By Sophie Sacilotto
Babyn Yar monument. February 10, 2018. No changes made. Wikimedia Commons. View license here.
Note on Translation
- Babyn Yar – Ukrainian Name
- Babyn – Old Woman or Woman*
- Yar – Ravine
- Babi Yar – Russian Name
*varies depending on the source
Introduction
On 19 September 1941, the Wehrmacht, German army, entered Kyiv, the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the largest Soviet city to fall under the Nazi occupation during World War II. Just ten days later, the Nazis began executing Jews at Babyn Yar, a deep, 150-meters-long, snaking ravine fifteen meters deep whose name roughly translates to “old woman ravine.”[i] These executions would continue for the next two years, predominantly targeting Jews but also Roma, Communists, and partisans to name a few.[ii] Concrete statistics on the death tolls of each ethnic, social, and political group have never been established due to a lack of concrete data. However, between 34,000 and 100,000 are believed to have been killed at the ravine.Today the park around Babyn Yar is filled with over 88 monuments to those killed there; however, the first of those monuments did not appear until 1976. This article will outline the history of Babyn Yar and how it came to be so significant in Soviet memorial history and for today’s ongoing conflict.
Crimes Committed at Babyn Yar
The German army’s arrival in Kyiv on September 19, 1941 was greeted with a “grand reception” from the local anti-Soviet population.[iii] This reception was interrupted by explosions at the bell tower and Monastery of the Caves which killed forty Germans. On September 24, another set of bombs went off blowing up the Nazi headquarters and blowing out the windows of the buildings on Khreshchatyk and parallel streets.[iv] Retreating Soviet troops had placed these bombs to kill German officials once they took the city.[v] These explosions drastically escalated tensions in Kyiv. Mines would continue to detonate in the city centre on September 24 and 25 every few minutes, killing around 200 Germans in total.[vi] Both residents of Kyiv and Germans were outraged by the mine explosions, an opportunity exploited by the latter in the coming days to justify the killing of Kyiv’s Jews, falsely rumoured to have been responsible for the explosions, and thereby used as scapegoats.[vii]
Fire on Khreshchatyk Street, Kyiv. September, 1941. German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons. No changes made. View license here.
On September 28, the newly appointed Ukrainian militia posted two thousand copies of an unsigned order around Kyiv.[viii] The order in Russian, Ukrainian, and German was addressed to the Jews of the city demanding that they appear the next day before eight in the morning at an intersection near the Lukianivske Jewish Cemetery.[ix] They were to bring their documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing. Any “Yids [sic]” who disobeyed would be shot.[x] The next morning, thousands of Jews from Kyiv arrived at the intersection of Melnyk and Dehtiarivska street expecting deportation at the nearby train station.[xi] Instead, all queuing Jews’ papers were checked and discarded before they were stripped of their clothing, beaten, and pushed to the edge of Babyn Yar where they were summarily shot.[xii] In total, between September 29 and 30, a minimum of 34 000 Jews and residents of Kyiv were shot and buried in the mass grave that is Babyn Yar.[xiii] This was one of the first massacres of Jews in the Holocaust by bullets and remains one of the largest massacres of Jewish people in a 24-hour period during the Holocaust.[xiv]
While it is believed that by the end of November 1941, 42,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed at Babyn Yar, this number is difficult to verify and is debated to range between 40,000 and 100,000 over the course of Nazi occupation.[xv] Of the estimated 42,000, 40,000 are believed to have been Jewish.[xvi]
The final phase of Babyn Yar would begin in 1943, when the Germans ordered the multi-ethnic prisoners of war (POWs) held in the neighbouring Syrets concentration camp to destroy the evidence of the mass executions at Babyn Yar.[xvii] Syrets, construction of which started in May 1942, was a three square kilometers Nazi camp in direct proximity to Babin Yar.[xviii] It held POWs, “racial enemies,” partisans (most often members of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, hereafter)[xix] It is estimated that approximately 10,000 prisoners were housed at Syrets[xx] The most damaging work to take place at Syrets was the use of its prisoners to destroy the nearby Jewish and Christian cemetery, collect the materials, and use them to create pyres on which to burn the bodies of those executed at Babyn[xxi] The burning and spreading of ashes through the ravine was a tactic employed by the Nazis in an attempt to cover up the massacres that they had perpetrated at Babyn Yar before the return of the Red Army – however testimonies of surviving POWs interviewed immediately following liberation offer critical insight into the extent of the atrocities that took place, setting the number of cremated bodies at 70,000[xxii]
The Red Army would arrive in Kyiv on November 3, 1943, reclaiming the city by November 13.
