Victoria Khiterer

“Suppressed Memory: Memorialization of the Holocaust in Babi Yar (Kiev)”
Victoria Khiterer (Millersville University)
< [email protected] >
Paper presented at the ASN World Convention
Columbia University, 23-25 April 2015
Please do not cite without the author’s permission
© Victoria Khiterer
Each epoch is reflected in their monuments: their outlook and artistic styles
represent the level of development of the arts, the artistic tastes, ideals and values of
society. The Soviet Union left many monuments to communist leaders, revolutionary and
war heroes, and to the victims of the war, but only very few were erected for Jews who
perished in the Holocaust. Usually such monuments were devoted to “peaceful Soviet
citizens killed by the Nazis.” The Holocaust and the collaboration of some of the local
gentile population with the Nazis were forbidden themes in the Soviet Union from the
anti-cosmopolitan campaign (1948) to Perestroika (late 1980s). Some courageous Soviet
intellectuals broke the taboo on discussion of the Holocaust during the Khrushchev Thaw
(1956-1964). However, this was on their own initiative, rather than a change of state
policy. Their initiative was denounced by the authorities and further discussions of the
Holocaust were suppressed.
However Jews who survived the war and returned to their cities and towns found
the mass graves of their relatives and friends. The survivors were deeply traumatized by
the Holocaust and wanted to memorialize the places of the mass killing of Jews. In some
places the authorities accepted a compromise and allowed monuments to be built to
“Soviet citizens, victims of the Nazis,” without mentioning the nationality of the victims.
In other places like Babi Yar they resisted for many years construction of any monument,
even to “Soviet citizens.”
Several recent publications discuss the resistance of the Soviet authorities to
construction of a monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Babi Yar. However, these
publications focus on state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and the public protest of
Jews and liberal gentile intelligentsia against the absence of any memorial to the
Holocaust victims in Babi Yar. None of these publications discussed the influence of
popular anti-Semitism on the decision of the authorities, or give much attention to the
realized and unrealized projects for memorials in Babi Yar. I am going to fill this gap in
my paper. Many unrealized projects of memorials in Babi Yar were interesting in their
concepts and proposed artistic approaches, and deserve more attention. I will show how
the policy of state anti-Semitism affected the monument finally built there in 1976. I will
also discuss the various monuments erected in Babi Yar in the last two decades and the
prospects for the future.
Babi Yar was one of the first and largest Holocaust killing grounds in the Soviet
Union during World War II. Historians continue to debate the widely varying estimates of
the number of Jews murdered in Babi Yar. Depending upon the source, the number of
Jews murdered in Babi Yar was anywhere from 33,771 to 150,000. It is impossible to
know with any precision how many Jews were in Kiev when the Nazis occupied the city
on September 19-20, 1941. We don’t know how many Jews were able to evacuate, how
many Kievan Jews were mobilized into the Soviet Army, or how many Jewish refugees
from other places were in the city. At the time of the chaotic retreat of the Soviet Army,
nobody thought about such statistics. A few days after the German occupation, on
September 28th, Einsatzgruppe C, the Nazi paramilitary extermination unit in Kiev,
reported, “There are probably 150,000 Jews in Kiev. To check this information has been
impossible thus far.”
German statistics of the number of Jews massacred in Babi Yar are not reliable,
because they counted the number of the executed Jews only for two days, 29-30
September 1941. Karel Berkhoff wrote that the Nazis had already began killing Jews in
Babi Yar on 27 September. Ukrainian auxiliary troops continued mass execution of Jews
in Babi Yar until October 5. Then periodic executions of Jewish and gentile prisoners of
the war, partisans and others continued in Babi Yar through the entire period of the Nazi
occupation of Kiev until November 1943. Kiev was the first large European city where
almost all Jews were massacred.
There were several reasons why one of the largest massacres of Jews in the Nazi
occupied Soviet territory occurred in Kiev:
- Kiev had one of the largest concentrations of Jews in the occupied Soviet
territory. According to the 1939 census, the Jews of Kiev comprised about 20% of the
total population, or about 175,000 people.
- Anti-Semitism in Kiev was always stronger than in other places of the Russian
Empire. Kiev had a long history of pogroms, Jewish expulsions, religious anti-Semitism
and chauvinistic Black Hundred organizations, which organized the Beilis Affair in Kiev
in 1911-13. So the Nazis anticipated correctly that the much of the local gentile
population hated Jews and would not resist their extermination.
- Members of the Soviet underground exploded remote controlled mines hidden in
buildings on the Kiev main street Kreshchatik in the first days of the Nazi occupation.
These explosions killed a number of the Nazi officers and soldiers, which made the Nazis
furious and looking for the revenge. They need scapegoats, and while real partisans were
hard to find, the Jewish population of the city was an easy target. In the city remained
mostly women, children and elderly people, while most adult men had been mobilized
into the Soviet Army.
Along with Jews, tens of thousands of the Soviet prisoners of war and gentiles
were killed in Kiev during the Nazi occupation (19 September 1941 - 6 November 1943).
The Extraordinary State Commission for Investigation German-Fascist Crimes
Committed on Soviet Territory reported at the Nuremberg trial that during the occupation
of Kiev over 195 thousand Soviet citizens were killed, including:
1. Over 100 thousand men, women, children and elderly people.
2. In Darnitsa (district of Kiev on the left bank of River Dnieper) – over 68
thousand Soviet Prisoners of war and civilians.
3. In an anti-tank trench and near Syretskii concentration camp and on the
territory of the camp — over 25 thousand Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.
