The massacre at the ravine near Kiev called Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941 remained a significant cultural and political event long after the end of World War II.^[1] Up to the present, Babi Yar has continued to resonate as part of the struggle to commemorate the dead and confront native antisemitism in the former Soviet Union. As Soviet citizens searched for a framework within which to mourn and commemorate the dead of the Great Patriotic War, Babi Yar was transformed into one of the central pillars of collective memory.^[2] However, the transformation of Babi Yar into a site of memory was in many ways unplanned. Moscow, which long sought to monopolize collective memory of the war, left Babi Yar out of the official war narrative, and even sought to eradicate the site physically. That the ravine came to play a role in collective memory was rather the result of social and cultural actors who set out to consciously challenge official memory. As a result of this challenge, Soviet Jews, who had been marginalized in the official discourse about the war and the Holocaust, came to use Babi Yar as a rallying point that facilitated their elaboration of a collective identity.
The reaction against official memory at first took the form of attempts by the creative intelligentsia to challenge Moscow’s narrative with a different one in which Jewish suffering and loss played a more visible role in the story of World War II. This reaction against the prevailing official memory was the first step in the construction of what Foucault termed “counter-memory”, a narrative about the scope and meaning of the Holocaust that consciously sought to undermine the official version, and to emphasize the uniquely Jewish character of the Holocaust.^[3] The process was gradual, in part due to the difficulty of finding an appropriate language for expressing loss on the scale represented by Babi Yar.^[4] At the same time, because Babi Yar was largely a blank spot in the official memory of World War II, the counter-narrative presented by writers and artists did not so much exist in opposition to official memory as attempt to fill in what was missing.^[5] A key role in its elaboration was played by non-Jewish intellectuals such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Dmitry Shostakovich since, given the regime’s denial of a separate Jewish voice, it was only when the Babi Yar counter-narrative was picked up by those who could not be accused of expressing parochial concerns that commemoration of Babi Yar became an element of collective memory for Soviet society as a whole. At the same time, remembering Babi Yar became a way for Soviet Jews to construct and reinforce their own sense of identity distinct from their ascribed position in the Soviet universe. Fragmentary acts of commemoration over time contributed to the formation of what Zerubavel terms a “master collective narrative” which in turn structured Soviet Jews’ collective memory of the massacre.^[6]
This commemorative narrative, despite the welter of writers, directors, composers, and others who took up the theme of Babi Yar in the years between the early 1960s and the fall of the Soviet Union, was surprisingly uniform. The themes elaborated by Yevtushenko in his well-known 1961 poem “Babii Yar” became the foundation for a wide range of artistic works dealing with the subject over the next decades. In particular, Yevtushenko’s emphasis on the historical continuity of antisemitism and his indictment of the Soviet regime for its failure to single out Babi Yar as a site of commemoration were themes common to a number of artistic works on the Holocaust that appeared following the publication of Yevtushenko’s poem. This uniformity facilitated, in time, the emergence of a fairly standardized master narrative, which became the basis for increasing popular mobilization in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of marches, memorial gatherings, and holiday celebrations.
With the end of the monopoly on official memory in the late 1980s and 1990s, the significance of Babi Yar underwent a substantial change. If, previously, the deficiencies of official memory had been a focal point around which counter-memory coalesced, with the downfall of the official memory’s political bulwarks, the alternative narrative that had sprung up to challenge it began to fragment as well. Especially after 1991, a welter of new interpretations about the meaning and significance of Babi Yar developed. In contrast to the earlier lamentations about the lack of adequate memorialization, new memorials began to be erected all around the massacre site, each emphasizing a different aspect of the tragedy. These new memorials not only told different stories, but, in their various shades of meaning, were often interpreted, especially by Jewish activists, as once again attempting to appropriate Jewish suffering for other (possibly antisemitic) purposes. While the inadequacies of official memory in the Soviet period with regard to Babi Yar imposed a degree of unity on the alternative narrative being constructed by activists and intellectuals, the collapse of Soviet power resulted in a fragmentation of memory that has increasingly sidelined Soviet Jews’ own attempts to establish “ownership” of Babi Yar as a site of memory.

BABI YAR IN OFFICIAL MEMORY

Official attempts to erase or appropriate the memory of Babi Yar extended from the mid 1940s (one poet was rebuked for his identification of Jews as victims as early as 1944) until well into the years of glasnost’. Urban development schemes continually threatened to cover Babi Yar itself, even as artists and authors were persecuted for calling attention to the massacre. When it became evident that the memory of Babi Yar could not be effaced, the Soviet government attempted to appropriate the image for its own rhetorical purposes, which included marginalizing the centrality of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and opposing Israel’s role in Middle Eastern politics. It was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union that a specifically Jewish memorial, a menorah, was placed at the site in 1991.
According to the official narrative, Babi Yar was one massacre site among many, where Jews, along with members of untold other national groups lay buried together. Yet, because of Babi Yar’s potency as a rallying point for opposition (a potency which the Soviet government recognized as early as the mid-1940s), it was not officially sacralized as were many battle sites and “hero cities” across the western USSR. Babi Yar challenged a number of assumptions in the orthodox Soviet narrative concerning the Second World War – about the common fate of all Soviet peoples in the face of Nazi aggression, of universal opposition to the invaders (pro-Nazi Ukrainian polizei played a central role in the massacre), and of the class, rather than race-based nature of the struggle. For non-Jewish intellectuals, such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Babi Yar was a glaring example of the hypocrisy and outright mendacity of the Soviet regime in dealing with its own citizens. Ignoring Babi Yar was an example of the regime tolerating and even promoting injustice when acknowledging the truth would be inconvenient.
