No repeating the past

On Sept. 29 we will mark a tragic date in Ukraine’s history – the 67th anniversary of the tragedy of Babyn Yar. In September 1941, during the German occupation of Kyiv, over 100,000 people were shot in this ravine. A few days ago the Museum of the Great Patriotic War hosted a publication launch of Anatoli Kuznetsov’s book Babyn Yar to remind society once again about this tragedy.

The Russian writer wrote his famous book in the 1960s, and until now there has been no Ukrainian version. A group of donors recently sponsored the first Ukrainian-language edition, and the translation was done by Kuznetsov’s son Aleksei. (The writer died in 1979.)

“The idea of the book is to try and confront the past and do everything to keep it from recurring,” said Kuznetsov. “The book was published in Russian, German, and other languages, but there was no Ukrainian-language edition. In my opinion, this was a big gap in Ukraine’s historical science. The novel was even published under the Soviets, but it was harshly censored. A book that was planned by an author as an anti-totalitarian publication, that is, one that spoke out against both communists and fascists, could leave the censor’s office only as an anti-fascist invective.

“All the editions of Babyn Yar that were published in various periods have one thing in common: in keeping with the author’s request, the text that was published in the Soviet editions appears in regular font, while the parts that were censored are italicized. This way, in addition to text reception, readers can see what obstacles the book had to overcome in order to reach them.”

Kuznetsov called his book a documentary novel because, apart from eyewitness accounts, it contains archival data, official documents, and his microfilm transcriptions about the events that took place in 1941-43. Many of these materials are still sparking debates among historians, in particular in relation to the destruction of architectural monuments.

“Scholars disagree over the Soviet government’s involvement in laying an explosive charge at the Dormition Church. However, most researchers, including Kuznetsov, concur that it was destroyed on NKVD orders,” said Dmytro Malakhov, a researcher at the Kyiv History Museum.

“Archival data and eyewitness accounts tell us that Kyiv was mined by the Corps of Engineers of General Andrei Vlasov’s 37th Army. The orders for placing the mines were verbally transmitted, so there are no documents to confirm these instructions, and there never will be. This is borne out by numerous history books and other publications.”

Anatoli Kuznetsov also argued that there were three attempts to destroy Babyn Yar after the war: first, the Germans tried to cover their tracks; second, the Soviet authorities had a go in the 1950s, and finally, the construction of the Syrets microdistrict on the site of the tragedy. Contemporary historians are most scandalized by this third attempt.

“I cannot call the bureaucrats who ordered the construction of a residential district at Babyn Yar anything but cynical. They erected symbolic monuments there, but at the same time they laid out public gardens on the site of that horrific tragedy,” said Myroslav Popovych, the head of the Hryhorii Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences.

“These people are not capable of feeling human suffering and letting it penetrate their hearts, so they blindly fulfilled the plan and built the Syrets district. At one time, Oleksii Davydov, the head of the Kyiv City Council, proposed to Nikita Khrushchev that a stadium be built at Babyn Yar, on the territory of the Jewish cemetery. Playing soccer on top of buried bones is the same as playing soccer with skulls, but this design was discussed absolutely calmly at the time. Now the Cabinet of Ministers has issued a regulation demarcating the boundaries of a reserve on this territory. But the land problem in Kyiv is so sensitive that it makes people exhibit the same callousness that afflicted Davydov and his associates.”

Next year Aleksei Kuznetsov will unveil his father’s complete works, including the letters that he wrote to his wife during emigration (during the last 10 years of his life Kuznetsov lived in London, where he worked at Radio Liberty) and a collection of his radio scripts. For the moment, the son of the great writer is offering Ukrainians the documentary novel Babyn Yar, which he read at the age of six.