The Slow Memorialization of Babyn Yar
Following the Red Army’s return to Kyiv in November 1943, Soviet control of Ukraine resumed and the memorialization of Babyn Yar developed privately amongst those who had lost loved ones in the massacres. It would be nearly twenty years until Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babyn Yar and Anatoli A. Kuznetsov’s memoir Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel would be published under Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw, opening the door to public discussion of the tragedies that had taken place.
In September 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a famous Russian poet published the poem “Babi Yar” in the Soviet journal Literaturnaya Gazeta, opening discussion on what had taken place at Babyn Yar.[xxiii] His poem caused an uproar in the intelligentsia, bringing Babyn Yar to the centre of discussion about the Holocaust in Soviet territory in the Soviet Union. Public discussion of Babyn Yar and the Holocaust showed that much of the Russian-speaking Soviet population supported the Soviet universalist approach to victims of the Holocaust.[xxiv] It was preferred to remember those killed as pertaining to one homogenous group, rather than differentiated based on ethnicity as their perpetrators had.[xxv] The method of remembering holds particular significance in a multi-ethnic country such as the Soviet Union. Overlooking ethnic differences bolstered the state’s official narrative of collective unity union-wide, thereby disregarding differences between its peoples. Despite this, 1961 became a landmark year for the recognition of Babyn Yar thanks to Yevtushenko’s poem. The poem would become the first commemorative “monument” to those killed at Babyn Yar, although its reception by the leaders of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR) was less than favourable: the government of the UkSSR did not publicly address the poem, banning it in Kyiv for the next twenty-three years.[xxvi]
Dina Pronicheva on the witness stand, January 24, 1946, at a Kiev war-crimes trial of fifteen members of the German police responsible for the occupied Kiev region. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons. Photo in the public domain. View license here.
The serial publication of Anatoli A. Kuznetsov’s memoir Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel in the Soviet Journal Yunost would bring even more attention and significance to Babyn Yar.[xxvii] Kuznetsov, an ethnic Ukrainian, had lived in Kyiv throughout World War II, often in hiding as residing in the city was emptied periodically throughout the war by both Nazis and the Red Army.[xxviii] Although large sections of the book were initially redacted, Babi Yar includes extensive quotations from several survivors of Kyiv’s Nazi occupation, including Dina Pronicheva, one of the few survivors of the initial massacre.[xxix] These testimonies provide critical understanding of the brutality of the Babyn Yar massacres with context, while also providing an insightful account of the Soviet Union’s deliberate erasure from memory.[xxx] In 1969, on a trip to London, England, Anatoli Kuznetsov sought political asylum and later published his book in full, un-redacted.[xxxi] In 2023, the Atlantic reported this book to be “The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save,” highlighting a poignant observation regarding the use of literature as a means of confronting historical truths, challenging prevailing narratives, and fostering empathy and understanding among Ukrainians and the broader international community.[xxxii]
It was these two publications that provided the impetus for a spontaneous gathering of young Kyivan Jews, including writers and filmmakers, at Babyn Yar on September 29, 1966 – marking the 25th anniversary of the massacre.[xxxiii] During this gathering, many uncensored speeches were made by notable attendees – some of which were recorded by the attending filmmakers for later distribution, but “whose celluloid film was destroyed on KGB orders.”[xxxiv] This was the second commemorative gathering at Babyn Yar to take place that month, warranting a resport on it in the archives of the Ukrainian Secret Police[xxxv] The number of attendees on September 29 is highly disputed, with the secret police documentation approximating 500 participants and witnesses such as Ivan Dziuba and Viktor Nekrasov counting thousands, a claim supported by a photograph of the event.[xxxvi]
When the Soviet Union Memorialized
Following Yevtushenko and Kuznetsov’s publications in the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics respectively, public interest in Babyn Yar continued to increase. The narratives asserted by the two authors encouraged those who were privately mourning the murder of their families for the past twenty years to begin doing so in public as a community. A change in leadership of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev was additionally encouraging, no longer needing to fear deportation or disappearance in the same manner as during Stalin’s rule.
