Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel; New, Complete, Uncensored Version

By Anatoly Kuznetsov and A. Anatoli

An internationally acclaimed documentary novel that describes the fateful collision of Russia, Ukraine, and Nazi Germany, and one of the largest mass executions of the Holocaust

“I wonder if we will ever understand that the most precious thing in this world is a man’s life and his freedom? Or is there still more barbarism ahead? With these questions I think I shall bring this book to an end. I wish you peace. And freedom.”

At the age of 12, Anatoly Kuznetsov experienced the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, and soon began keeping a diary of the brutal occupation of Kiev that followed. Years later, he combined those notebooks with other survivors’ memories to create a classic work of documentary witness in the form of a novel. When Babi Yar was first published in a Soviet magazine in 1966, it became a literary sensation, not least for its powerful and unprecedented narratives of the Nazi massacre of the city’s Jews, and later Roma, prisoners of war, and other victims, at the Babi Yar ravine—one of the largest mass killings of the Holocaust. After Kuznetsov defected to Great Britain in 1969, he republished the book in a new edition that included extensive passages censored by Soviets, and later reflections.

In its fully realized form, Babi Yar is a classic of Holocaust and World War II testimony. With sustained immediacy, it relates a scrappy but principled boy’s day to day fight to survive, and provide for his family. He dodges bullets and transport to Germany, befriends black market horse dealers and prerevolutionary aristocrats, wonders at the pomp of the Nazi’s opera performances, overhears his mother and grandparents debate the merits of German and Soviet rule, collects grenades, digs hiding places, and confronts the moral dilemmas of assisting neighbors or looting stores—all the while hearing the constant hum of bullets at the Babi Yar ravine nearby. In a bravura feat of reporting, he tells the story of what happened at Babi Yar—from the deceptive roundup of the city’s Jews and execution of the national soccer team to the memoires of the site’s few survivors, and the story of a daring escape. The book’s once-censored passages explore the Soviet effort to hide the realities of the massacre, and other facts about wartime the regime did not want discussed. In the manner of Elie Wiesel’s Night or The Diary of Anne Frank, here is a book that tells some of the most uncomfortable truths of the past century—and the most essential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781250331120

Book preview

A. Anatoly (Kuznetsov)

BABI YAR

A document in the form of a novel

Translated by David Floyd

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Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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PREFACE

When I submitted the original manuscript of this book to the editor of the magazine Yunost in Moscow it was returned to me immediately with the advice not to show it to anybody else until I had removed all the ‘anti-Soviet stuff’ from it. I removed important sections from the chapters about the Kreshchatik, the destruction of the monastery, the disaster of 1961 and so forth, and submitted a milder version in which the sense of the book, though discernible, was concealed.

The manuscript passed through many departments, up to and including the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and while it was being prepared for publication the multistage censorship cut out another quarter of the text: the whole sense of the book was turned upside down. It was in that form that Babi Yar was published.

The same fate befell all my earlier works, and the works of other writers too. In the Soviet Union a writer is constantly faced with a choice: either he will not be published at all or he can publish what the censorship will permit.

The manuscript remained in my hands, however, and I continued to work on it. I put back the sections on the Kreshchatik, the monastery and the 1961 disaster, after having improved and re-written them, and I added new facts and made some things clearer. As a result of this the manuscript became so ‘seditious’ that I was afraid to keep it at home, where I was often subjected to searches, so I photographed it and buried it in the ground, where I hope it still is to this day.

In 1969 I escaped from the Soviet Union, taking with me the films to which I had transferred my manuscripts, including the complete text of Babi Yar. I am now presenting it as the first of my books to appear without being submitted to any political censorship, and I wish the present text of Babi Yar to be regarded as the only true one.

You have here in one volume the text that has already been published, the sections that were rejected by the censorship, and the passages that I have added since publication, including final corrections for the sake of style. Here is, at last, what I actually wrote. But I decided to preserve the distinctions between the different parts of the text for certain good reasons.

Those who are interested will be able to have some idea of the conditions in which books are published in the Soviet Union, because—as I must stress again—my case was not an exception; on the contrary, it was quite ordinary and typical. Again, the version of Babi Yar distorted and deformed by the censorship was printed in millions of copies and appeared in translation in many languages. People who have read it already but who would like to know the full text need only read in this book the new sections, published here for the first time; especially since they contain the main sense of the book and are the reason why it was written.

The different sections of the text are distinguished in the following way:

Ordinary type—material published in Yunost in 1966.