4. On territory of Kirillovskii hospital — 800 mentally ill people.
5. On territory of Kiev-Pechersk Lavra — about 500 civilians.
6. At Lukianovskii Cemetery — 400 civilians.
There were a large number of not only Jewish, but also gentile victims in Kiev,
because the Nazi encircled a large group of Soviet troops near Kiev and took into
captivity 665 thousand Soviet prisoners. The Nazi created in occupied Kiev four
concentration camps for prisoners of war: in Darnitsa and Syrets district, on Kerosinnaia
Street (now Sholudenka Street) and on Institutskaia Street. The concentration camp on
Kerosinnaia Street had a Jewish Department, for Jews who had escaped the original
execution in Babi Yar. However, the concentration camp on Kerosinnaia Street was only
a holding point for captured Jews before they were sent to their execution in Babi Yar.
One of Schutzmann (Policeman) testified that his Battalion Schutzmannschaft several
times escorted columns of Jews from Kerosinnaia Street to execution in Babi Yar. While
the vast majority of Kievan Jews were killed in Babi Yar in the end of September –
beginning of October 1941, at least several hundred Jews were killed there later.
Due to the harsh treatment of the prisoners of war in Darnitskii and Syretskii
concentration camps, malnutrition, forced labor, torture and executions for any
disobedience, or even without reason, tens of thousands of prisoners perished there.
So there were a large number of victims of the Nazi occupation regime in Kiev,
however the vast majority of victims in Babi Yar were Jewish. In Babi Yar, Roma,
Karaites, Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and members of Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN) were also executed.
Babi Yar Tragedy in Soviet Official Reports and Literature
The Soviet authorities wrote openly about Jewish victims of Babi Yar in
1941-1942. The first official publication about the execution of Jews in Babi Yar
appeared in one of two central Soviet newspapers, Izvestia, on 19 November 1941. The
newspaper based its information “on a report filed with the Overseas News service in
New York” and announced that “information has been received that in Kiev Germans
executed 52 thousand Jews – men, women and children.” The information about the Babi
Yar massacre already was modified when Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov
described Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory in his diplomatic note to British and
American representatives in Moscow. The note was sent on 6 January 1942 and published
in the Central organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the newspaper Pravda,
on the next day. The note said,
A frightful slaughter and terror actions were committed by German
invaders in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. During three days the German
robbers shot and killed 52,000 men, women, old people and children,
mercilessly killed Ukrainians, Russians and Jews who showed their
loyalty to the Soviet government.
This note listed Jews only as the third national group among the victims of the
Babi Yar massacre. This was an intentional distortion of the truth, because on 29
September – beginning of October 1941 the Nazi, with the assistance of Ukrainian
collaborators, killed almost exclusively Jews. Some Soviet prisoners of the war, members
of the Soviet underground and Ukrainian nationalist movement were executed by the
Nazis in Babi Yar, but that was later.
Soon the Soviets stopped reporting the nationality of the victims of Babi Yar at
all, calling them Kievans or Soviet citizens. Perhaps this switch in the Soviet approach to
the Holocaust happened due to the rise of popular, and later state anti-Semitism in the
Soviet Union. So the Soviets usually avoided talking about the Holocaust, especially in
Ukraine, because the level of anti-Semitism there was higher than in other Soviet
republics.
The official report of The Extraordinary State Commission for Investigation
German-Fascist Crimes Committed on Soviet Territory (ChGK) “About Destruction and
War Crimes Committed by German-Fascist occupants in City Kiev” described the
massacre of Jews in Babi Yar in one paragraph and did not mention the nationality of
victims. The report, which was first published in the newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda (Red
Star) on 29 February 1944, said:
Hitlerite bandits gathered thousands of peaceful Soviet citizens on 29
September 1941 on the corner of Mel’nik and Docterevskoi Streets.
The executors brought the people to Babi Yar, took all their valuables
and then executed them. Citizens N.F. Petrenko and N.T. Gorbacheva,
who lived near Babi Yar, testified that they saw how Germans threw
into the ravine live babies and buried them together with their killed
and injured parents.
The Extraordinary State Commission mentioned several times the Jewish victims
of the Nazi regime in other places, but did not mention them in Kiev. The report of the
Extraordinary State Commission was based on the reports of local commissions, some of
which reported about the Jewish victims of the Nazis and some did not. The
Extraordinary State Commission based its report about victims of the Nazi regime in
Kiev on the materials of the Special Commission led by the First Secretary of the
Communist Party of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, which avoided mentioning Jewish
victims in their report. Probably Khrushchev was afraid that mentioning Jewish victims
in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of post-war Ukraine could provoke an explosion of
popular anti-Semitism and invoke the wrath of the gentile population against Soviet
authorities.
This approach of official Soviet reports and propaganda talking about the Babi
Yar tragedy, without mentioning its primarily Jewish victims, was also a feature of Soviet
literature. Ukrainian and Russian poets Savva Golovanivskii (Ukrainian spelling: Sava
Holovanivskyi), Mykola Bazhan, Ilia Ehrenburg and Lev Ozerov wrote poems about the
Babi Yar massacre in 1943-1945. However, only Golovanivskii’s poem
“Abraham” (1943) talks about “an old Jew, Abraham, whom the Germans marched
through the streets of Kiev to be shot.” Bazhan, Ehrenburg and Ozerov describing in their
poems the Babi Yar massacre as a universal, even cosmic tragedy, but none of them dared
to mention that primarily Jews were killed in Babi Yar. Such an enormous omission is
unlikely to have been accidental. Perhaps the poets did this to fit the new Soviet concept,
which required that the victims of the war not be divided by nationalities. Golovanivskii,
who published the truth, was punished soon thereafter: during the anti-cosmopolitan
campaign he was “violently berated for having spread ‘nationalist slander’” in his poem.
Golovanivskii wrote in his poem that “Russians and Ukrainians – turned their backs on
the old Jew, Abraham,” when the Nazi convoyed him to Babi Yar. Literaturnaia Gazeta
wrote about Golovanivskii’s poem on 9 March 1949, “This is a terrible defamation of the
Soviet nation, which has succeed after a hard and bloody struggle and by dint of great
sacrifice and effort, in upholding the freedom and independence of Soviet people of all
nationalities.”