The Soviet government in Moscow accepted and took on some of Yevtushenko and Kuznetsov’s ideas in relation to Babyn Yar in an attempt to maintain control over the burgeoning memorialization movement. The leadership even went so far as to seize control of memorialization events taking place, which had been organized by those wanting to see Babyn Yar have a physical commemoration of its past. By the end of 1966, the government of the UkSSR erected a granite stone at the top of the ravine with an inscription calling for the establishment of a memorial at Babyn Yar dedicated to the memory of the “victims of fascism.”[xxxvii] The choice to dedicate the monument to “victims of fascism” was influenced by the Soviet Union’s conceptualization of “self-determination”.
The Soviet Union’s use of the term self-determination and its populations right to it, while sounding quite similar to Western perceptions, differs quite drastically.[xxxviii] Lauri Mälksoo describes the Soviet approach to people’s rights, and Lenin and the Soviet Union’s understanding of self-determination as different or “unusual” by Western European standards.[xxxix] Mälksoo quotes Soviet International Lawyer Grigory Tunkin saying “the Russian Communist Party struggled for unification on a voluntary basis, so that individual nations exercising their right to self-determination have expressed themselves freely for unification with other Soviet socialist republics.”[xl] This universalist approach, critical to consider, argues that a nation, rather than be able to make an independent self-determined choice, can only exercise their “right to self-determination” so long as they are choosing to be a part of the Soviet Union and by extension follow the Soviet leaders. As such, no genuine right to self-determination or acknowledgement of one’s nation was permitted as long as it opposed the dominant homogenous Soviet narrative.[xli] As a result, any distinct ethnic minority having been victimized by the Nazis at Babyn Yar was overlooked under the all-encompassing banner of “victims of fascism” on the monument erected under Soviet rule.
The granite stone at the edge of Babyn Yar would remain in its place for ten years, promising a monument to be erected. It would, however, not be until 1976 that a monument would take its place.
Kyiv, Babyn Yar memorial with people. June 2, 2007. By Viktor Polyanko. No changes made. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons 4.0. View license here.
After three closed design competition winners were rejected by the Kyiv Municipal government, the Ukrainian Soviet Party finally commissioned the monument in 1972.[xlii] The unveiling of the statue occurred on July 2, 1976, with minimal publicity and the absence of any formal ceremony.[xliii] The monument was described as a memorial to the Soviet people designed to honour citizens, soldiers, and prisoners of war shot by the Nazis at Babyn Yar.[xliv] No ethnic or social groups were named on the plaque adorning the base of the monument, despite records indicating that not only Jews but Poles, Russians, Belarussians, Roma and Sinti, Red Army POWs, Communists and psychiatric patients had all been executed there during the Nazi occupation.[xlv]
In 1991, following Ukraine’s independence, three additional plaques were added to the monument with inscriptions in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish.[xlvi] The inscription reads:
In this place during 1942-1943 the German-Nazi occupiers shot one hundred thousand of Kyiv residents and POWs.
The monument has often been criticized for the inaccuracy of its design, focusing on Red Army POWs rather than the Jewish population that made up the majority of the death toll of the massacres.
Babyn Yar Post 1991
Since the erection of the first monument memorializing those murdered at Babyn Yar in 1976, what is today the Babyn Yar Park has continued to evolve and expand as a memorial space. The descendants of those killed by the Nazis have worked tirelessly throughout Ukraine’s independence to commemorate all ethnic, social, and political groups killed at the ravine, with the number of monuments in the park now surpassing 88 in total. These monuments include a menorah for the Jewish population, a horse drawn cart for the Roma and Sinti population, and a child for those children killed, all of which have been privately funded and commissioned. The park has not been without controversy however, with contentious debates over the ethics of building of a museum, synagogue, as well as other large art projects on the site.
80th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy. October 6, 2021. Office of the President of Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons. View license here.
Unfortunately, the continued evolution and development of the memorial park has been halted by the Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine starting on February 22, 2022. The Babyn Yar Park has even suffered some damage to its grounds, although fortunately no monuments, when a Russian missile accidentally crashed in the park in the early days of the war. With the last photos of Babyn Yar released in 2022, little visual documentation of the current state of the park has made it to the West and as such it is difficult to determine what damage has been done by the missile .