Heavier type—material cut out by the censor at that time. Enclosed between square brackets [ ]—material added between 1967 and 1969.

THE AUTHOR

Introduction

A Soviet writer was not necessarily one who wrote. Plenty of people wrote without getting published, at least officially, in book form, and were therefore not, officially, writers. Others were called writers and lived the life of writers but hadn’t written anything in years or decades. A writer was someone who belonged to the Writers’ Union and received the benefits of this membership, which included housing, preschools, polyclinics, summer camps for children, and writing residencies for adults. Once a person was inducted into the Writers’ Union, they could stop publishing and writing—they would remain a writer in good standing as long as they didn’t do anything to get themselves expelled. In this sense, it might have been better not to write than to write—what you didn’t commit to paper couldn’t get you in trouble. Writing was not a job, not work. Writing was a social role.

Anatoly Kuznetsov was, officially, a Soviet writer. He had all the credentials. He studied at Moscow’s Literary Institute, where Soviet writers were made. His remarkable small cohort included the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, and several others whose names are still recognized by readers of Russian literature. One of their classes was called The Labor of the Writer. Kuznetsov later recalled:

One writer liked to keep his feet submerged in a bucket of cold water. Another kept rotting apples in his desk drawer. One wrote sitting up, another lying down, and a third wrote only standing upright. Some wrote in the mornings and others strictly at night. Some waited for inspiration to strike and others didn’t believe such a thing existed. Lectures were broken up into categories: The Material Conditions of a Writer’s Life; The Writer’s Desk; The Influence of Location on a Writer’s Work. This course included everything except, I think, the work of a writer in a dictatorship and the work of a writer in exile. We didn’t study that.

Kuznetsov published a requisite number of short stories, and in 1960 he joined the Writers’ Union, which gave him an apartment in the city of Tula, about three hours’ drive from Moscow. Tula was famous for its copper samovars, its gingerbread, and its long history of arms manufacturing (for this reason Tula was closed to foreigners, as Kuznetsov discovered when a visiting writer tried to see him there). Kuznetsov employed a literary secretary—a perk of official Soviet writers—and was romantically involved with her, a common and commonly tolerated transgression. Kuznetsov’s estranged wife was a student at the Literary Institute; she lived in Moscow, where she was learning to become a Soviet writer. They had a son, who mostly stayed in Kyiv with Kuznetsov’s mother—not an unusual arrangement for young working parents. Before Kuznetsov was a Soviet writer, he, too, had been a little boy in Kyiv.

Kuznetsov’s earliest memories were of the man-made famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. The Soviet authorities used hunger to subjugate Ukraine, then—as now—one of the world’s foremost producers of wheat. An estimated three and a half to five million people died in what is today known as the Holodomor—literally, mass murder by famine.

Eight years after the famine came the German occupation. Kuznetsov, his mother, and his grandfather lived in a small house—which he later often referred to as a hut—on the forested outskirts of Kyiv, near a giant ravine called Babyn Yar (Babi Yar in Russian; Kuznetsov, a Russian speaker like many in Kyiv then and now, used the Russian toponym). Babyn Yar became one of the first sites of the mass shooting of Jews. More than thirty-three thousand Jews were shot in Babyn Yar over the course of two days in September 1941—the largest single execution of the Holocaust. Over the next two years of German occupation, tens of thousands of others—Roma, people with mental illnesses, witnesses to murder, Soviet prisoners of war, and still more—were killed in the ravine.

Kuznetsov survived. He became a teenager during the war and drew some conclusions about the world. He decided that his grandfather, who had initially welcomed the German occupiers and who was always scheming for a better life, was an idiot. He concluded that he himself was lucky: he had violated so many rules set by the occupiers—breaking curfew, twice escaping from captivity, failing to turn in his warm felt boots for confiscation, not denouncing his Jewish friend, failing to register with the authorities upon reaching the age of fourteen—that if Germans had caught him, and had followed their own decrees, he should have been executed twenty times over. Perhaps he was more than lucky, one surmised; perhaps he had a mission. Perhaps his mission was documenting what he had seen. At fourteen, Kuznetsov began writing in a thick notebook. He set out to record what he knew: what he had seen, heard, and felt during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, living next to, living with, Babyn Yar.