Ehrenburg, who did not mention Jewish victims of Babi Yar in his poetry, did this
later in his novel Buria (The Storm). Ehrenburg returned again to the Babi Yar theme in
his novel, because “Kiev—and Babi Yar—was also a personal wound” for him.
Ehrenburg was born in Kiev in 1891. Although he moved with his parents to
Moscow in 1894, he returned to Kiev many times to stay with grandparents during the
summer and lived in the city during the civil war in 1918-1920. Ehrenburg most likely
knew some Kievan Jews who perished in Babi Yar. He visited Kiev in spring 1941 and
read to the public at the Lenin Museum (now the Teachers’ House) chapters from his new
novel Padenie Parizha (The Fall of Paris) about the Nazi occupation of Paris. As a Soviet
correspondent in France he was an eyewitness of this event. Mikhail Kalnitsky wrote, “In
the Spring of 1941 Soviet propaganda praised the Soviet-German agreement [of 1939].”
However listening to the chapters from Ehrenburg’s new novel “even most cheerful
optimists” felt the approach of the war. The coming war was much more awful than any
predictions. During the war Ehrenburg, who was a war correspondent, impatiently waited
for the liberation of his native city. He came to Kiev soon after its liberation, but it was a
different city: all downtown lay in ruins, including the house on Institutskaia Street where
he lived with his parents in childhood, and most Kievan Jews had perished in Babi Yar.
“Hirsh Smolar, a partisan commander from Minsk, recalled visiting Ehrenburg in
Moscow in 1944: “Ehrenburg had just returned from Kiev and he was in a rotten mood...
‘This was my hometown,’ he told me, ‘and I will never go back there.’” Ehrenburg broke
his promise to never return to Kiev only once in 1952, when he came there soon after
receiving the International Stalin Prize “For strengthening peace among nations.”
Ehrenburg knew a great deal about the Babi Yar tragedy from eyewitness
testimonies and other documentary materials that he collected for the Black Book: The
Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the TemporarilyOccupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War
in 1941–1945. The Black Book manuscript was confiscated by the authorities at the
beginning of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. However before the campaign Ehrenburg
succeed in publishing his novel The Storm in 1946-47. Ehrenburg described in his novel
the life of two brothers Osip Alper in Kiev and Leo Alper in Paris, “who represent two
widely separated branches of the same family.” During the war Osip’s family perished in
Babi Yar, while his brother Leo was sent to Auschwitz. Thus Ehrenburg’s description of
the common fate of Jews during the Holocaust “joins Kiev with Paris, Babi Yar with
Auschwitz.” This connection had a personal meaning for Ehrenburg, he lived in France
from 1908 and until the February 1917 Revolution and in the 1920s-1930s returned there
many times as a correspondent for Soviet newspapers. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko
devoted to Ehrenburg his poem Kreshchatitskii Parizhanin (Parisian from Kreshchatik).
The cultural connections of Kiev with Paris has a special meaning for the Kiev
intellectual elite, who were oriented toward French culture since prerevolutionary times.
Unrealized Projects for Monuments in Babi Yar
Ukrainian Soviet authorities originally supported the idea of building a monument
in Babi Yar, but without mentioning its Jewish victims. On March 13, 1945 the Ukrainian
government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine decided to
build a monument in Babi Yar. The monument was supposed to be dedicated to “140,000
Kievans killed by the Nazis.” In 1946, when Kiev still was in ruins, the government
decided to provide 1.4 million rubles for this purpose. A model of monument was created
by the main architect of Kiev, Aleksandr Vlasov, and sculptor E. Kruglov in 1945. The
memorial was modeled as a granite black pyramid with white bas-reliefs and two
sculptures at the entrance. The architectural solution was quite interesting, because it
realized the concept of Kiev as Yehupets (Egypt), a hostile place for Jews. Jewish writer
Sholom Aleichem called Kiev Yehupets in his works due to the hostility of the city toward
Jews. He wrote,
The large, beautiful gentle city of Yehupets... is certainly not the kind
of city that would seek to have even a token Jewish population. Quite
the contrary, it is well known that from time immemorial Jews have
been as welcome to the people of the city as a migraine.
The nickname Yehupets stuck for Kiev and was widely used by the local Jewish
population. It was well known to gentiles also through the works of Sholom Aleichem,
which were published in the Soviet Union in Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian. Jews also
were traditionally perceived by gentiles as a Middle Eastern people, who according to the
Biblical account, lived in slavery in Egypt. The main architect of Kiev in 1944-1950,
Vlasov used this oriental Egyptian theme in his monument project. So the original
monument concept had a clear connection with Kievan Jewish history and indirectly
referred to the Biblical account of the suffering of the Jews in Egyptian slavery. However,
the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture denounced the project for its “pitiful outlook” and
“absence of compositional and ideological direction.” Even the personal friendship of the
architect Vlasov with the then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine
Khrushchev could not protect his project from the wrath of local anti-Semites from the
Ukrainian Ministry of Culture. All of Vlasov’s other projects were successfully realized
in Kiev, for example, the reconstruction of the main street of Kiev, Kreshchatik, ruined
during the war. In December 1949 Stalin recalled Khrushchev to Moscow and made him
the First Secretary of the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party, Soon thereafter
Khrushchev invited his friend Vlasov to Moscow, and appointed him as the main
architect of the capital in 1950-1955. Vlasov was the President of Architecture Academy
of the Soviet Union in 1955-56 and was awarded Soviet and international prizes for his
works.
So obviously the problem was not with the design of Vlasov’s monument in Babi
Yar, but in the reluctance of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine to construct any
monument there. The anti-Semitic bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture could not
openly resist the decision of the Ukrainian government and the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine to build a monument in Babi Yar, so they claimed that they
didn’t like the design of the monument. This hypocritical claim allowed the local
authorities to postpone construction of a monument for over thirty years.