The establishment of the official Soviet narrative on Babi Yar took place over time, and this gradual process of creation clearly demonstrates the political calculations driving the construction of official memory. The initial massacre at Babi Yar, which began on 29 September 1941 and lasted for two days, was openly (if quietly) acknowledged by the Soviet government and even communicated to the Allies as a means of gaining agreement for the need to obtain Germany’s unconditional surrender. The first official communication regarding the massacre was a short announcement printed in the newspaper Izvestiya on 19 November, 1941. Basing its information on a report filed with the Overseas News service in New York, Izvestiya announced that “information has been received from reliable sources that in Kiev the Germans executed 52 thousand Jews – men, women and children.”^[7] In light of later Soviet attempts to portray the massacre as having fallen on Soviet citizens of all nationalities, it is important to note that this first announcement refers solely to Jewish victims.
The Soviet government also communicated word about the massacre to the Allies beginning on 6 January 1942. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (whose wife was Jewish) was instrumental in letting the West know about the full extent of the massacre. The first communication took the form of a diplomatic note passed by Molotov to the British and American representatives in Moscow. The full text of the note, which was reprinted in the Communist Party’s organ Pravda the following day, again makes explicit reference to Jewish victims, and not only at Babi Yar.^[8] Molotov would continue to raise the issue of Babi Yar in his dealings with the Western Allies. Three more notes mentioning the massacre were passed by the Foreign Minister in the course of 1942.
Many Soviet leaders, beginning with Khrushchev, wanted to see Babi Yar as emblematic of the Nazis’ hatred for all that the Soviet Union represented, and to emphasize the multinational character of the victims.^[9] Beginning with the very first attempts by Jewish intellectuals to draw attention to Babi Yar, Soviet officials responded by denying that the dead of Babi Yar were primarily Jewish, or in any case that the nationality of the dead should not matter. The debate over Babi Yar’s meaning demonstrated the degree to which the Soviet government was uncomfortable with the idea that Nazism had treated the Jews differently from other “inferior” races such as the Slavs. Moscow could not publicly acknowledge that the Nazi invaders had specifically targeted Soviet Jews (as at Babi Yar) without endorsing the thesis that Jews as a nation constituted a distinct element in Soviet society.^[10] According to the official argument, there were no Jews, only working class Jews and bourgeois Jews.
If the Soviet government was initially proclaiming that the aim of the Nazis, at Babi Yar and elsewhere in the occupied East, was nothing less than the complete annihilation of the Jews, the Ukrainian authorities in liberated Kiev and the postwar leadership in Moscow were much more reticent about identifying Nazi victims as exclusively or predominantly Jewish. In part, the Soviet government was eager to avoid discussion of its own behavior towards the Jews both during and after the Great Patriotic War. For a government that had ruthlessly suppressed autonomous Jewish life in its sector of occupied Poland and deported Jewish intellectuals to Siberia as “unreliable elements”, wartime antisemitism was a subject to be broached with great discretion.^[11] Soviet officials also sought to minimize the direct participation of Soviet citizens in anti-Jewish violence during the war, lashing out with particular fierceness at authors who mentioned the participation of Ukrainian polizei and other Soviet citizens in the Holocaust. The guilt of Soviet citizens in abetting Nazi crimes belied Moscow’s claim that antisemitism had ceased to exist in the USSR, and undercut the official position that all Soviets suffered equally in the Holocaust. Given the magnitude of the slaughter, Babi Yar was potentially a very powerful image, to be depicted with caution. By turns, the Soviet and Ukrainian governments tries to appropriate the image of Babi Yar as a place of international martyrdom in which Jews were but one of many nations to have suffered there, and to deny its significance altogether. This construction of rhetorical boundaries around Babi Yar was the crucial first step in the creation of official memory.

BABI YAR AND JEWISH COUNTER-MEMORY

For Soviet Jews themselves, the meaning of Babi Yar was more complex. Before the Khrushchev Thaw, Soviet Jews knew of Babi Yar, but were largely afraid to speak of or visit the site. A few Jewish authors, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, attempted to analyze Babi Yar’s significance in the pre-Thaw era, but were often subjected to official hostility. From the 1960s until the end of the Soviet Union, though, Babi Yar was important not only as a place of mourning for the Nazis’ victims, but also as a symbol of the larger struggle Soviet Jews faced in their everyday existence. Because Babi Yar was so visible to society at large (due in large part to the efforts of non-Jewish intellectuals like Yevtushenko, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Anatoly Kuznetsov), Jewish activists were able to use the site as a forum to air other grievances. In the 1970s and 1980s, the question of emigration to Israel became the most salient political issue facing Soviet Jews, and Jewish activists used the annual commemoration of the September 29 massacre to call publicly for the freedom to emigrate. In this way, Babi Yar allowed Soviet Jews to establish the foundations of collective memory that transcended the single issue of establishing a memorial at Babi Yar. For Soviet Jews, the debate over Babi Yar’s place had profound importance in the development of a distinct “national” (in the Soviet sense) consciousness. This sense of national identity (i.e. that Soviet Jews constituted a people apart from other Soviet nations, but whose historical experience made them a distinct group within world Jewry) was in large part based on the articulation of collective memory of the Holocaust and postwar antisemitism in the Soviet Union.
