In Babi Yar, the Nazis massacred 33,771 Jews. The struggle to preserve their memory remains of paramount importance.

On September 29 and 30, 1941, the Nazis executed 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv that became one of the primary sites of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This exact figure is known to us because it was meticulously documented by the perpetrators themselves.

The Jews of Kyiv were ordered to assemble with their documents, money, valuables, and warm clothing. Many believed they were being resettled. Instead, they were driven to the ravine, forced to strip, and shot. Within two days, the majority of the Jewish population remaining in the occupied city was annihilated. For the Nazis, identifying their victims presented no difficulty: they were targeted solely for being Jewish.

Following the war, this historical fact became increasingly inconvenient for the Soviet Union.

In the official language of state remembrance, the murdered Jews were redesignated as "peaceful Soviet citizens." Formally, this was not a falsehood; the Jews of Kyiv were indeed Soviet citizens. However, this formulation excised the very element without which the crime itself cannot be understood: they were murdered specifically because they were Jews.

This contains a lesson in the politics of memory that extends far beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. To distort history, one does not necessarily need to deny it outright. Sometimes the event remains, the statistics remain, even the location remains. Only the identity of the victim is altered.

Eighty-five years after Babi Yar, this distinction remains critical. Moreover, it serves as a warning. A universal memory cannot be constructed by depersonalizing its victims. It must begin by addressing the fundamental questions: who was killed, who killed them, and why.

The Scope of the Executions

After September 1941, Babi Yar did not cease to be an execution site. Throughout the German occupation, Romani people, Soviet prisoners of war, psychiatric hospital patients, and other civilians were also murdered there. The total number of victims is generally estimated at approximately 100,000. All of them are part of the history of this site.

However, remembering all victims does not mean obscuring the specific sequence of crimes. The operation of September 29–30 was organized precisely for the systematic destruction of Kyiv's Jewish population, representing one of the largest single mass killings of what is now commonly referred to as the "Holocaust by bullets."

The Soviet authorities documented Nazi atrocities and prosecuted war criminals. They did not deny the events of Babi Yar. Their approach was more subtle.

The formula "peaceful Soviet citizens" fit into a broader narrative in which the war was commemorated primarily as a shared suffering and a collective victory of the Soviet people. Within this framework, the specifically Jewish experience of Nazi annihilation was suppressed. The victims were granted a place in public memory, but the reason they became victims was erased from it.

A similar transformation occurred with the site itself. The ravine was gradually filled in, industrial waste was pumped into it, and roads, parks, and urban development altered the landscape beyond recognition.

Yet memory persisted outside official institutions. The survivors remembered. Families preserved photographs and letters. People gathered at the ravine. Writers, musicians, and ordinary citizens preserved a history that lacked a fitting public monument.

The Poet Who Restored the Forbidden Word

Among them was the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He did not create the memory of what occurred to the Jews at Babi Yar, but in 1961, he gave it a voice that resonated across the entire nation.

In the summer of 1961, Yevtushenko visited Babi Yar. He was struck not only by the absence of a proper memorial but also by the mundane neglect of the site. Almost nothing indicated to a visitor that one of the largest mass murders of the Holocaust had taken place there.

His response was the poem "Babi Yar," published in Literaurnaya Gazeta on September 19, 1961. Its opening line—noting that there are no monuments over Babi Yar—carried profound weight because it was literally true. But the primary challenge lay in what followed.

Yevtushenko framed the massacre within the historical continuity of antisemitism. His lyric protagonist identifies with Dreyfus, with a child in a pogrom, with Anne Frank, and with the Jews murdered at Babi Yar.

Yevtushenko was not Jewish. This fact constituted a significant aspect of his action. A Russian poet publicly rejected the notion that Jewish suffering was solely the concern of Jewish people.

The reaction was immediate. The poem circulated throughout the country, igniting a controversy that extended far beyond literary circles. Critics accused Yevtushenko of elevating Jewish suffering at the expense of Russians, Ukrainians, and other peoples of the USSR.

This accusation exposed the very attitude the poem sought to confront. To state that Jews were killed as Jews was, in the eyes of his critics, to diminish everyone else. This argument proved exceptionally durable.

Shostakovich Sets the Poem to Music

Dmitri Shostakovich read the poem and resolved to set it to music. The project, which began with "Babi Yar," expanded into his Thirteenth Symphony, completed in 1962. Shostakovich incorporated four additional poems by Yevtushenko, transforming the work into a broader reflection on fear, conformity, daily humiliation, and the compromises demanded by an authoritarian society.

The Jewish theme was not new to him. In 1948, during the height of Stalin's campaign against Jewish culture, he composed the vocal cycle "From Jewish Folk Poetry," which could not be performed publicly until after Stalin's death.

The Thirteenth Symphony was of a different scale and visibility. A poem could be clipped from a newspaper and kept privately, transcribed, or read at home. A symphony for bass soloist, male choir, and full orchestra transformed those words into a collective, public experience.