The Ukrainian authorities explained in 1959 why the monument was not built by
citing the dissatisfaction of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine with the design and the
lack money for its construction. However these explanations are insufficient. The absence
of funding could have been an issue in the first postwar years when Kiev and many other
cities and towns of Ukraine were in ruins. But by the 1950s the economy had recovered
from the war and the authorities could, if they wished, provide funds for construction of a
monument in Babi Yar. In the 1950s several other monuments to the heroes of World War
II were built in Kiev. Regarding the design of the monument, if the Ministry of Culture of
Ukraine did not like the original monument project they could have invited other
architects and organized a design competition for the memorial. But in reality the local
authorities for a long time resisted the idea of building any monument in Babi Yar. The
reason for this was the rise of popular and state anti-Semitism in Kiev and the Soviet
Union in the postwar years.
Popular anti-Semitism erupted in Kiev spontaneously without the permission,
encouragement or approval of the local or higher authorities. Ukrainian authorities were
even concerned for a while how to deal with this phenomenon, not so much due to their
compassion for Jews, but more likely because they were afraid of their responsibility to
Moscow for street disorders. The Security Service of Ukraine (NKGB) admitted a rise in
popular anti-Semitism in Ukraine after its liberation from the Nazis. According to a topsecret report of the People’s Commissar of the Security Service of Ukraine to Nikita
Khrushchev, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine and the First Secretary
of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1944-47, ‘About Antisemitism in Ukraine’, dated
13 September 1944, the Kiev population had called for a pogrom on 22 June 1944 (the
third anniversary of the beginning of the Nazi-Soviet War) and the local gentile
population attacked and beat Kiev Jews on the streets.
Jews who returned to Kiev from evacuation were deeply traumatized by the loss
of their relatives and friends in Babi Yar. They felt that they need to do something to
commemorate the victims of Babi Yar. However, when the Yiddish poet David Hofshtein
attempted to organize “a mass demonstration [according to another source, a meeting] of
the Jewish population on the anniversary of German massacre at Babi Yar” in 1944, the
authorities forbade the demonstration, claiming that it might ‘provoke anti-Semitism’.
And probably the authorities were right. Considering the militant anti-Semitic mood of
much of the gentile population, such a Jewish demonstration could have provoked a
pogrom in the city. But a Jewish pogrom broke out in Kiev anyway in the next year.
On 5 September 1945, the Vice Commissar of Interior Affairs of the Ukrainian
SSR, I. L. Loburenko, reported to the secretary of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine, D. Korotchenko, about the pre-pogrom situation in Kiev
after NKGB Lieutenant Iosif Rosenstein killed two local antisemites, who insulted and
beat him. The Kiev police quickly arrived to the site of the killings and attempted to
pacify the crowd that had gathered there, but the crowd resisted the authorities. Mounted
police then came and restored order. Rosenstein was immediately arrested and was soon
executed according to the decision of a military tribunal.
The funeral of the antisemites shot by Rosenstein, which took place on 7
September 1945, turned into open violence against Kiev’s Jews, with some three hundred
rioters participating. Kiev Jews Kotliar, Zabrodin, Pesin, and Miloslavsky wrote a letter
on 16 October 1945, addressed to the ‘Central Committee of the Communist Party,
Comrade I. V. Stalin, NKVD USSR, Comrade Beria and the editor of the newspaper
“Pravda” Comrade Pospelov’, noting that the funerals had turned into a pogrom:
The funerals were organized in a special way. The coffins were carried
on the most populous streets and then the procession went to the
Jewish market. This procession was set up by the pogrom-makers.
They began to assault Jews. One hundred Jews were beaten up on this
day, thirty-six of them were taken to Kiev hospitals with serious
injuries, and five of them died on the same day.
Solomon Shvarts reported that sixteen Jews were killed during the pogrom in
Kiev.
Kotliar, Zabrodin, Pesin, and Miloslavsky lamented in their letter that they could
not recognize their city ‘not only by its outlook, but also due to the existing political
situation there’. They said they felt the strong influence of Nazi propaganda:
The words ‘Yid’ or ‘Let’s beat the Yids’ you can hear everywhere in
the capital of Ukraine: in trams, trolleybuses, stores, markets, and even
in some Soviet offices.
In some more latent form it [anti-Semitism] is present in
Communist organizations, up to the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities also reported on the pogrom mood in the city and took
measures to reinforce security. As shown on 8 September 1945, in the secret report of the
People’s Commissar of the Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, V. Riasnoi, to the
Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Korotchenko,
the local authorities took seriously the threat of an even larger pogrom in Kiev. Riasnoi
wrote,
Considering the inflamed condition of some part of the population of
the city due to the spreading of bogus rumours and agitation directed
against Jews, we reinforced patrols in the city, moreover giving special
attention to the markets, gathering places, and the places of residence
of relatives of the murdered Grabar and Mel’nikov.
It is obvious that without the measures taken by the Soviet authorities, the anti-
Jewish violence in the city would likely have taken on even larger dimensions.
So considering this evident anti-Semitism mood of much of the Kiev population,
it easy to see why the local authorities postponed construction of a monument in Babi
Yar. If a Jewish memorial was erected in Kiev in the post-war years, it might have
provoked a new explosion of anti-Semitic violence in the city, and the crowd could also
turn against the authorities who allowed construction of the monument. Khrushchev
allegedly said: ‘We are in Ukraine, and it is not in our interest that Ukrainians should
associate the return of Soviet power with the return of the Jews.’ Ukrainian Jews who
survived the war returned home from the front and evacuation. But it seems that the local
authorities did not want to be associated either with the returning Jews, or with the
commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. More Ukrainian Jews perished during
the World War II than survived. Alexander Kruglov wrote, “In mid-1941, some 2.7
million Jews lived in the territory of what is today the independent state of Ukraine…
Between 1941 and 1945, more than 1.6 million of them perished at the hands of the Nazis
and their accomplices.”