Even if Moscow’s own policies often forced Jews into a separate identity, the government continued to mistrust them for not fitting into the accepted mold. Moreover, Soviet officials saw in Babi Yar a potential rallying point for a collective Jewish consciousness that, by its very nature, would be in opposition to the tenets of official memory. As far as the Soviet authorities were concerned, it would be preferable if Babi Yar simply disappeared. Indeed, more than one urban development plan for Kiev called for the ravine to be filled in and covered with a sports stadium, a housing development, or a park. The Jewish cemetery, which had served as a gathering point for Kiev’s Jews on the morning of September 29, 1941, was bulldozed in the mid-1960s to make way for the construction of a television tower. A large part of the ravine itself was ultimately filled in and turned into a park. Under mounting public pressure, a memorial to the victims of Babi Yar was erected in this park only in 1976. Even then, it made no mention of Jews. Today, only fragments of the ravine remain untouched. In the independent Ukraine that emerged after 1991, these undeveloped stretches of Babi Yar have become spots for individual pilgrimage and remembrance for the dwindling number of individuals who lost loved ones there in 1941.^[12]
For Soviet Jews, Babi Yar underwent a slow transformation from a place of private commemoration to a potent symbol of their second-class citizenship that lay at the heart of their collective memory. This process of transformation was often helped by intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish, who saw the official neglect of Babi Yar as a stain on Soviet honor. As early as 1944, Soviet writers began trying to put the experience and meaning of Babi Yar into words. These attempts, though at times harshly condemned by the authorities, had little effect on mass opinion until the appearance of Yevtushenko’s poem in 1961. The lack of a memorial to Jewish suffering at the spot, which Yevtushenko forcefully highlighted, galvanized public opinion and contributed to a nascent Jewish political awakening in the USSR. Commemorations by Jews who had lost relatives at Babi Yar, hitherto small private gatherings, took on the character of public demonstrations. Given the sensitivity of public opinion, the official reaction to these demonstrations was relatively cautious. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the gatherings at Babi Yar grew increasingly larger, providing a forum for Soviet Jews to air accumulated grievances on issues such as the refuseniks and official suppression of Jewish organizations. Deprived of any legal way to mourn the victims of the Holocaust as Jews, Soviet Jewry saw in Babi Yar not only a site of memory and mourning, but also a symbol of their larger struggle for acceptance.
Creating official memory and limiting the expression of alternative versions was complicated by the fact that substantial quantities of documentary material on Babi Yar existed in the immediate postwar years. However, much of this material disappeared between the end of the war and the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s. For example, Dina Pronicheva, Babi Yar’s sole survivor, testified as a witness in the West German town of Darmstadt at the trial of sonderkommandos from Einsatzgruppe C in 1967. This trial, incidentally, was barely covered in the Soviet press. Pronicheva had also testified as a witness at a 1946 trial in Kiev, after which 12 Nazis were publicly hanged in Majdan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev’s central square. Pronicheva’s testimony from this 1946 trial was filmed. Fifty years later, the approximately 100 meters of tape were nowhere to be found. The trial of Paul Blobel (commander of the Einsatzgruppe) at Nuremberg in 1951 was not covered at all, and Blobel’s name, like that of Adolf Eichmann, was almost entirely unknown in the Soviet Union (even in Kiev).^[13] Much of the first-hand evidence regarding Babi Yar inside the Soviet Union simply disappeared, for the same reason. When the Russian-Jewish filmmaker Alexander Shlayen attempted to access a variety of eyewitness accounts for a planned documentary on Babi Yar, he discovered that most of them had not been preserved. In the mid-1960s, Dina Pronicheva had sat down with journalists and technicians from Ukrainian radio to discuss her escape from Babi Yar and her testimony at Darmstadt. When Shlayen began searching for the tapes from these sessions in the early 1990s, he discovered that they had been erased. By the time Shlayen gave up hope of finding the tapes, Pronicheva had already died. Shlayen also searched for the films of A. P. Dovzhenko, a journalist who had entered Kiev with the Red Army in 1943. They too were never found.^[14]

CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF BABI YAR IN THE USSR

Even while the war was going on, alternative narratives about Babi Yar began to appear, and in challenging the official story, these works established the dialectical pattern of memory and counter-memory that would characterize the remainder of the Soviet period. Several notable representations of the massacre date from the war years. The first, a poem by Sava Holovanivskyi entitled “Avraam” (Abraham) was published in early 1943 and depicts the march of a single elderly Jew to Babi Yar while the Ukrainian population stands to the side watching passively. Despite the fact that few readers took notice, the Soviet government was sufficiently outraged to publish a condemnation of “Avraam” in Literaturnaia Gazeta, the official organ of the Soviet Writers’ Union. “Avraam” was declared a “nationalist poem openly hostile to the Soviet people”, whose “great sacrifices and perseverance secured freedom and independence for Soviet people of all nationalities.”^[15]Another minor poet to take up the theme of Babi Yar during the war years was Lev Ozerov, whose poem “Babii Yar” was written in 1944-1945, but not published until after the war in the journal Oktyabr’. While this poem was well received by the Soviet authorities, a 1948 sequel, “Snova v Bab’yem Yaru” (Anew in Babi Yar) was not accepted for publication in the Soviet press, and only circulated via the system of underground publication known as samizdat.^[16] Others wrote about Babi Yar during the war years, but only circulated their work among a select group of friends.^[17] In the 1940s, at least, the image of Babi Yar was very much in view for many writers, who were not afraid to portray both the massacre and the anti-Semitic impulses that lay at its core.
