Babi Yar and the Politics of Memory 

                          The woman I had never met.

                      My dearest child! My rosy blushes!

                      My countless relatives, my own!

                      From every gorge your summons rushes:

                      You plead with me, beseech and moan.

                      We”ll gather all our strength and rise,

                      Our bones will clatter as we wend – we”ll haunt the towns still left alive,

                      Where bread and perfumes waft their scent.

                      Your candles sputter. Flags rip out their seams.

                     We’ve come to you. Not we – but the ravine.

These lines drip with death and despair. But unless you knew the title of this poem – or unless the word ‘ravine’ in the last line stuck in your gullet – you would find it hard to relate to the poem’s immediate context. At any rate the first time the poem appeared in print in the Russian magazine Novy Mir in 1944, it was one of several untitled poetic reflections by Ilya Ehrenburg on Nazi Germany’s apocalyptic war on the Soviet Union, then still ongoing. It was only in an 1959 anthology of his poems that Ehrenmburg added the title Baby Yar to this racking little poem. But, with the title or without it, contemporary Ukrainians – indeed the Soviet citizenry at large – always knew just what the Ehrenburg poem was about, as much in 1959 as in 1944. Soviet readers could hardly fail to see the linkages between Ehrenburg’s searing lines and the unspeakable crimes Hitler’s hordes committed in the Baby Yar ravine in Kyiv on 29-30 September, 1941.

And yet Yevgeni Yevtushenko in his 1961 poem Babi Yar was right to lament that

No monuments stand over Babi Yar,

A sudden drop sheer as a gross graveslab.

Yevtushenko was only eight years old when Babi Yar happened, so  he was unlikely to have been greatly affected at the time. (Ehrenburg was 41 years his senior.) And yet the fact that the site lacked a proper monument a good sixteen years after the defeat of Nazi Germany deeply troubled Yevtushenko. An anguished cry bursts forth from him as he stands contemplating the ravine’s bleak landscape:

The wildgrass rustles over Babi Yar.

Trees stare down stern,

                                        judicial,

                                               cold as day.

All things scream silent here.

Hat in my arm,

I feel myself now

slowly going grey.

I myself am

one all-out soundless scream

For the thousand buried thousands in this char.

I’m every old man

shot in this ravine.

I’m every baby

burned in Baby Yar.

The pathos here is as profound as in the Ehrenburg poem, but there is also something else: a sense of exasperation, of anger, even, not only at the perpetrators of the Babi Yar massacre but also at the colossal indifference to the massacre’s victims that Yevtushenko sensed around him. And he traces that impassivity to what he believed Babi Yar really stood for: essentially as a site of a racial genocide, of an anti-Semitic carnage, and not just another horrendous war-time atrocity. Yevtushenko clearly implies that this indifference was a function of the anti-Semitism which was as endemic to Soviet society as it had been to pre-revolutionary Russia. He then goes a step further. He, a non-Jewish Russian, identifies himself with the victims of Baby Yar and the ordinary Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union who, he suggests, daily suffered multiple indignities. He calls up graphic images of Jewish pogroms, suggesting that  the Jewish nightmare was nowhere near ending even in a country like Russia which had experienced a great revolution.

I have been

hounded, hunted,

slandered, spat on,

And demoiselles dolled up in Brussels lace

Shrieked as they poked their parasols in my face,

 And now I am 

a boy in Bialystok,

Blood runs across the floor. Blood on the wall.

The bar-room rabble-rousers run amok

Reeking of onion and hard alcohol.

Yevtushenko, then, sees Babi Yar as an obnoxious link in the unbroken chain of anti-Semitic prejudice that goes back centuries. It has often intrigued commentators that Ilya Ehrenburg, himself a Jew and, in his day, one of the Soviet Union’s leading public intellectuals, did not appear to see Babi Yar as racial genocide but the much-younger, non-Jewish Yevtushenko clearly did. What explains the two divergent perspectives? In trying to answer this question, we will find ourselves engaging with the two contesting narratives around Babi Yar that persist to this day.                 