Unfortunately, the rise of the popular anti-Semitism in Kiev was not unique. AntiJewish violence occurred in other Ukrainian cities and towns, though mostly on a smaller
scale. Antisemitic violence was often sparked by attempts of Jews to return to their
apartments, where they had lived before the war. Local authorities also did not allow the
building of monuments to the victims of the Holocaust in other Soviet cities and towns.
In many places the mass graves of Jews were vandalized, turned into pastures and
cesspits. Writer Victor Nekrasov recalled that in the post war years “some marginal
persons crawled on the bottom of Babi Yar searching for either diamonds or gold tooth
crowns.”
In the years of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the Soviet Union (the late
1940s-1953) all discussions about building a monument in Babi Yar ceased. These were
the years of the most acute state anti-Semitism, when discussion on any Jewish topic
could ruin not only the career of its participants, but could cost them their life. With the
death of Stalin and the limited liberalization of the political regime in the country known
as Khrushchev’s Thaw, Kievan Jews and liberal gentiles appealed again to the authorities
to build a monument in Babi Yar. The Soviet writer Ilia Ehrenburg “worked hardest to
promote this idea.” He sent a letter to Khrushchev asking that a monument be built in
Babi Yar. However Khrushchev replied, “I advise you not to interfere in matters that do
not concern you. You had better keep to writing good novels.”
Richard Sheldon wrote,
[I]n 1957 the question was officially discussed by the Ukrainian
Central Committee [of the CPU], now under the leadership of Nikolai
Podgorny. The committee decided not to erect a monument, and it also
decided to efface the site altogether. Plans were made to build a sport
stadium on the site and to build a dam at one end of the ravine.
In the 1950s the Kiev City Council ordered that Babi Yar ravine be filled by
pumping in liquid mud waste from nearby brick factories, and then built through it a road
between Lukianovsky and Kurenevsky districts of Kiev. On 13 March 1961 the poorly
built dam holding back the mud collapsed and a mud wave 45 feet high flowed into the
city. Official statistics record that 150 people in Kurenevsky district were killed (rumors
claimed 1,500 perished), 68 houses and 13 public buildings were destroyed. Many people
saw the mud flood as divine retribution for the attempt to erase the traces of the Babi Yar
massacre. The Kievan historian Alexander Anisimov called the Kurenevsky tragedy a
“city-sized Atonement Day.” The Kurenevsky mud flood again directed public attention
toward Babi Yar.
In the post-Stalin years, Kievan Jews and some Russian and Ukrainian
intellectuals gathered in Babi Yar on the anniversary of the tragedy on September 29.
However, such improvised meetings were often broken up by the police and their
participants persecuted. Soviet officials showed their utter disdain for commemoration of
the massacre at Babi Yar by planning to build a stadium and amusement park there.
However Jewish activists and liberal gentiles resisted this decision. Official
silence over the Babi Yar tragedy was broken by the writer Victor Nekrasov and the poet
Evgeny Yevtushenko, whose essay and poem were published in 1959 and 1961 in
Literaturnaia Gazeta. Nekrasov wrote that all Kievans have lost in Babi Yar either their
relatives or friends, or acquaintances. Nekrasov said that he visited the memorial to the
victims at the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. He asked in his article why there is
no memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime in Babi Yar.
In September 1961 Evgeny Yevtushenko published his famous poem Babi Yar in
Literaturnaia Gazeta. The poem began with the verse: “No monument stands over Babi
Yar.” The editor of the newspaper was fired for publishing the poem. Yevtushenko’s
poem was denounced by Khrushchev as a “political mistake” and an attempt to divide the
suffering of Soviet people during World War II by nationality. But, while the authorities
and anti-Semites denounced the poem, the liberal intelligentsia and Jews greeted the poet,
who broke the silence on the Holocaust theme in the Soviet Union.
In 1962 the renowned composer Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his Thirteenth
Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar with the chorus adapted from Yevtushenko’s poem. After
the Yevtushenko poem and the Shostakovich symphony, the tragedy in Babi Yar and the
absence there of a monument became well-known to the Soviet public and the authorities
could not ignore it any longer.
Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov (1929–1979) described his experiences in
German-occupied Kiev during WWII in his book Babi Yar: roman-dokument (Babi Yar:
A Document in the Form of a Novel). The book was originally published in a censored
form in 1966 in Russian in journal Iunost’ (Youth). In 1969 Kuznetsov defected to the
United Kingdom. He pretended that he needed to travel abroad to do research for his new
book on the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which took
place in London in 1903. Kuznetsov smuggled abroad a photographic film containing the
uncensored text of his novel Babi Yar. In Great Britain he requested political asylum and
received an unlimited residence visa. Kuznetsov’s uncensored novel Babi Yar was
published in the West under the pseudonym A. Anatoli.
Foreign tourists who visited Kiev in the 1950s – first half of the 1970s often asked
Ukrainian authorities many questions about why there was no monument in Babi Yar.
Under pressure from public opinion in the Soviet Union and abroad, the Ministry of
Culture of Ukraine called in 1965 for a “Closed competition of projects for monuments in
memory of the Soviet citizens and soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army - prisoners of
the war, who perished during the Nazi occupation of Kiev.” Jewish victims were not
mentioned in the call for the competition, because the Holocaust remained a forbidden
topic in the Soviet Union. About sixty models of monuments were shown at an exhibit in
the Architect’s House in Kiev in December 1965. The exhibit was not widely announced,
however it attracted many Kiev Jews, whose relatives were killed in Babi Yar, gentile
intelligentsia and anti-Semites. The exhibition guest book contained not only supportive
comments, but also insulting anti-Semitic slurs, so the authorities confiscated it.