After the war, Babyn Yar was not to be remembered. The Soviet repression of memory was layered. Soviet historiography shortened the Second World War: eliding the two years when the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany were allies, it erased the Winter War and the occupation of part of Finland and the other invasions of 1939–40, as a result of which the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of Poland and Romania. After the war, the newly occupied territories were treated in part as though they had always been Soviet, in part as the spoils of victory in the war against Nazi Germany. Soviet history books referred to the Great Patriotic War, a defensive war the Soviets had fought against Germany, and focused almost exclusively on the period between 1941 and 1945. The story of the war was a story of triumph, and war losses had to be hidden from view. People disabled from the war were, in great numbers, shipped off to remote sanatoria. The official estimate of Soviet casualties—a staggering figure of twenty million—was at least 25 percent lower than the actual figure. The sites of the biggest human losses—the Siege of Leningrad, during which at least a million died, and the Battle of Stalingrad, during which at least a million Soviet troops did—were memorialized as heroic, as triumphs of the human will, rather than as tragedies. This served to obscure the Soviet war strategy: to win by drowning the enemy in the blood of Soviet citizens.

In his victory speech, Stalin gave credit to the Russian people—ethnic Russians, that is—first among all the other Soviet people. In these postwar years, Stalin continued and intensified his prewar effort to reestablish Russia as an empire and Russians as colonizers (on paper, the Soviet Union, though it occupied much of the territory of the former empire, was a federation, or what the historian Terry Martin has called an anti-imperialist empire). Singling out the fate of Jews—or Roma, or Ukrainians—ran counter to this recycled ideology of ethnic-Russian supremacy. The Holocaust, therefore, could not be memorialized. A book on the Holocaust in Soviet territory, edited by the Soviet Jewish writers Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg and completed soon after the war was over, was banned by the censors. This was another reason the largest site of what is now known as the Holocaust by bullets could not be memorialized in the Soviet Union.

As for the third layer of Soviet forgetting, it’s hard to tell whether it was a conscious strategy. Remembering—learning about—the mechanics of German terror would inevitably evoke parallels to the Soviet regime: between the German system of concentration camps and the Gulag, between the construction of enemies of the people or the state, and between the ways in which ideology was enforced. One can see it in the Soviet censor’s changes to the text Kuznetsov would create from his boyhood notebooks and subsequent research and begin trying to publish in 1965. Near the end of this book, Kuznetsov describes a waking nightmare that recurred when he was trying to write the book, as an adult, back in his mother’s house.

I would hear cries as I lay in bed at night—sometimes I was lying on the ground and they were shooting straight at me, in the chest or in the back of the neck, or else I was standing to one side with a notebook in my hand and waiting for it to start, but they didn’t shoot because it was their dinner break. They would be making a bonfire out of books … (p. 477)

The censor cut out of books.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre, a spontaneous protest broke out in Kyiv. People marched to Babyn Yar, demanding that the site—by then leveled and obscured several times over—be marked with some sort of monument to the murdered. This was in 1966, at the extreme tail end of the Soviet Thaw, the brief period of liberalization between the reigns of Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. A short time after the protest, authorities installed a marker—a stone that promised that one day, a monument to the victims of Bayn Yar would be erected there. Now, Kuznetsov writes near the conclusion of this book, when visiting foreign dignitaries expressed interest in Babyn Yar, the marker could be decorated with flowers and displayed to the foreigners; following each visit, the flowers were cleared away.

During the Thaw, the censors briefly, tenuously allowed writers to attempt to remember—to memorialize—some of the terrors of the first half of the century. In 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella that follows an ordinary Russian man through a day in the Gulag, was published in the literary journal Novy Mir (The New World); but a few years later, when Solzhenitsyn wrote his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, the writer was forcibly exiled. Solzhenitsyn classified The Gulag Archipelago as a novel-document. A half dozen years earlier, Kuznetsov called his book Babi Yar a document in the form of a novel. He specified that to the best of his knowledge, the book contained nothing but facts. Babi Yar was published, in installments, in the journal Yunost (Youth) in 1966, following a protracted battle with the censors. At the editors’ request, Kuznetsov had censored his own manuscript, removing, among others, the sections in which he described explosions set off in Kyiv by the Soviet secret police days after the German troops had entered the city. The censor then made many more cuts—so many that Kuznetsov considered the manuscript unrecognizable and tried to pull it. He was given to understand that the work was no longer his to pull, and also that he should probably refrain from reading the galleys to avoid becoming upset. Babi Yar, as published, was unrecognizable to Kuznetsov, and yet the publication was an extraordinary event for Soviet readers.