Memorialization of the Holocaust in Ukraine is just as vital today, however, with the Kremlin employing a narrative of de-Nazification to justify their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[xlvii] In the contemporary geopolitical landscape, there exists a pressing imperative to safeguard the integrity of historical truths surrounding the Babi Yar massacre, in order to counteract Russia’s narrative depicting Ukraine as complicit with Nazi Germany both historically and in present discourse. Despite the intricacies characterizing Ukraine’s historical relationship with the Third Reich, the atrocities perpetrated at Babi Yar unequivocally constitute genocide. Therefore, it remains paramount to uphold the memory and veracity of these events as a vital measure in combatting revisionist historical narratives.
Conclusion
At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union did not wish to memorialize the Jewish civilians who had died in massacres such as Babi Yar. Instead, the Soviet Union subsumed those Jews killed in what we now call the Holocaust into the category of peaceful Soviet citizens, a name much more suited to the Soviets ideas of self-determination. The Soviet leadership in Moscow did not take any steps to highlight that its Jewish population was treated by Nazis any differently than Russians or Ukrainians. By the 1970s, with an increasing number of Soviet Jews emigrating to Israel, the Soviet government began to see their Jewish citizens as less loyal than other ethnicities, leading to further alienation.[xlviii]
Although the granite stone erected by the UkSSR in 1966 at the edge of Babyn Yar would not be replaced by a monument for ten years, its presence was effective in allowing officials to take control of the narrative and lead the memorialization of Babyn Yar for a time. Ultimately, however, control of the memorialization of Babyn Yar would return to a free Ukraine Government and the people with the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence in 1991. The subsequent erection of over 87 monuments by a variety of social, ethnic, and communities’ groups who had lost members at the ravine visually demonstrated society’s reclamation of the role of memorializing those they had lost. The Jewish monument in the form of a menorah has become a traditional stop for foreign dignitaries visit Kyiv and every year on 29 September, the anniversary of the deadliest day of the massacre, the President of Ukraine lays flowers at the base of the monument.
Babyn Yar is an example of how memorialization evolves over time and through generations. First being memorialized at home, in private by families who lost loved ones, then in Yevtushenko’s poem and Kuznetsov’s book, then in an inaccurate monument to a vague social collective, and finally back in the hands of the victim’s families who have memorialized so many of the groups murdered at the ravine for their ethnicity, race, politics, resistance or other reason. Babyn Yar continues to constantly evolve, pausing only to resist Russian’s invasion. One day, I am sure, flowers will again be laid at Babyn Yar.
Endnotes
[i] Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, United States: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 68.
[ii] “The Unveiling of the Memorial Plaque for the Victims of the Events in Babi Yar,” Warsaw Ghetto Museum, 21 November, 2021,https://1943.pl/en/artykul/the-unveiling-of-the-memorial-plaque-for-the-victims-of-the-events-in-babi-yar/
[iii] Stanislav Aristov, “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, no. 3 (2015): 433.
[iv] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 30.
[v] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 30.
[vi] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 30-31.
[vii] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 32.
[viii] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 32-33.
[ix] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 33.
[x] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 33.
[xi] Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 33.
[xii] Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), 104-110.
[xiii] Norman M. Naimark, “The many lives of Babi Yar: one of the blackest chapters of World War II: the German massacre of Kyiv’s Jews. The horror of Babi Yar, suppressed in the Soviet era, may be finding its proper place in European memory at last,” Hoover Digest (2017): 177.
[xiv] Naimark, “The Many Lives of Babi Yar,” 177.
[xv] Artisov, “Next to Babi Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 437; Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 306-307.
[xvi] Aritsov, “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 437.
[xvii] Aritsov, “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 447-449.
[xviii] Aritsov, “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 438
[xix] Aritsov, “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 439; Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, 306.
[xx] “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 441.
[xxi] “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 447.
[xxii] “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev,” 447.
[xxiii] Aleksandr Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine: Memorialization of the Jewish Tragedy at Babyn Yar,” Nationalities papers 39, no. 3 (2011): 375.
[xxiv] Arkadii Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018), 152.
[xxv] Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments, 152.
[xxvi] Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine,” 375
[xxvii] Naimark, “The Many Lives of Babyn Yar,” 182.
[xxviii] Kuznetsov, Babyn Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.