The first major writer to address the theme of Babi Yar was the well-known Jewish journalist, poet, and publicist Ilya Ehrenburg, whose poem “Babii Yar” was first published in mid 1944. In his poem, Ehrenburg rhetorically assumes the role of a man shot at Babi Yar, who still possesses consciousness and observes the carnage from above.^[18] Nothing in Ehrenburg’s poem indicates that the protagonist or any of the other victims are Jewish, which helps explain the lack of official condemnation that greeted its publication. In 1948, Ehrenburg touched on the theme of Babi Yar again, when he published the first of his novels of the Great Patriotic War, Burya (The Storm) – followed by Devyatyi Val (The Ninth Wave) – in which Osip, the son of a Jewish tailor in Kiev, loses his wife Raya and young daughter Alya at Babi Yar. Burya depicts in detail the roundup and march to Babi Yar, and describes the terror of the victims’ final minutes, as Alya is seized from her mothers’ arms and cast alive into the ravine. Despite Ehrenburg’s use of Jewish protagonists and powerful indictment of Nazi antisemitism in these works, they are also characterized by the anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments that became Stalinist orthodoxy after the war.^[19]
With Stalin’s death in March 1953, little changed in the official memory of Babi Yar. On the other hand, alternative voices became increasingly prominent in challenging the official line, and at times the state was forced to react. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s eventual successor, had spent a large portion of his life in Ukraine, and in his capacity as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, had supervised the Ukrainian Central Committee’s decision not to erect a monument at Babi Yar in the early 1950s. The Ukrainian authorities had even commissioned an architect, A.V. Vlasov, to design a memorial and an artist, B. Ovchinnikov, had prepared the appropriate sketches while the Soviet government and the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party had allocated 1.4 million rubles for the construction in 1945.^[20] Yet in early 1949 the plan was quietly shelved by the Ukrainian authorities under Khrushchev’s direction.^[21]
With Khrushchev’s elevation to the national leadership, completed in 1956 with the deposition of his rival Georgii Malenkov, Nikolai Podgornyi took over as head of the Ukrainian party apparatus. Under Podgornyi’s direction, the Ukrainian leadership in 1957 again raised the question of whether a monument to the victims of Nazism should be placed at Babi Yar. Podgornyi and the Ukrainian leadership again decided against erecting a monument, and further decided to physically erase the massacre site. This erasure was to be accomplished by building a dam at one end of Babi Yar, which would flood the ravine, followed by the construction of a sports stadium on the adjacent land. In the liberalized intellectual atmosphere of the Khrushchev years, the so-called “Thaw”, the decision to flood Babi Yar was met with a level of public discussion and criticism unthinkable just a few years previously. The first shot was fired in an essay by Viktor Nekrasov in Literaturnaia Gazeta. Entitled “Pochemu eto ne sdelano?” (Why Has This Not Been Done?), Nekrasov’s piece wonders why the “thousands of Soviet people” killed at Babi Yar do not deserve the same memorialization as those who perished elsewhere.^[22] While Nekrasov’s essay serves as a moral indictment of the authorities’ refusal to erect a monument at Babi Yar, it also refers to “Soviet people” rather than Jews as victims of Nazi aggression, not only at Babi Yar, but across Ukraine. Indeed the word “Jew” does not appear anywhere in Nekrasov’s essay. “Pochemu eto ne sdelano?” is thus one of the first attempts to both acknowledge the importance of Babi Yar and reject the centrality of its Jewish narrative. This tactic was to be increasingly adopted by the Soviet authorities over the next decades, as it became clear that the image and the memory of Babi Yar could not be effaced simply by altering the physical landscape of the massacre site. Nekrasov’s article received partial support from a number of other Ukrainian writers, whose letter to the editors of Literaturnaia Gazeta seconded Nekrasov’s call to memorialize the victims of Babi Yar.^[23]
The official reaction to Nekrasov’s appeal appeared soon after as well. In a small announcement on the far side of the page, T. Skirda, Vice Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Kiev State Council of Workers’ Deputies answered Nekrasov’s question – “Why has this not been done?” Skirda replied that “Hitherto at Babi Yar no monument has been erected in connection with the unsuitability of this region”. Announcing a decision taken by the Ukrainian authorities in December 1959 reversing the decision of 1957, Skirda seemingly confirmed that “in the near future” a park would be constructed at Babi Yar and an “obelisk with a memorial plaque in memory of the Soviet citizens tormented by the Hitlerites in 1941”, placed in the center.^[24] Skirda’s announcement was in line with a new resolution adopted by the Ukrainian Central Committee in December 1959 to resurrect the previous plans for a memorial at Babi Yar. Despite the Ukrainian government’s acquiescence in the construction of a memorial, ultimately the plans were again shelved, due to the intervention of the central authorities in Moscow, specifically of Khrushchev himself.^[25]
With Khrushchev’s decision to continue urban development around Babi Yar, construction began on the dam in mid-1960. Not long after the dam was completed in 1961, the heavy spring rains caused a wall of water to build up behind the dam. In March 1961, the dam gave way as a torrent of mud and water swept through Babi Yar and the surrounding regions. By the time the flood had subsided, approximately 145 people had died, and residents of Kiev spoke darkly of Babi Yar’s victims taking their revenge on the Nazis’ Ukrainian accomplices.^[26] At the height of the flooding, two young Moscow intellectuals – Anatoly Kuznetsov and Yevgeny Yevtushenko – traveled to Kiev to see the carnage for themselves. Out of their visit emerged two of the most lasting and powerful artistic descriptions of Babi Yar’s tragic history.
