Raphael Lemkin was born on the northwestern outskirts of the Russian Empire in Volkovysk County, Grodno Province, one of three children born to Joseph Lemkin and Bella, née Pomerants. His father was a farmer, and his mother was an intellectual, artist, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history. Lemkin and his two brothers (Elias and Samuel) learned a lot from their mother, who taught them at home, paying attention to the humanities. As a result, he became fluent in nine and read fourteen languages. The family maintained a traditional Jewish lifestyle; as a child, Raphael attended Heder, and during his school years he took private lessons in "living Hebrew" (and loved this language very much, as a result of which in 1926 he published in Lviv the poem by the famous Jewish writer H. N. Bialik "Noah and Marinka" in his translation from Hebrew into Polish).

Even in his youth, Lemkin paid attention to the problem of the importance of morality for humanity and the theme of atrocities. He was interested in the fall of Carthage, the Mongol invasions, and the persecution of the Huguenots. Lemkin apparently came across the concept of mass atrocities when, at the age of 12, he read Henryk Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis," in particular the passage where Nero threw Christians to the lions. Of these stories, Lemkin wrote, "a bloody line ran from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the pogrom of Białystok." In his writings, Lemkin demonstrates a conviction that was central to his thinking throughout his life: that the suffering of Jews in eastern Poland was part of a larger picture of injustice and violence that stretched across history and the world.

In the 1910s, the Lemkins moved to the county town of Wołkowicz. During World War I, the Lemkins' small farm was in a combat zone. The family buried their books and valuables before taking refuge in a nearby forest. During the fighting, artillery fire destroyed their homes, and all their possessions were lost. Lemkin's brother Samuel eventually died of pneumonia and malnutrition, and the family remained in the forest.

After graduating from the local vocational school in Bialystok in 1928, R. Lemkin began studying linguistics at the University of Lviv (now Ukraine), studied Arabic and Sanskrit, but a year later transferred to the law faculty.

Years later, he wrote in his "autobiography" that he was pushed into law by the case of the Turkish Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian, who killed in broad daylight in Berlin the former Minister of the Interior of Turkey Mehmed Talat (also known as Talat Pasha), at one time the initiator and organizer of the mass extermination of Armenians. The court acquitted Tehlirian on the grounds of "temporary clouding of consciousness." It was then that Lemkin asked himself the questions: "Why is the murder of a friend considered a crime?" Why is the murder of millions considered a lesser crime than the murder of one? Why is there no international law that applies moral criteria in cases of the destruction of a nation, race, or religious group? A little more than ten years will pass, and lawyer Raphael Lemkin will begin to push for the emergence of an international law on the punishment of genocide of civilians.

Raphael Lemkin studied intermittently - he had diverse interests and the young man was looking for where his versatile talents could be most applicable: a philosophy course at the University of Heidelberg; a student at the University of Berlin; studying French in Paris. In 1926, he graduated from Lviv University with a doctorate in law and in the same year moved to Warsaw to specialize in criminal and commercial law. In 1927, he took the position of secretary of the Warsaw Court of Appeal, and in 1929 became a deputy prosecutor at the Brzeźno District Court, and then at the Warsaw District Court. In addition, he was secretary of the commission for the codification of the laws of the Polish Republic and represented the country in the International Committee on Legal Affairs at the League of Nations. He also taught a course in marriage law at the Jewish seminary, where religious and secular sciences were taught (and among his students was the future writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978), and took an active part in the creation of two encyclopedias - a 27-volume criminal law encyclopedia (1933-1939) and a single-volume financial encyclopedia (1936).

Since the beginning of the 1930s, the political climate in many European countries began to change noticeably. In Poland, the government refused to adhere to the treaty on the rights of national minorities, adopted at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and guaranteed by the League of Nations. The persecution of Jews began in Germany.

It was probably in this atmosphere that Lemkin had the idea of the need to prevent persecution based on racial and religious principles by legislative means. For the conference on the unification of criminal law, scheduled for October 14-20, 1933 in Madrid, Lemkin prepared a report in which he proposed to consider two types of criminal actions practiced in many countries within the framework of international law, namely barbarity, the forms of which are massacres, pogroms and/or economic discrimination against ethnic, social or religious groups; and vandalism, expressed in the destruction or ruin of cultural and artistic values.