The most interesting projects were presented by the architects Iosif Karakis and
Aba Meletskii (together with the sculptor Ada Rybachuk and her husband the architect
Vladimir Mel’nichenko). Karakis proposed a memorial park be built over the Babi Yar
ravine. Seven spurs of the ravine were supposed to be connected by bridges. According to
the concept of the architect, the Babi Yar ground is a sacred place, where nobody should
walk. Red poppy flowers would be planted on the bottom of the ravine or red gravel
would be lay there.
Meletskii, whose mother and grandmother perished in Babi Yar, proposed to build
a memorial complex in Babi Yar, which should start with a granite block with the sign
Babi Yar in several languages and end with a retaining wall with seven artistically
decorated spurs between them. Sculptor Rybachuk and architect Mel’nichenko proposed
that inside of the spurs of Babi Yar a monumental wall be built with bas-relief and steps
down to an Urn with the “ashes” of the killed. Both projects used the natural landscape of
Babi Yar, emphasized and preserved it, showing respect for the sacred meaning of the
place. The jury of the competition claimed that the seven spurs in the projects of
Meletskii and Karakis represented a Jewish Menorah, a symbol of the State of Israel. So
the project was rejected by the jury as Zionist. The projects of memorial complexes by
Karakis and Meletskii, Rybachuk and Mel’nichenko were executed in an abstract style,
which contradicted the officially allowed socialist realism artistic style in the Soviet
Union.
There were many other projects submitted for the competition of 1965, however
none them satisfied the jury. The jury did not want a Babi Yar monument reminiscent of
the tragedy of Kievan Jews. The daughter of the architect Karakis, Irma, also an architect,
was present at the public discussion of the competition projects. She recalled that there
flashed like a kaleidoscope antisemitic speeches written in advance and speeches of the
condemned authors of the monument projects and writers, the majority of whom were
Jewish. Nekrasov gave a brilliant speech about the memorialization of the victims of Babi
Yar. Then the film director Sergei Paradzhanov called for a minute of silence in the
memory of the Babi Yar victims. In the silence that lasted more than a minute were heard
mass weeping of the Babi Yar victims’ relatives.
A second competition was announced under the title “Road, Death and Rebirth to
Life.” The Union of Architects chose as the competition winner a socialist realist style
project depicting a man carrying a banner, which they thought the authorities would like.
This monument project was sent for approval to the First Secretary of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petr Shelest, who disapproved saying “I
think this is not for Babi Yar.”
So on the twenty fifth anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy in 1966 only a stone
was put on the corner of the Dorogozhitsky and Mel’nikova streets, with the engraving
“On this site there will be a monument for the victims of Fascism during the German
occupation of Kiev, 1941 – 1943.” The authorities did everything to suppress the memory
of the Kievan Jews massacre in Babi Yar, but the more effort they made, the more
protests of Jews and liberal intelligentsia they created.
On the twenty fifth anniversary of the massacre in Babi Yar on September 29,
1966, there was a huge spontaneous meeting to which about one thousand people came.
Russian and Ukrainian writers Victor Nekrasov, Vladimir Voinovich and Ivan Dziuba
came to Babi Yar and gave speeches at the meeting. They talked about the tragedy of the
Jewish people, the necessity of the struggle against anti-Semitism, while their friends, the
film director from the Kiev documentary film studio Ukrkinokhronika Rafail
Nakhmanovich and main editor of the studio, Gelii Snegirev, shot a documentary. This
initiative of the local liberal intelligentsia was severely punished by the authorities.
According to the memoirs of Ada Rybachuk and Vladimir Mel’nichenko, the police
arrived at the meeting at the 9:30 am, wrote down car license plate numbers, made a list
of the people who participated in the meeting, stopped the documentary shooting and
dispersed the crowd. The film was confiscated, the director Nakhmanovich fired, and
Snegirev was demoted. Later Snegirev was expelled from the Unions of Ukrainian
Writers and Cinematographists and arrested for his dissident activities. Nekrasov also
was expelled from the Union of the Soviet Writers and later expelled from the Soviet
Union. Dziuba was arrested and received five years in concentration camps for his
dissident activities.
In spite of the repression, on every anniversary of the massacre of Jews in Babi
Yar people came there for memorial meetings. The most active meeting participants were
arrested, other chased away by the police. Thus Jewish dissident Boris Kochubievskii
was accused of “Zionist and bourgeois-nationalist propaganda” for his speech at Babi Yar
in 1968, where he emphasized that the vast majority of the victims there were Jewish.
Kochubievskii received three years in a concentration camp “for slander against the
Soviet regime.”
The trial – held ironically, in the same courthouse in which Beilis had
been tried in 1912-13 – was replete, according to samizdat accounts,
with numerous instances of anti-Semitism emanating from the bench,
the prosecution, the guards, and the persons permitted by the
authorities to attend.
The Soviet Monument in Babi Yar
Under the pressure of public opinion at home and abroad, the Ukrainian
authorities ultimately authorized construction of a monument at Babi Yar. A Secretary of
the Kiev City Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), A. Botvin, wrote in
his letter, on 18 September 1974, to the Central Committee of the CPU about the need to
build a monument:
Jewish people, so called “refusniks,” have the idea to create a public
committee for fundraising for construction of a monument in Babi Yar.
Due to this there will be official material published in the newspaper
Vechernii Kiev (Night Kiev) on the eve of 29 September about the
project of the monument and its construction.