Yevtushenko’s famous poem, published following his visit to Kiev, was crucial in moving the issue of remembrance at Babi Yar from being the concern of a few relatives and residents of Kiev into a major cultural and political issue. Given the resonance that Yevtushenko’s poem had, its charges of complicity and insensitivity laid the foundation for the emergence of an alternative narrative that increasingly came to supplant the official version and provide the basis for the construction of counter-memory. The poem provided a framework for Soviet Jews to commemorate their losses and to identify their fate not so much with other Soviet victims of the war, but with Jewish victims of persecution throughout history (including Jesus, Dreyfus, and Anne Frank). Told in the first person, Yevtushenko’s “Babii Yar” opens with an indictment: “No monument stands over Babi Yar / A drop sheer as a crude gravestone / I am afraid.” Yevtushenko also indicts Russians for their participation in antisemitism, though remaining convinced (as in his autobiography) that antisemitism is alien to the Russian spirit: “Oh my Russian people! / I know you in your very being are international / But how often those with unclean hands / sully your purest name.” Yevtushenko closes by remarking that “There is no Jewish blood in my blood / But I am hated with a burning passion / by every anti-Semite / as though I were a Jew / Therefore / I am a true Russian!”^[27]
Yevtushenko had dared to suggest that the Nazis’ antisemitism, which had caused the massacre at Babi Yar, was not so different from that which infected segments of the Russian population and government, in both Tsarist times and in the present. In one section of the poem, Yevtushenko repeats the slogan of the Tsarist-era antisemitic paramilitary Union of the Russian People (the so-called Black Hundreds): “Beat the Yids, Save Russia!” Though the Union of the Russian People had long since disappeared, the slogan was an uncomfortable reminder of a much more recent incident, in which rioters in the Russian city of Malakhovka had in October 1959 attacked Jewish citizens under this motto of the Black Hundreds.^[28] Yevtushenko also undermined the official position that national distinctions were no longer important, and that Soviet Jews therefore existed on a class basis equal to that of the other peoples of the USSR. By depicting Russian antisemitism as the latest incarnation of a phenomenon stretching back to Biblical times, Yevtushenko posited the existence of a Jewish people existing historically and internationally, and therefore capable of loyalties stretching outside Soviet borders.
The reactions to Yevtushenko’s poem were mixed, but highlighted the fact that, even within the state and Party apparatus, the outlines of official memory were not universally accepted. Yevtushenko, after all, published his poem in the official organ of the Soviet Writers’ Union and participated in the Union’s congresses. Similarly, the debate over building a memorial at Babi Yar that extended throughout the Khrushchev years and beyond, was indicative of a debate going on within the Party apparatus, with some segments of the regime supporting, and even initiating, plans for a memorial. Khrushchev himself, however, remained a substantial obstacle to commemorating Babi Yar.