[xxix] Naimark, “The Many Lives of Babyn Yar,” 182.
[xxx] Naimark, “The Many Lives of Babyn Yar,” 182.
[xxxi] Naimark, “The Many Lives of Babyn Yar,” 182.
[xxxii] George Packer, “The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save,” The Atlantic, February 9, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/03/nazi-holocaust-literature-kyiv-babi-yar-book/672782/
[xxxiii] Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “A Paradigm-Changing Day: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Babyn Yar and Ukrainian-Jewish Relations,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 38, no. 3/4 (2021): 232-234.
[xxxiv] Petrovsky-Shtern, “A Paradigm-changing Day,” 232, 255.
[xxxv] Petrovsky-Shtern, “A Paradigm-changing Day,” 232.
[xxxvi] Vladimir Khanin, Documents on Ukrainian Jewish Identity and Emigration, 1944-1990 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 167-168.
[xxxvii] Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine,” 376.
[xxxviii] Lauri Mälksoo, “The Soviet Approach to the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination: Russia’s Farewell to Jus Publicum Europaeum,” Journal of the History of International Law 19, no. 2 (2017): 213.
[xxxix] Mälksoo, 212.
[xl] Mälksoo, 213.
[xli] Mälksoo, 213.
[xlii] Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine,” 377.
[xliii] Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine,” 377.
[xliv] Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine,” 377.
[xlv] “The Unveiling of the Memorial Plaque for the Victims of the Events in Babi Yar,” Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
[xlvi] Burakovskiy, “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine,” 377.
[xlvii] Rachel Treisman, “Putin’s claim of fighting against Ukraine ‘neo-Nazis’ distorts history, scholars say,” National Public Radio (NPR), March 1, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/03/01/1083677765/putin-denazify-ukraine-russia-history.
[xlviii] Mark Tolts, “A Half Century of Jewish Emigration from the Former Soviet Union,” Migration from the Newly Independent States, edited by Mikhail Denisenko, Salvatore Strozza, and Matthew Light (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020), 324, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36075-7_15.
References
Aristov, Stanislav. “Next to Babyn Yar: The Syrets Concentration Camp and the Evolution of Nazi Terror in Kiev.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 29, no. 3 (2015): 431-459.
Burakovskiy, Aleksandr. “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine: Memorialization of the Jewish Tragedy at Babyn Yar.” Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (2011): 371-389.
Berkhoff, Karel Cornelis. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, United States: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.
Khanin, Vladimir. Documents on Ukrainian Jewish Identity and Emigration, 1944-1990. London: Frank Cass, 2003.
Kuznetsov, Anatoliĭ. Babyn Yar: A Documentary Novel. Dial Press, New York, 1967.
Mälksoo, Lauri. “The Soviet Approach to the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination: Russia’s Farewell to Jus Publicum Europaeum.” Journal of the History of International Law 19, no. 2 (2017): 200–218.
Naimark, Norman M. “The Many Lives of Babyn Yar: One of the Blackest Chapters of World War II: The German Massacre of Kyiv’s Jews. the Horror of Babyn Yar, Suppressed in the Soviet Era, may be Finding its Proper Place in European Memory at Last.” Hoover Digest (2017): 176-186.
Packer, George. The Masterpiece No One Wanted to Save. The Atlantic, February 9, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/03/nazi-holocaust-literature-kyiv-babi-yar-book/672782/.
Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan. “A Paradigm-Changing Day: The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Babyn Yar and Ukrainian-Jewish Relations.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 38, no. 3/4 (2021): 227-258.
Tolts, Mark. “A Half Century of Jewish Emigration from the Former Soviet Union.” Migration from the Newly Independent States, edited by Mikhail Denisenko, Salvatore Strozza, and Matthew Light, 323–44. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36075-7_15.
Treisman, Rachel. “Putin’s claim of fighting against Ukraine ‘neo-Nazis’ distorts history, scholars say.” National Public Radio (NPR), March 1, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/01/1083677765/putin-denazify-ukraine-russia-history.
“The Unveiling of the Memorial Plaque for the Victims of the Events in Babi Yar.” Warsaw Ghetto Museum, 21 November, 2021.https://1943.pl/en/artykul/the-unveiling-of-the-memorial-plaque-for-the-victims-of-the-events-in-babi-yar/.
Zeltser, Arkadii. Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union. Brown. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018.