The bare facts are as follows. Three months into Operation Barbarossa, in September 1941, virtually all of Ukraine had come under German occupation. On September 28, or nine days after the 6th army moved into Kyiv, the city woke up to printed notices posted all over its public spaces ordering Kyiv’s Jews to assemble in a clearing between two city cemeteries on the morning of September 29 “with valuables, cash, documents….. and warm clothes”. Jews, the order curtly said, would disobey the instructions at their own peril.

Anticipating forced deportation at worst but nothing more sinister, a large majority of Kyiv’s Jews – mainly women, children and elderly men (most able-bodied males having alrerady been drafted into the Red army or joined the partisans) – turned up on the morning of the 29th as ordered. They were then marched in batches towards a densely wooded part of the Babin Yar ravine at the city’s edge. What followed was one of the worst mass murders of the War until that point. At a rough count, nearly 34,000 Jews were slaughtered inside the ravine on September 29 and 30 by machinegun fire. The ravine’s walls were later undermined to bury the bodies, some still breathing, under mud and rubble. 

Word of the carnage filtered slowly out of Kyiv, thanks to the Nazis’ tight control over all information channels. And as the Nazi holocaust was as yet a little-known phenomenon, the news was met with disbelief and shock in equal measure. Once the facts became a little clearer, however, the Soviet government’s denunciation of the massacre clearly referred to the large number of Jewish dead. Indeed, Foreign Minister Molotov’s message to the Allies highlighted the essentially anti-Jewish character of the Babi Yar savagery. At this point, the Soviet narrative around Babi Yar was pretty straightforward and uncomplicated. 

To understand how the picture began to blur over the following months and years, however, a look at the Soviet Union’s record of dealing with anti-Semitism would be instructive. The aggressive atheistic secularism of October Revolution’s first decade began later to yield ground to sectarian prejudices of many kinds. Anti-Semitism had been an embedded feature of Russian society for centuries, and, among the Soviet republics, historically Ukraine was perhaps the most plagued by this disease. No wonder then that parts of Ukraine erupted not infrequently in ugly anti-Semitic episodes well into the 1930s/1940s. Sadly, the Soviet elite itself was not wholly immune to this malady in the Stalin years. Whether Stalin himself was a confirmed anti-Semite it is hard to say, but there’s no doubt that, at best, he was deeply ambivalent. The result was that a steady, low-burn variety of anti-Semitism was well tolerated by the Soviet leadership. 

Rather than confronting the virulent racism underlying Nazi theory and practice, therefore, the Stalinist leadership embraced the expedient of presenting Hitlerism as a particularly malevolent variant of hyper-nationalism – which it certainly was, but not that alone– intent on destroying Soviet socialism. Stalin’s antidote to Nazi expansionism was the Great Patriotic War which would, he hoped, harness every Soviet nationality in full measure to the object of beating back the German invaders. In this great project, all ethnic markers had presumably to be submerged in the high tide of patriotic passion. The Great Patritic War was a campaign sustained by the Soviet people as an organic whole; any ethnic boundaries drawn between the Soviet defenders fof their Fatherland, for whatever purpose, could only weaken the Soviet cause. The tens of thousands of luckless victims of Babi Yar were Soviet citizens – first and always. They were killed because they were Soviet citizens. It was unnecessary – indeed, counter-productive – to identify their ethnic nationality which no longer had any meaning in a socialist state which, by definition, was internationalist. The narrative of the Great Patriotic War would, it was hoped, subsume all other minor narratives.

Therefore, it was decided to downplay the racist angle to the Babi Yar carnage. And that’s why the demand for a memorial at the site was repeatedly resisted by Soviet authorities. There was another, more down-to-earth motivation for the stonewalling. As the Naziz were driven out of Kyiv in late 1943, non-Jewish Ukrainians who had fled their homes started returning to the city in large numbers. It would have been ‘injudicious’ to hurt their sentiments by erecting a memorial principally to Kyiv’s Jews at that critical juncture when the war against Germany had not yet been won. (The hurt would likely have been felt more keenly by those Ukrainians who had occupied the homes of the dead Jews of Babi Yar.)