The Ukrainian authorities chose for the monument the project of the renowned
Ukrainian sculptor academic Mikhail Lysenko (1906 -1972) and his assistants - two
young sculptors Aleksandr Vitryk and Victor Sukhenko. Vitryk claimed that this project
was chosen at a competition in 1968. However no other sources verify that this
competition actually took place. Rybachuk and Mel’nichenko and other sources claimed
that the authorities chose the monument project arbitrarily. Most likely the authorities
trusted creation of the monument to Lysenko, because he was a famous Ukrainian
sculptor, the creator of several monuments to Soviet heroes performed in a romantic style
with great expressionism and plasticity. Lysenko was a student of the Ukrainian sculptor
of Jewish origins, Eleonora (Leonora) Abramovna Bloch (1881-1943). Bloch studied at
Rodin’s Studio in Paris in 1898-1905. Her early works were performed in an
impressionist style under the influence of French impressionism. Bloch’s wrote a memoir
about her teacher, which was published posthumously in 1967 in Kiev in Ukrainian as Iak
uchiv Roden (How Rodin Taught). Bloch passed on her admiration of French
impressionism to her student Mikhail Lysenko who studied with her at the Khar’kov Art
Institute in the second half of the 1920s – early 1930s. His admiration of Rodin and the
influence of Rodin on the early works of Lysenko caused the sculptor many problems in
Stalin’s years. A granddaughter of the sculptor, the art historian Liudmila Lysenko, said
that Soviet art critics characterized the works of her grandfather by the words: “erotic,
rodenovshchina (Rodin influenced), impressionist.” Perhaps in any other country such a
characterization would be a compliment, but not in the Soviet Union during the Stalin
years, where only one art style was officially recognized – socialist realism. However,
Lysenko not only survived, but made a successful career in the Soviet Union. He taught
at Kiev Art Institute from 1944, received the title of Professor in 1947, and academic of
the Academy of Arts of the Soviet Union in 1970. The secret of his successful career was
his artistic talent combined with sticking to “ideologically correct” subjects and his
eclectic mix of realistic and impressionistic styles. Lysenko produced not only erotic
statues of the couples in love, but monumental statues of the revolutionary and war
heroes with elements of impressionism, or in pure impressionist style (if censorship was
not very strict and did not annoy the sculptor too much). So Lysenko made in pure
impressionist “Rodin” style his works “Faithfulness” and “Partisans’ Ride,” other of his
sculptures were more realistic with elements of impressionism. Perhaps Lysenko’s career
would have continued successfully, and he would have lived longer, if he had not been
involved in the construction of the monument in Babi Yar.
According to Lysenko’s original design, on the front of the composition there was
supposed to be a Jewish family: an elderly Jewish men in tallit, a young mother, feeding
her baby at her breast, an elderly woman, covered by her hand the eyes of her grandson
and people falling under bullets. The monument also was supposed to depict other
victims at Babi Yar: prisoners of the war – a sailor, a soldier and a partisan captured by
the Nazis.
However, according to Malka Rozenberg, in the final stage of the production of
the monument Lysenko’s original plan was secretly changed by his assistants. On the
front of the monument were put the sailor, soldier and partisan, and several Jewish
figures disappeared from the monument. Reportedly when Lysenko saw the modified
monument design he suffered a heart attack and died soon thereafter at the age of 65.
The monument was unveiled in the Summer of 1976 and dedicated to “Over one
hundred thousand Kievans and prisoners of war killed in 1941-43 by the German
fascists,” that so many of victims at Babi Yar were Jewish was not mentioned in the
monument plaque. The monument showed the universal tragedy of the Soviet people, but
not specifically the Jewish massacre. Commemoration of the Holocaust of Jews in Babi
Yar still was forbidden.
Only after the collapse of Communism and the end of state anti-Semitism, did
public discussion of the Holocaust of Jews in Ukraine become permissible. On the fiftieth
anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy, on 29 September 1991, a monument in the form of a
Menorah (architect Yury Paskevich, engineer B. Giller, the artists Yakim and Alexander
Levich) was built in Babi Yar. This monument has been vandalized many times (Most
recently in September 2014 on the eve of the anniversary of Babi Yar massacre). During
one repair the Jewish agency Sokhnut, without the designers’ consent, substituted the dark
granite of the original with light-colored Jerusalem stone. The architect Paskevich
thought that this ruined the entire composition of the monument. Furthermore the
Jerusalem stone began to rapidly disintegrate in the Kiev climate.
Since then many other monuments have been built in Babi Yar, which are
dedicated to the memory of members of the resistance movement, Jewish children, writer
Anatoly Kuznetsov, prisoners of the war, and other people killed there. Twenty nine
monuments and memorial plaque are now in Babi Yar. Why have such a large number of
the monuments been built in Babi Yar since the collapse of Communism? Probably this is
overcompensation for the prior long-lasting prohibition against building any monuments
there. The post-communist society was recovering from suppressed memory and tried to
reconsider the historical past. This does not mean that there is no longer controversy
about Babi Yar monuments. Christians “contested memorializing Babi Yar as a primarily
Jewish place of memory.” Crosses have been erected there dedicated to the Organization
of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) victims and churchmen, who were killed in Babi Yar.
Monuments have also been built for the victims of the Kurenevsky tragedy, mentally ill
people killed by the Nazis, the imprisoned and murdered members of the soccer team
Dinamo, German prisoners of war who died in captivity, and others. Not all of these
people perished in Babi Yar, but the ravine was the chosen place for all of these
monuments.
In 2003 Ukrainian and Jewish intellectuals created a Public Committee for
Commemoration of the Victims of Babi Yar. The Committee pursues the following goals:
creation of a national historical-memorial park “Babi Yar,” with a museum and memorial.