Kuznetsov had been an official Soviet writer for more than six years. He had published three novellas and three books of short stories, all on standard Soviet topics—the valor of the construction worker, the romance of the collective farmer—all of them deploying standard sets of adjectives and adverbs to depict Soviet life as it should be. If anyone but the censors and official critics read these stories, they almost certainly couldn’t tell them apart from hundreds of other stories produced by the other members of the Writers’ Union about, it seemed, the same set of imaginary cheerful Soviet citizens. Babi Yar was a different species of text. It had an identifiable point of view—that of a scared, smart, scrappy boy managing to survive the Nazi occupation, hardening in the process. It described real events, in the sense that these were things that happened in real life and in the sense that they happened to humans who appeared three-dimensional on the page. These included the Jews who died in the massacre and some who, improbably, escaped; Ukrainians who welcomed the Nazis and Ukrainians who resisted them; and the occupiers themselves. The book was like virtually nothing that had been published in the Soviet Union, both in its literary approach to nonfiction and in its direct depictions of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation. A severely abridged translation of The Diary of Anne Frank had been published in 1960 and quickly went out of print; the literature of the Holocaust as a whole, like the Holocaust itself, remained unknown to most Soviet citizens.

And then the window of opportunity for publicly recording memory, which had barely opened, was once again shut. People cut Babi Yar out of the three consecutive issues of Yunost in which it appeared and bound it into a book, in an attempt to preserve the memory of Babi Yar and a memory of a brief taste of freedom and remembering.

Unlike many other Soviet writers who eventually ran afoul of the regime, Kuznetsov seems never to have believed any part of the Soviet ideology. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he was not a disillusioned Soviet Communist. Unlike many Soviet dissidents and Yevtushenko, whose popularity peaked in the 1960s (and whom Kuznetsov once took to Babyn Yar, prompting Yevtushenko to write a poem, which he then performed often, sometimes several times in the course of one reading), Kuznetsov never dreamed of what they called socialism with a human face. Kuznetsov hated the Soviet regime, everything it stood for, and everything it claimed to stand for. When he was nineteen, he wrote what he later described as a grotesque play about Stalinism:

It was populated with Iron Felixes [the mythologized figure of the founder of the Soviet secret police], they traveled as a monolith, following a perfectly straight line that consisted of a series of zigzags. Lenin kept turning over in his grave, Stalin flapped his wings, the people were silent, and so forth.

He wrote the play in 1948, still during the years of Stalinist terror; it would have been more than enough to get him executed by the Soviets. Kuznetsov destroyed the play before anyone found it. Later, even as he was producing standard-fare Soviet literature, he also wrote pieces that he knew could never be published in the Soviet Union. He hid these in tin cans and buried them in the ground so they would not be found if his apartment was ever searched. He had some reason to fear such a search: though he remained a Communist Party and Writers’ Union member in good standing, for a few years in the late 1960s he mentored Vladimir Batshev, a writer who had spent time in Siberian exile.

Even by the high standards of subjects of totalitarian regimes, Kuznetsov was very good at keeping secrets. He seems to have been able to resist vanity—imagine a nineteen-year-old destroying his first play!—and the temptation of sharing his plans or ideas with loved ones. Perhaps this ability, and the utter disdain Kuznetsov had for the Soviets, came from his two formative experiences: surviving the famine engineered by the Bolsheviks and witnessing the genocide carried out by the Nazis. He tried to collect information for a book on the famine, too—in secret, of course—but other survivors were too afraid to talk.

Kuznetsov’s complete hatred of the regime and his ability to keep secrets were his superpowers. He deployed them, first, to attain the status of official Soviet writer. He then applied them to obtaining a trip to England. Soviet citizens—even privileged ones—were rarely allowed to travel abroad, especially to capitalist countries. The system was designed to prevent temptation, communication, and the ultimate danger: defection. A citizen might be allowed, first, to travel to a more loyal Warsaw Pact country such as Bulgaria, then to a less tethered one such as Hungary or Yugoslavia, and only then might they graduate to a capitalist country. Children and, usually, spouses had to stay behind to ensure that the citizen would return, and a KGB minder had to accompany the traveler. Kuznetsov concocted a reason for travel: he claimed to be working on a book about Lenin and to want to research the time Lenin had spent in London. Kuznetsov also promised to inform for the KGB. There is no indication that he ever made good on this promise, but it likely bought him not only a trip to London but also the ability to move about with relative freedom during the trip (he still had a minder, a fellow Writers’ Union member).