In 1961, the limits of the “Thaw” were still being tested, and Yevtushenko’s poem helped define what the authorities were and were not willing to accept. Almost immediately after the publication of “Babii Yar”, an editorial in Komsomol’skaya Pravda accused Yevtushenko of “ringing the wrong bell” by dredging up the issue of antisemitism in the Soviet Union. Yevtushenko was accused of being young and immature, “confusing a multitude of understandings” of an issue “long ago decided by our life”.^[29] By blaming the poet’s youth, rather than accusing him of hostility to Soviet values, the authorities gave Yevtushenko an opportunity to “correct” his error. Yevtushenko also appeared onstage at a plenum of the Soviet Writers’ Union in early 1963 to give a speech of contrition for his various literary sins. However, because he focused primarily on his just-released autobiography and subsequent promotional visit to the West, without addressing the deeper challenge that “Babii Yar” and the subsequent poem “Nasledniki Stalina” (Heirs of Stalin) represented, Yevtushenko’s mea culpa was deemed unsatisfactory.^[30] Despite his attempts to regain favor with the regime, Yevtushenko continued to read the poem, though it would not be officially published again in the USSR until 1983.^[31]
Most serious were the charges leveled against Yevtushenko by Khrushchev himself at a meeting between leading government figures and members of the creative intelligentsia in March 1963. By turns condemning “Babii Yar” and Ehrenburg’s recently published memoirs, Khrushchev accuses both authors of “looking for cheap sensationalism”. Yevtushenko is singled out for abuse further in the speech for allegedly “assigning blame to the Russian people for the foul provocations of the Black Hundreds”. Khrushchev also advises Yevtushenko to draw the appropriate conclusions from the fact that not “dogmatists”, but “Communists” have been criticizing his poem.^[32]
Yet, despite the official abuse heaped on Yevtushenko for his poem, it continued to resonate among the Soviet public, and to aid the construction of counter-memory of Babi Yar, and by extension, of the Holocaust and the war as a whole. Primarily through this poem, Babi Yar had taken on a new symbolic importance, becoming a metaphor for a range of ills affecting Soviet society, especially the position of the Jews. For the remainder of the Soviet period, activists and intellectuals concerned about antisemitism in the USSR would use Babi Yar as a metaphor for Jewish suffering. The ravine near Kiev thus came to represent the refuseniks denied permission to live in Israel, the Jewish students refused admission to universities under the numerus clausus, and the relatives of those killed by the Nazis who sought to commemorate the dead. In this way, Babi Yar became a catalyst for challenging the official memory of the war, a memory in which the Jews played no part as Jews. Given the relative lack of open Jewish life in the Soviet Union (only one synagogue was left open in Moscow, and its worshippers were often harassed by the KGB), opposition to the official memory of Babi Yar became an important part of Jewish self-identification, encouraging Jews to cling to a Jewish identity, as one student told Wiesel, “for spite”.^[33]
Yet at the same time, the centrality of Babi Yar to Jewish collective memory created an artificial uniformity among Soviet Jews themselves, in which Jewish identity was focused on the experience of victimization, first at Nazi, and then Soviet hands.^[34] If Soviet official memory left no place for Babi Yar, or at least for the Jews who had died there, establishing a competing narrative that emphasized the centrality of Babi Yar to the Jewish experience encouraged Jews to both put aside their own disagreements about other issues, and to forge a common front with all those who did not accept the official version of what had happened at Babi Yar.

BABI YAR AND THE MOBILIZATION OF SOVIET JEWS

During the 1960s, the few state-sanctioned synagogues in Kiev began a tradition of reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish after Kol Nidre and on the morning of Yom Kippur in honor of the victims of Babi Yar.^[35] This tradition was the first indication that memorializing Babi Yar was beginning to move beyond literary debates and into the general consciousness of Soviet Jews. Soon Jews began seeking a larger commemoration, and from the mid-1960s began gathering at Babi Yar every year on the anniversary of the massacre to conduct a memorial service. The first such service took place in 1966, the 25th anniversary of the massacre. Thousands of mourners arrived at Babi Yar on the morning of September 29, and the Kiev militsiya (local police) let the rally proceed until several mourners got up to give speeches. A number of speakers (including Viktor Nekrasov) were arrested. Two weeks later, a stone appeared at Babi Yar announcing that a memorial would finally be constructed. The memorial gathering became an annual event. After 27 Jews were arrested in 1972, a crowd of almost 1,000 people arrived the next year, forcing the militsiya to again intervene.^[36]
The massive rallies at Babi Yar from the mid 1960s began having their effect. Yet another announcement regarding the construction of a monument had been printed in the November 30, 1965 edition of Literaturnaia Gazeta, proclaiming the government’s intention to build two monuments – at Babi Yar and at the site of the Darnitsa concentration camp nearby. According to the newspaper announcement, the two memorials would be dedicated to the “Soviet citizens, POWs, and officers of the Soviet army”, who had been killed by the Nazis.^[37] Yet only in 1976 were the plans for this memorial finally put into effect. In the autumn of that year, a huge socialist realist sculpture was placed at the site of the filled in ravine. The bronze sculpture depicts a mass of people writhing in agony. This pile of humanity is topped by a woman whose outstretched arms reach for a baby who has fallen into the pit. The memorial’s plaque, as the 1965 announcement claimed it would, makes no mention of Jews or the Holocaust.^[38] For Moscow, giving in to the repeated calls for a memorial had a certain logic. By crowning the official memory with a monument, the authorities hoped to “put a cap on memory work” by breaking down the polarization between official memory and the increasingly consolidated counter-memory of Jews and intellectuals.^[39]
In the cultural sphere, Yevtushenko’s poem was the first of many works that would soon appear challenging the official rejection of Babi Yar as a site of (Jewish) memory. Anatoly Kuznetsov, Yevtushenko’s travel companion in 1961, soon published a “document in the form of a novel” that recounted the events of September 1941 on the basis of the recollections of his relatives (who had been living in Kiev at the time), while Dmitry Shostakovich set Yevtushenko’s words to music in his 13th Symphony. Yet it was primarily non-Jews who, in the 1960s and 1970s took up the theme of Babi Yar in art, even as Jews themselves increasingly used Babi Yar as a gathering place and a focal point for the construction of their own collective memory. Only in the last decade or so of the USSR’s existence did Jews finally begin to make the inadequacies of official memory towards Babi Yar the subject of artistic works. Perhaps the most significant Jewish artistic contribution (at least since Ehrenburg) to challenging the official memory of Babi Yar was Aleksandr Borshchagovsky’s 1980 play Damskii Portnoi (The Ladies’ Tailor), which represented the first literary depiction of Babi Yar since Kuznetsov’s novel 14 years earlier. In the play, a family of working class Jews was confronted with the German occupation and the slowly dawning realization that the Nazis aim to eliminate the entire Jewish population of Kiev. One of their neighbors is a bitter Russian antisemite who ultimately shared a common humanity with the Jewish family and died together with them at Babi Yar. Staged by the Jewish Drama Ensemble, Damskii Portnoi was permitted a weeklong run at Moscow’s Romen Theater in October 1980. All the performances were sold out months in advance.^[40] After this initial 1980 production, Damskii Portnoi remained in circulation. The play was translated into Yiddish in 1981 by the newspaper Sovietische Heimland, and was even staged at Moscow’s Stanislavsky Theater the following year. The director Leonid Gorovets also made a film version of Damskii Portnoi during the last years of the Soviet Union, releasing it in 1990.^[41] Damskii Portnoi offered a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of Soviet Jews (and, equally important, a frank depiction of Russian antisemitism), but dealt only with the war years and made no mention of government antisemitism.^[42] Its release and perpetuation, however, was an important signal that the veil of secrecy over Babi Yar was beginning to lift by the early 1980s, and that the state was open to revising the bases of official memory, at least to some degree.