In the tradition of the time, the text of the report was published long before the conference began in French, German and English, and almost immediately Lemkin was told by telephone that the Polish Minister of Justice advised him not to attend the Madrid Conference. This was followed by an article in Gazeta Warszawa accusing Lemkin of deliberately insulting the German people, while Polish diplomats were working on signing a non-aggression pact with Germany. In response, Lemkin published the text of his unsuccessful report in Polish in the October issue of the Lviv magazine Holos Prava - the only legal organ of the country. Unfortunately, the report was not discussed at the conference.

Having been dismissed from civil service, Lemkin opened a legal practice, but it did not last long. Like thousands of refugees from Nazi- and Bolshevik-occupied Poland, Raphael Lemkin found temporary shelter in Kaunas, at that time the capital of Lithuania, which had not yet been captured by anyone. At the end of 1939, he received an invitation to teach a course in international financial law at Stockholm University, and with it a work visa to Sweden.

In early 1941, Lemkin was offered a professorship at Duke University Law School (North Carolina, USA). Having received Soviet and Japanese transit visas (all of Europe was already under Hitler), he traveled throughout the Union from Leningrad to Vladivostok, moved to Japan, crossed the Pacific Ocean on a Japanese steamer and arrived in the New World in April 1941. This year, Lemkin managed to complete the joint work he had begun in Warsaw in 1932 with Professor McDermott on the publication of the Polish Criminal Code in English and published several articles on criminology. But he devoted most of his time to his "collection" - Nazi decrees and resolutions introduced in the occupied and annexed lands. He began collecting them in Poland, Lithuania and Sweden and continued to replenish them in 1941-1942. in America. Convinced of their enduring value, Lemkin proposed the creation of a documentation center for occupation decrees at the Library of Congress.

His book, "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress," appeared in bookstores in November 1944.

In the summer of 1946, Raphael Lemkin was in Germany as part of a group inspecting military courts, visiting camps for displaced persons, and gathering new evidence of genocide (such as child abductions and forced contraception). In August 1946, he delivered a speech at a conference of the International Bar Association in Cambridge on the need to enshrine the crime of genocide in international law. His proposal was met with the same indifference as at the Madrid Conference in 1933. In September 1946, Lemkin was present in Paris at the signing of the peace treaty between the victorious powers and the satellite countries of the Hitlerite coalition, where he again proposed to include in the treaty a provision stating that the organizers of genocide in each individual country should be held accountable within the framework of the criminal legislation of that country. But, unfortunately, he was not supported.

Lemkin still had hope for the Nuremberg Trials, where the speeches of American and British state prosecutors repeatedly mentioned "genocide." But the Nuremberg Tribunal operated on the basis of the London Resolution, signed by the USSR, Britain and the USA on Victory Day over Germany, which stipulated how to conduct a post-war trial of war criminals and what international laws to apply to them. Accordingly, the Nuremberg Tribunal passed sentences for: 1) war crimes, 2) crimes against peace and 3) crimes against humanity. Genocide was not mentioned in the verdict - this concept did not yet exist in international law.

This result upset Lemkin, and, returning to Washington, he decided: to present genocide to the UN himself. In October 1946, the UN was only a year old, the organization was in the process of growth and formation and was ready to hear from many about how to ensure cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural and humanitarian nature. Later, the director of the UN Commission on Human Rights recalled Lemkin: "never in the history of the UN had anyone individually conducted such a treatment of UN delegates. He could be found everywhere ... and according to general observation, he enjoyed such privileges that private individuals never had." Although Lemkin talked to everyone, he did not look for sponsors among European countries, but in the countries of Latin America and distant India. As a result, the proposal on genocide was sponsored by the Cuban delegation, and co-sponsored by the Indian delegation with the massive support of most countries. On December 11, 1946, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring genocide an international crime and asked the UN Legal Department to prepare a detailed draft of a convention on the prevention of genocide for the next session of the General Assembly.