In July 1969, Kuznetsov boarded the plane from Moscow to London wearing a baggy, shapeless jacket. He had sewn rolls of microfilm into the lining: the original, uncensored manuscript of Babi Yar and the manuscripts of at least six other books that he had hidden in the tin cans. His plan was to defect and start publishing his books, beginning with the unabridged version of Babi Yar. When he could get away from his minder, he rushed to the offices of the Daily Mail and asked for help in seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. He had left his personal belongings in the hotel room he shared with his minder, but he was wearing the jacket with his books in the lining. After tk days in London, he walked into a British government building and requested political asylum in the United Kingdom.

Kuznetsov devised a simple system of notations—italics and brackets in the first edition, boldface and brackets in subsequent editions—to denote, respectively, words and phrases that the Soviet censor had cut and material that Kuznetsov himself had added after the original publication of Babi Yar. He created a layered text that told several stories: the story of the Babyn Yar massacre, the German occupation of Kyiv, and subsequent Soviet efforts to suppress this history; a story, in heavier type, about the ways in which censorship shaped Soviet literature; and the stories, in brackets, of what the writer thought he couldn’t say.

Try reading the book twice—the first time as the (document in the form of a) novel that it is, a story; and the second time as a document that tells a story about censorship. Follow the censor’s pencil as it cuts:

• the fact that some Red Army soldiers didn’t have weapons—because the Soviet army could not be portrayed as weak or underequipped;

• a description of Soviet soldiers running into houses and begging for civilian clothes so they could retreat in disguise—because Soviet soldiers could not be portrayed as anything other than heroic;

• the second part of this sentence: "And we didn’t know where we were: still under Stalin, already under Hitler, or were we in a narrow space in between?"—because any parallel between the two dictators, even a grammatical parallel construction, was unthinkable;

• and these phrases in bold: "With joy and wonder and triumph in her voice she exclaimed: ‘What are you sitting there for? The Germans are here! It’s the end of Soviet rule!’"—because Soviet citizens could not be portrayed as expressing joy at the coming of the Germans, or as criticizing the Soviet regime in any way;

• this description of the calm after fighting subsided and the Germans fully took the city: "like fine weather following a storm"—because even this description came too close to sounding like the author welcomed the occupiers;

• a woman talking "tenderly and happily about a German soldier she had seen and describing him as good-looking"—because German soldiers could not be portrayed in any positive way;

• details from this sentence: "In newspaper cartoons and Soviet films the Germans were always made to look like ragged beggars and bandits"—because the mere suggestion that a Soviet movie or newspaper was wrong was unthinkable;

• a sentence stating that a street in Kyiv had been renamed by the Soviet authorities but the new name didn’t stick—because any failure of the regime, no matter how insignificant, was unthinkable;

• this sentence describing an initial interaction between the occupiers and the locals: "The girls giggled and blushed, and all the people around were laughing and smiling"—because Soviet citizens could not experience joy and happiness in the company of the German army;

• and a description of the narrator’s grandfather salvaging the flagpole from a Soviet flag (which he burns before the Germans can find it) so he can use it as a broomstick—because this is sacrilege.

That is an incomplete list of excisions made by the censor in the first short chapter of the book. Each one of them is pragmatic; together they have the effect of flattening the text and the characters, turning it into a rendering of ideal totalitarian subjects—incapable of feeling, thinking, and making mistakes. Kuznetsov’s later additions to the manuscript are equally telling, if more predictable. He was able to do additional research, learn facts that had been inaccessible to him when he was in the Soviet Union. He was also able to make explicit what in the original he had wedged between the lines—where even there the censor had tried to stamp it out: the parallels between the Soviet and Nazi regimes.

He was also now able to have the literal last word of the novel. In the manuscript Kuznetsov had submitted to the censor, the last line of the book was, I wish you peace. The censor had deleted the preceding passage, in which the author wondered whether humanity would ever come to value human life enough to protect it. But he had kept I wish you peace. Now Kuznetsov was able to add, And freedom.

In 1970, he published his expanded Babi Yar in English under the name A. Anatoli. He was not, as one might have guessed, trying to protect his family or associates back in the Soviet Union: the authorship of Babi Yar was a public fact, as was Kuznetsov’s defection. It had been covered and condemned in Soviet papers and Party functionary memos. (And like several other high-profile exiles, including the poet and screenwriter Alexander Galich and the writer Andrei Amalrik, Kuznetsov would die young, a mysterious and sudden death.) Kuznetsov dropped his last name because he was shedding his identity as a Soviet writer.