Yet the process was not linear, and proponents of the official version that had been circulating in various forms since the Stalin years could still find outlets for their views. As late as 1987, well into the years of Gorbachev’s glasnost’, an official sourcebook on the Holocaust in Ukraine published by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences did not make reference to the Jews as being specifically targeted by the sonderkommandos. In the 21-page introduction, Jews are mentioned but twice, as victims of Nazi crimes alongside Russians and Ukrainians. Moreover, well into the 1980s, Zionists were officially accused of collaborating in the massacre of their Jewish brethren in order to undermine the foundations of the multinational Soviet state. Accusing Jewish Zionists of complicity in the massacre at Babi Yar was part of a larger campaign on the part of the Soviet government to link Zionism with Nazism. A 1982 article in Literaturnaia Gazeta condemning the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Lebanese refugee camps Sabra and Chatila placed those killings last in a long line of allegedly genocidal massacres. The article was entitled “Babii Yar, Lidiche, Khatyn – A Teper’ Sabra i Chatyla” (Babi Yar, Lidice, Khatyn – Now Sabra and Chatila). The article went on to accuse the same Zionists responsible for the massacre of Palestinian civilians (though in fact the killings were the work of Lebanese Christian militias) of complicity in the massacre at Babi Yar 41 years earlier.^[43] The rhetorical importance of listing instances of mass killing perpetrated by Nazis with those allegedly carried out by Zionists is obvious – Zionism is but a modern incarnation of Nazism.

BABI YAR AFTER THE FALL: PLURALISM AND DISSENT

With the fall of the Soviet Union, official memory, at least as represented by Khrushchev, Starikov, and others who denied the centrality of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, has given way to a greater pluralism. Even the state, in the person of Ukrainian politicians, has paid its respects to the dead and shared its sympathy with Kiev’s Jewish community. In 1989, the Secretary of the Kiev Executive Committee (i.e. the mayor of Kiev) spoke at the annual September 29 rally in honor of the victims. In 1991, United States President George H. W. Bush and Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers Leonid Kravchuk spoke at the Babi Yar memorial. Bush quoted from Yevtushenko’s poem, and pointedly remarked that “the Holocaust occurred because good men and women averted their eyes from unprecedented evil”.^[44] On the 50th anniversary of the massacre, September 29, 1991, another large rally and vigil were held at the memorial, while a photo exhibit covering the massacre at Babi Yar opened on the rebuilt Khreshchatyk (blown up by Ukrainian partisans soon after the Nazi occupation). Soon thereafter, a memorial to the Jewish victims of Babi Yar was finally dedicated. Shaped like a menorah, the Jewish memorial, designed by Yuri Paskevich, is located several hundred yards from the socialist realist sculpture erected in 1976. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, world leaders from Yitzhak Rabin to Bill Clinton have visited and spoke at this menorah memorial.^[45] In early 2001, during a visit of Israeli President Moshe Katsav to Kiev, the Ukrainian government announced that it would construct a museum at the massacre site.^[46] At ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the massacre in September 2001, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and Kiev Mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko unveiled a memorial to the child victims of Babi Yar.^[47] The role of politicians such as Kravchuk, Kuchma, and Omelchenko has been to re-legitimize the memories of those who experienced, directly or indirectly, the tragedy of Babi Yar. The framework for commemoration, which Merridale asserted was lacking throughout the Soviet period, has returned at last.