The political atmosphere surrounding the work was highly charged. Nikita Khrushchev attacked Yevtushenko for his portrayal of Babi Yar, objecting to the emphasis on Jewish victims. Pressure persisted even after the premiere.

Consequently, Yevtushenko altered certain passages of the poem. The revised lines explicitly mentioned Russians and Ukrainians lying alongside Jews at Babi Yar, shifting the emphasis toward the collective struggle of the Soviet people against fascism.

Shostakovich initially resisted these changes. For subsequent performances, he agreed to substitute eight lines with Yevtushenko's revised text, but the composer's original manuscript preserved the initial version.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to categorize those who lived under a dictatorship into heroes and collaborators. Real lives are far more complex. Neither Yevtushenko nor Shostakovich should be canonized. Both operated within the Soviet system, and both made compromises with it.

Yet neither renounced their essential contribution. Yevtushenko did not disown "Babi Yar," and Shostakovich did not remove it from his symphony.

Courage under an authoritarian regime does not always take the form of an uncompromising gesture. Sometimes it consists of preserving enough truth to withstand the pressure exerted upon it.

Remembering the Dead of Others

There is another compelling reason to remember Yevtushenko and Shostakovich today. Neither man was Jewish.

Antisemitism is frequently treated as though it were primarily an internal issue for Jewish people. Jewish organizations are expected to protest it, Jewish historians to document it, and Jewish families to preserve the memory of its victims. Subsequently, Jewish people are asked to explain to the rest of the world why this matters.

Yevtushenko and Shostakovich crossed this boundary.

The poet could have visited Babi Yar, felt horror, and moved on. The composer could have admired the poem privately, choosing not to associate his name and reputation with a work that would inevitably attract official censure. Instead, they chose to make their solidarity public.

Their choice addresses a question that extends far beyond Babi Yar: what responsibility do we bear when those being persecuted are not "our own"?

For Soviet Jews, the significance of "Babi Yar" and the Thirteenth Symphony exceeded the artistic value of each individual work. Two central figures of Russian culture declared that Jewish memory must not remain confined to Jewish homes. It belonged to the entirety of society.

When Universalism Becomes Erasure

It is tempting to believe that modern memorial culture has rendered the old Soviet struggle over Babi Yar obsolete. This is not the case.

The vocabulary has changed, but the temptation remains the same. The identity of victims is acknowledged when it aligns with the dominant political narrative, and deemed inconvenient when it does not. Historical specificity is still dismissed as an attempt to secure exceptional treatment. Universal language can still be deployed not to expand memory, but to purge it of uncomfortable facts.

This does not imply that Jewish suffering should be elevated above that of others.

The Romani people killed at Babi Yar must be remembered as Romani. Soviet prisoners of war must be remembered in the specific circumstances of their deaths. The psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazis must not dissolve into an abstract total figure, just as the 33,771 Jews murdered on September 29 and 30, 1941, must not be obscured.

The dignity of different victims is not in competition. Equality does not require anonymity.

Therefore, the language of museums, school textbooks, public ceremonies, and monuments remains crucial. A memorial can present precise dates and impressive statistics while failing to address the most critical historical question: who were these people?

The Soviet monument finally dedicated at Babi Yar on July 2, 1976, was dedicated to Soviet citizens, prisoners of war, and officers of the Soviet Army shot by the German fascists. No mention was made of the Jewish victims.

It was not until September 29, 1991—half a century after the massacre, as the Soviet era was drawing to a close—that a menorah-shaped monument was dedicated to the Jewish victims of Babi Yar. It took fifty years for their identity to be explicitly recognized within the memorial space.

Three September Anniversaries

This month brings together three anniversaries that, at first glance, belong to distinct histories.

Eighty-five years ago, the Jews of Kyiv were executed at Babi Yar. September 19 marked sixty-five years since the publication of Yevtushenko's poem. September 25 marked the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich's birth. Together, however, they form a cohesive sequence.

First came the slaughter. Then followed a political culture that acknowledged the dead while obscuring why so many of them were killed. Finally, a poet and a composer, each in his own way, confronted this enforced silence.

Their story should not be simplified into a narrative of heroic artists challenging a malevolent state. It is far more instructive.

Both were complex individuals who navigated compromises. Both had to calculate what could be said, published, or performed. Yet, at a critical juncture, each decided that the suffering of people outside his own community was his concern. This choice holds enduring relevance for our own time.

Political memory often seeks to begin with a lesson. It asks what the past proves about the present, what cause it supports, what nation it vindicates, or what ideology it condemns. In this process, the victims themselves can disappear remarkably quickly.

Babi Yar suggests a different order of priority: to begin with the individual who was killed. To state clearly who they were. To state why they were condemned to die. One must resist the temptation to immediately convert a specific life into an illustration for an external political argument. Only then can memory become truly universal.

Yevtushenko and Shostakovich understood this—imperfectly, yet courageously—in a country where the official language of memory directed them to do the exact opposite.

Eighty-five years after Babi Yar, we continue to debate how to remember the dead. Let us at least begin by allowing them to remain who they were.