In May 1947, the UN Secretary-General Trygve Halfdan Lie (a Norwegian) invited Lemkin and two other international lawyers, Professor Donnedier de Vabre from France and Professor Vespasian Pell from Romania, to prepare the text of the Genocide Convention. All three had known each other since the 1930s, and Raphael Lemkin considered them his mentors, but working together in New York was difficult for all. The only thing they agreed on was to rewrite the main material on genocide from Lemkin's book and articles on the subject. There was no agreement on anything else. For example, Raphael Lemkin wanted to include in the project, in addition to physical genocide, also cultural genocide (i.e., the destruction or theft of books, cultural and religious values, the destruction of the national intelligentsia, the prohibition of the use of the native language, the removal of children from the persecuted group and their transfer to other population groups), whereas Vabre and Pella did not accept this concept and left the decision to the General Assembly. On December 9, 1948, at a plenary session in Paris, the UN General Assembly approved the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" and offered it to all UN member states for signature and ratification or accession. By October 1950, twenty countries that had signed the Convention had ratified it, and it entered into force on January 12, 1951.

All UN delegates remembered that Rafael Lemkin was the initiator and main propagandist of this Convention. In 1950, Cuba presented him with the country's highest award - the Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Cross; in 1951, the Congress of American Jews awarded him the Stefan Weiss Prize; in 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Order of Merit; in 1950, 1951, 1952, and 1955, his fellow lawyers nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. But Lemkin was upset because the US Senate refused to ratify the Convention. Lemkin understood well that without the participation of the United States, it would remain lifeless. And he turned out to be right: the USA ratified the Convention in 1988, and only in 1990 it began to be applied in practice: the trial of the organizers of the genocide of Croats and Muslims in Yugoslavia and Tutsi in Rwanda.

Lemkin also considered it his defeat that the Convention did not mention “cultural genocide”. He believed that in many cases “cultural genocide” precedes the barbaric extermination of ethnic, national or religious groups. “Cultural genocide” was to receive multifaceted coverage in the book “History of Genocide”, on which he began working in the 1950s. In 1958, Raphael Lemkin signed a contract with a publishing house and began writing an “autobiography”. Memories captivated him, charged him with new energy, the work went quickly... and was cut short instantly - he died of a heart attack on August 28, 1959. The Jewish community of New York buried him: Lemkin never had a family of his own. His tombstone bears the following inscription: "Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), Father of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide." In 1989, Raphael Lemkin was posthumously awarded the Four Freedoms Award for Religious Freedom. Each year, the Rabbinical Appeal for Human Rights (T'ruah) awards the Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Award to a layperson who draws on his Jewish values of being a leader in the field of human rights. Raphael Lemkin's Views on the Holodomor ("Great Ukrainian Famine") In a 1953 speech in New York, Raphael Lemkin described the Holodomor as part of "perhaps the classic example of of the Soviet genocide, its longest and most extensive experiment in Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation”. He further notes that “the Ukrainian is not and never was a Russ. His culture, temperament, language, religion – are all different… The Soviet Union needed famine… if the Soviet program is completely successful, if the intelligentsia, the priest and the peasant are destroyed [then] Ukraine will be dead if every Ukrainian is killed, because it will lose its culture, its beliefs, its general ideas, which guided the Ukrainian in general and gave him a soul, in short, made him a nation… This is not just a case of mass murder. This is a case of genocide, the destruction not only of individuals but of a culture and a nation.”

On September 20, 1953, during a protest in New York, the Ukrainian Weekly reported that “an inspiring speech at the rally was delivered by Professor Raphael Lemkin, author of the United Nations Convention against Genocide, that is, the deliberate mass murder of peoples by their oppressors. Prof. Lemkin spoke movingly about the fate of millions of Ukrainians before and after 1932-1933, who died as victims of Soviet Russia's plan to destroy as many of them as possible in order to break the heroic Ukrainian national resistance to Soviet Russian power and occupation and communism.

On November 20, 2015, Lemkin's article "The Genocide of the USSR in Ukraine" was added to the Russian index of "extremist publications", the distribution of which is prohibited in Russia.

On September 15, 2018, the Ukrainian-Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation (www.ucclf.ca) and its supporters in the USA unveiled the world's first memorial plaque in Ukrainian / English / Hebrew / Yiddish in honor of Lemkin for recognizing the Great Famine of 1932-1932 as genocide.

Evgeny Borinshtein - Doctor of Philosophy Sciences, Professor.