An attempt has also been made in recent years to commemorate the tragedy of Babi Yar on a much larger scale. The U.S.-based Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) arranged to fund the construction of a massive (532,500 square meters) Jewish Community Center under the name Nasledie, or Legacy. Although the Kiev City Council agreed to provide land for the construction of the center, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma laid the cornerstone on the 2001 anniversary of the massacre, the proposal continues to generate controversy.^[48] Particularly controversial are both the sheer size of the proposed center and the fact that, while plans call for a memorial and research center (similar to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem), the center is also slated to include a theatrical hall, meeting rooms, exhibition halls and a cafe. The proposal has generated a heated debate among Jewish activists, both inside Ukraine and abroad, with the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine, as well as Kuchma and the Ukrainian parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) in favor and the influential Jewish umbrella organization VAAD at the forefront of the opposition.^[49]
Besides such controversies between different Jewish organizations, the collapse of official memory has permitted a number of non-Jewish groups to articulate their own counter-memory of the war, often in a way that Jews find inimical. Part of the difficulty many Russians and Ukrainians had in acknowledging that the Holocaust had a particularly anti-Jewish dimension (aside from Soviet propaganda) was that the German invasion was incredibly brutal, and millions of non-Jewish Soviet civilians perished under the Nazis. Accentuating the suffering of non-Jews undoubtedly served the interests of official Soviet antisemitism, but such rhetorical manipulation did nonetheless tend to obscure the fact that not only Jews died at Babi Yar. Now that the Soviet official memory about the Holocaust has given way, non-Jewish groups have sought to have their own suffering commemorated. Because so much of the Soviet and post-Soviet debate about memorializing the Holocaust has centered on Babi Yar, groups such as the Orthodox Church and even extreme Right-wing Ukrainian nationalists have chosen to focus their own demands for commemoration on Babi Yar. Thus in 2000, Orthodox faithful erected a cross 30-40 meters from the Menorah marking the killing of two monks in 1941.^[50] Another cross nearby commemorates the deaths of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), who sought, through collaboration with the Nazis, to achieve Ukrainian independence. Like the Jews, extreme Ukrainian nationalists have, in the last decade, taken to gathering at Babi Yar every September 29 to commemorate their dead. Many Ukrainian Jews, unsurprisingly, find the presence of a memorial to the antisemitic OUN, and rallies by its latter-day supporters at Babi Yar to be extremely distasteful.^[51]

CONCLUSIONS

In the postwar Soviet Union, Babi Yar has remained a significant bellwether of both collective Jewish consciousness and of the relationship between the Soviet/Ukrainian government and the Jewish population. During the Soviet period, the official reluctance to acknowledge the massacre at Babi Yar was largely based on the inability to fit the Nazis’ race-based conception of the struggle in Eastern Europe into Soviet ideas about the multinational, class-based nature of the war. Yet this ideological discomfiture quite often merged into outright denials of a specifically Jewish experience in the war that was tantamount to denying the existence of a Jewish Holocaust. Soviet internationalist ideology, in this case, proved to be mutually supportive of explicit antisemitism. As early as the mid-1940s, Moscow understood the potential resonance that Babi Yar could find as a site of memory and mourning among the USSR’s Jewish population; as a result, mention of Babi Yar in works of art was proscribed, and repeated attempts were made to fill in Babi Yar itself. This attempted metaphorical and physical covering over of Babi Yar was the first step in the construction of an official memory that existed, with minor changes, throughout the Soviet era.
Yet from very soon after the war, gaps began appearing in the official memory, and Babi Yar became a site whose meaning was contested. The significance of Babi Yar as a cultural and political symbol was in part due to the fact that the debate over its meaning had migrated beyond the Jewish community, into the “mainstream” Soviet press and high culture. The role of Yevtushenko, Shostakovich, and Kuznetsov in bringing Babi Yar to the attention of a wider audience cannot be overestimated. For Soviet Jews, the struggle to commemorate Babi Yar was central to the act of mourning, that is, of “express[ing] grief and pass[ing] through the stages of bereavement” in order to part from the dead.^[52] Soviet Jews, deprived of an official framework for mourning, had to search for a language that would allow them to express their grief. Babi Yar became a convenient shorthand form of this language, its significance validated within Soviet society as a whole by Yevtushenko and other artists. Too big and too central to the experience of Soviet Jewry, Babi Yar would not go away as an image, even if it could be physically removed from the landscape. By making it the centerpiece of a campaign against Jewish self-identification, the Soviet government handed Jews a potent symbol for all of their struggles.
The collapse of the Soviet-era “official memory” of Babi Yar has complicated the picture further, with Babi Yar now acting as a cultural symbol, a marker of memory, for a wide range of groups. Now that commemoration is possible, Jews themselves are divided about how to commemorate, as the continuing debate on building a Jewish Community Center at the site attests. At the same time, in place of a seemingly monolithic Soviet government devoted to erasing Babi Yar from the cultural and physical landscape, multiple groups, including local and Ukrainian governments, the JDC, the Orthodox Church, Ukrainian nationalist groups, and individual donors have all taken an interest in advancing a specific narrative about the site. This competition between multiple versions of collective memory has imbued Babi Yar with both greater visibility and greater controversy. If Soviet repression forced an artificial simplification onto popular counter-memory, the end of the Soviet Union has uncovered the messy, contradictory nature of counter-memory that is fundamental to Foucault’s description of the concept. The appropriation of the site by Jewish memory has been overlaid with other, often contradictory strands of collective memory. In the fifty year struggle between official Moscow and Soviet Jews to appropriate Babi Yar as a site of memory, the outcome at the start of the 21st century is far from what either could have imagined.