be to take care of
itself, focusing on reconstruction and democracy building. But all of this leaves the root cause of the problem unaddressed. 

Finkel ponders at length how Russia itself might engineer a change in public attitudes, with K–12 education, “films, plays and exhibitions,” political leadership, and more. He acknowledges that this would be difficult and likely to take a generation or more, but nevertheless seems to convince himself that it is possible. His vision: “Russians need to learn, understand, and come to believe that Ukraine is a different country and not a severed limb of Russia, that Ukrainians are not Russians who speak in a funny dialect, and that the Russian World is an invention of politicians seeking resources and prestige.” 

Amen to that. Finkel is not wrong that this would cut to the heart of the problem, relieving Ukraine and Europe of the menace on their doorstep. I only wish I could agree that it is plausible or likely.