For all his occasional spells of waywardness, Ilya Ehrenburg was a pillar of the Soviet establishment. At times he did test the limits of what was permissible, but he was careful never to stray too far beyond those limits. The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, of which he with Vasily Grosman were joint editors, never saw the light of day till well after Stalin’s death. The 1932-born  Yevtushenko, on the other hand, really made his mark in 1956, the year of the 20th Party Congress, and absorbed some of the creative energies that deStalinzation’s first few years famously undammed. (To be fair to Ehrenburg, in 1944 he mightn’t have liked to rock the boat at any rate: the war with Nazi Germany had still to be won.)

But let this not mean that Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar was greeted with open arms in the Soviet Union of 1961. Far from it. Indeed, he was roundly excoriated both by the Party bureaucracy and the semi-official Writers’ Union for his ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’.  And when Dmitri Shostakovich wanted to incorporate stanzas from the poem as an aria in his 13th Symphony, he ran into serious difficulties with the authorities. Only after some of the verses were sanitised and the paradigm of complete racial amity in the Soviet state built into the stanzas that the composer could go ahead with further pulic performances.

Post Stalin, the clamour for a Babi Yar memorial grew steadily louder. Soviet authorities blew hot cold for many years. Government plans around the site ranged from the outrageous (flattening the gorge and building a dam at the ravine’s northern-most edge) to the ludicrous (a sports complex on the flattened mass graves). By then monuments memorialising the dead of the Great Patriotic War had come up all over the country. Some serious efforts were begun in the mid-1960s to remedy the glaring omission at Baby Yar.

Suggestions and layout designs were sought alike from sculptors and ordinary citizens, and in-depth consultations started. The memorial was finally unveiled in the summer of 1976 – a mess of tangled bodies, twisting, writhing, flailing desperately. At over 50 feet tall and 30 feet across, its dimensions are also appropriately monumental. 

One imagined the installation of the memorial would have laid the unremitting controversy around Babi Yar finally to rest. But that didn’t happen, the reason being that the plaque at the foot of the monument read

                                         Here in 1941-43 German Fascist invaders

                                        Executed more than 100,000 citizens of the

                                        City of Kyiv and prisoners of war

The wording raised the hackles of nearly every Jewish institution without exception. The Museum of Jewish Heritage at New York summed up their skepticism quite candidly:

The Soviet Union was still unwilling to acknowledge that Babi Yar was a killing site for Jews specifically, or that it was one of many such sites that comprised the larger Holocaust. (Emphasis added) 

When Elie Wisel, Nobel laureate and one of the the best-known Jewish voices of the latter part of the 20th century, visited Babi Yar in 1979 as Chairman of the President’s Commission of the Holocaust, he was, he said, greatly disappointed by the monument. He spoke of a deep feeling of frustration, shame and rage that the Soviet government chose to perpetuate the memory of Babi Yar’s victims without acknowledging that

(T)he men and women buried in this ravine were murdered for being Jewish! …. While still alive, the Jews of Babi Yar were abandoned, and now their memory is being betrayed. 

Wiesel’s anguish is palpable, but is he speaking the whole truth? Is the Jewish Museum or everyone else from that spectrum of opinion right to fault the Babi Yar plaque for the reasons they state? Hardly.

The dead buried in Babi Yar number, by current estimates, between 140,000 and 150,000. That’s because Babi Yar was not just one massacre but a whole series of them stretching over the Occupation’s entire duration. And besides Kyiv’s Jews, the victims included partisans, POWs, communists, Romanis/Gypsies, the physically disabled, Christian pastors and even many Ukrainian Nationalists (who were Nazi collaborators till the Nazis turned on them towards the end). It’s believed that non-Jewish victims account for at least 15 percent of the total number. And not only that Babi Yar is not an unmixed Jewish mass grave.

It is now well-established that the mass executions at Babi Yar commenced immediately after the Nazis entered Kyiv, or at least a week before 29/30 September, and that the first targets of the shootings were not Jews but Russian POWs. This gives the lie to the claim that Babi Yar was a killing site specifically or exclusively for Jews. And what this means is this:  the Soviet regime’s refusal to acknowledge the linkages between Babi Yar and racial genocide surely smacked of prejudice and insensitivity; equally, Jewish leaders’ (and Western observers’) failure to recognise that the Soviet Union was justified in claiming Babi Yar as also one of the battlegrounds of the Great Patriotic War is unacceptable and wrong.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com