The Ukrainian government followed the wish of Kievans to make Babi Yar a memorial
place and gave the ravine the status of a national historical-memorial park in 2007. This
would perhaps be a good ending of the story, if the proliferation of monuments was not
continuing unabated. The monument jungle threatens to make its landscape
unrecognizable. In June 2013, the Jewish Agency Sokhnut proposed to then President of
Ukraine Victor Yanukovich a plan for construction in Babi Yar of a new memorial
complex. Inside the ravine on the place of the execution of Jews would be built an
“interactive pavilion with Hollywood special effects, which will immerse the visitors in
the atmosphere of the fall of 1941.” “The visitors will hear the barking of German
shepherd dogs, the commands of Nazi guards, and on the side will walk for execution the
doomed Jews, Gypsy and Soviet prisoners of war,” a representative of Sokhnut in Kiev,
Alexander Levin told Ukrainian journalists. The new memorial complex would also
include a large pool with fountains and lights in the shape of a candle and ‘the road of
death’ that should bring people to the middle of pool to the ground in the shape of a
Mogen David. In the ravine a Jewish Community Center would also be opened. Levin
said that “at the same spot where the Nazi executed Jews, Jewish children will study
Torah.” The memorial would be built with public donations, which Sokhnut is ready to
accept from everybody, except Germans. The Ukrainian Revolution of 2014 postponed
the fulfilment of this plan, but Sokhnut continues to persist in the construction of this
memorial complex inside Babi Yar.
From my perspective this is a vulgar plan, which if realized, will finally destroy
the Babi Yar ravine. Building such a memorial complex on the bones and ashes of Babi
Yar victims seems like a sacrilege. The complicated geographical relief of Babi Yar with
its ground water makes construction in the area dangerous. There is enough space around
the ravine for construction of a Babi Yar memorial museum. The Public Committee for
Commemoration of the Victims of Babi Yar has struggled continuously against the
various construction projects proposed to be build inside Babi Yar. The Chair of the
Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, Rabbi Elyakim
Schlesinger, and the Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Yona Metzger, stated that
construction of any building on a place of massacre contradicts Jewish religious law –
Halakha.
Hopefully the Sokhnut and other plans to build anything inside Babi Yar will
never be realized. Babi Yar does not need more monuments; on the contrary it needs
protection and preservation of the ground from new constructions, which threaten its
existence.
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Mikhail Mitsel, Zapret na uvekovechivanie pamiati kak sposob zamalchivaniia Kholokosta. http://
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Vadim Kipling, “Ushel, ostaviv zhizn‘ v kamne, ” Ekho, 01/03/2013
http://exo.net.ua/arkhiv/2423-2013-01-03-09-29-52
Tat'iana Evstafieva, “K istorii ustanovleniia pamiatnika v Babiem Yaru.” Evreiskii Obozrevatel’, 11/30,
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Evgenii Olenin, Zabytyi konkurs 65-go goda. http://archive.is/Dja2, accessed 07/10/2013.
Ibid.
Evstafieva, “K istorii ustanovleniia pamiatnika v Babiem Yaru.”
Ada Rybachuk and Volodymyr Mel’nychenko. Koly ruinuet’sia Svit... (Kyïv : Iurinform, 1991), 13.
Evstafieva, “K istorii ustanovleniia pamiatnika v Babiem Yaru.”
Olenin, Zabytyi konkurs 65-go goda.
Ibid.
Evstafieva, “K istorii ustanovleniia pamiatnika v Babiem Yaru.”
Babi Yar - I. http://berdichev.org/babi_yar.htm, accessed 07/11/2013.
Rybachuk, Mel’nychenko, Koly ruinuet’sia Svit..., 45.
Vladimir Potresov, “Vozvrashenie Nekrasova,” in Victor Nekrasov. Zapiski zevaki (Moscow: n.p., 2003),
21; Elektonnaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopedia, s.v. “Babi Yar,” http://www.eleven.co.il/article/10370;
Potresov, “Vozvrashenie Nekrasova,” 22.
Mikhail Mitsel. “Zapret na uvekovechivanie pamiati.”
Delo Borisa Kochubievskogo, http://www.sakharov-center.ru/politprocess/histkochubievsky; Babi Yar,
1941-1991. A Recourse Book and Guide. Ed. and Compiled by the Staff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
(N.p.: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1991), 34.
Babi Yar, 1941-1991. A Recourse Book and Guide, 34. The Beilis trial took place in Kiev District Court
from September 25 through October 28, 1913.
Mikhail Mitsel, “Zapret na uvekovechivanie pamiati.”
Iulia Mel’nichuk, “Kogda prishla nastoiashchaia nishcheta, odin iz avtorov pamiatnika v Babiem Iaru
Viktor Sukhenko dobrovol’no ushel iz zhizni.” Fakty, July 2, 2003.
Malka Rozenberg, “Tragedia Babiego Yara,” http://www.myreklama.com/myreklama/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=326:2009-09-24-19-14-47&Itemid=28
Ibid.
Babi Yar: chelovek, vlast,’ Istoriia, 204.
Efim Dzhurinskii, “Mnogostradal’nyi pamiatnik,” Agenstvo Evreiskikh Novostei. http://www.aen.ru/
index.php?page=article&category=sketches&article_id=707, accessed 11/24/2012.
Catalogue of the monuments and memorial plagues in Babi Yar. Babyn Yar:masove ubyvstvo i pam’iat’pro
ni’ogo, 221-250.
Bringing the Dark Past to Light. The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe. Eds. John-Paul
Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic. (Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 646.
Ibid.
“Diial’nist’ gromads’kogo komitetu “Babyn Yar,” 2003-2013,” Uroky Golokostu. Informatziinopedagogichnyi buleten’ Ukrains’kogo tsentru vyvchennia istorii Golokostu. 1(33), 2013, 7.
Babi Yar. http://www.kievtown.net/rus/sights/babiy_yar.html
V Babiem Yaru postroiat unikal’nyi memorial’nyi complex. Segodnia, 06/25/ 2013, http://
www.segodnya.ua/ukraine/V-Babem-YAru-postroyat-unikalnyy-memorialnyy-kompleks-444135.html
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“Diial’nist’ gromads’kogo komitetu “Babyn Yar,” 2003-2013,” Uroky Golokostu, 8-9.
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