Now that he was free of the constraints of the Soviet writer—the requirement that he adhere to the conventions of socialist realism; the bans on myriad topics, comparisons, and mere mentions; and the constant anxiety that accompanied writing—Kuznetsov expected a new, free writer to emerge from the shell he had carried around. This process was supposed to begin with the publication of never-before-published manuscripts Kuznetsov had smuggled out to the free world. But when he looked at the book he had planned to publish after the complete Babi Yar, Kuznetsov saw an unoriginal belated attempt at a dystopian novel about totalitarianism written by someone who had never read Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, or, for that matter, Hannah Arendt. He had not even known they existed. A couple of years later, he said:

I now think that to call yourself a contemporary Russian writer and not know that Zamyatin and Orwell existed is the same as to call yourself a poet and not that, say, Lermontov and Blok existed, to work painstakingly on inventing a steam engine not knowing that the world is full of locomotives and electrical engines. I was a blessed Soviet writer, in my blessed Tula, risking my livelihood to work in secret at night, invented the wheel, and my wheel design was inferior to the wheels of bicycles that are gathering dust in countless London stores, priced between eight and eleven pounds. Eight pounds is how much a London bus driver makes in a day.

Kuznetsov decided not to try to publish his old work. Instead, he devoted himself to studying the world where he had landed and, from this new vantage point, thinking about the world he had left behind. He appears to have expected that the new, un-Soviet writer would emerge from this process. Like many other illustrative Soviet defectors, Kuznetsov got a job with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian Service. There he recorded monologues—part memoirs, part think pieces, part reports on his studies of the free world and the unfree one. In the ten years Kuznetsov lived after escaping from the Soviet Union, he never published a new book or short story. In the end, the only writer he ever was was a Soviet one.

The first monument at Babyn Yar—the one promised by the stone that appeared there in 1966—was erected in the second half of the 1970s. It looked like a mess of bodies in struggle, forming a sort of pyramid; the inscription at its base said, Here, in 1941–1945, German fascist occupiers executed more than a hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of war.

In 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Babyn Yar got its second monument—and the first explicit reference to Jews. It was a large bronze sculpture of a menorah. More than two dozen other sculptures followed, honoring, among others, Ukrainian nationalists, Jewish resistance fighters, Roma people, a Ukrainian soccer team that was executed at Babyn Yar after it defeated a Nazi team, and Kuznetsov himself, depicted as a teenager with a notebook. Most of these are figurative sculptures, none of them physically or aesthetically linked to any of the others. By now, the site had a park with wide alleys and white plaster statues: a young flutist astride a goat, a woman in a flowing skirt. It was a cacophony of images that, taken together or separately, told no story.

It wasn’t until 2015 that the Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, promised to undertake a comprehensive memorialization effort in Babyn Yar. The year before, Ukrainians had staged what they call the Revolution of Dignity, ousting a corrupt pro-Moscow president. Poroshenko was elected to bring Ukraine closer to Europe. A large memorial complex at Babyn Yar would be in line with this mandate: by then, every European capital had a monument and, in many cases, a museum that commemorated the murder of its Jews. Kyiv, with the first and largest site of the Holocaust by bullets, lagged behind. Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket, the historian Tony Judt wrote in the conclusion of his 2005 book, Postwar. As Europe prepares to leave World War Two behind—as the last memorials are inaugurated, the last surviving combatants and victims honoured—the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.

The monuments and museums at Babyn Yar were in the early stages of design and construction when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. One of the first missiles to hit Kyiv landed in Babyn Yar, destroying a mixed-use building that was eventually supposed to be taken over by the memorial complex. Five people died in the ensuing fire.

While Ukraine was attempting to reinvent itself as a European democracy, Russia was restoring totalitarianism. With the start of the full-scale invasion, Moscow brought back explicit censorship. A new law made it a crime to call the war a war, to refer to Russian aggression as aggression. Most writers fell in line, as they had before. The last surviving member of Kuznetsov’s Literary Institute cohort, Yunna Moritz, a Jewish native of Kyiv, churned out poems in support of Russia’s war: I know all I need to know of Babi Yar//It knows all it needs to know about me.//These beasts are not my Kiev.//They were lackeys to Satan, where beasts were Ukrainians and Satan was Washington.

The few independent media outlets that still survived in Russia in 2022 were forced to shutter after the invasion. Most independent journalists went into exile. One exception was Elena Kostyuchenko, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, who entered Ukraine on foot on the first day of the war, moving opposite the flow of Ukrainians who were fleeing Russians shelling. By the time Kostyuchenko—at that point likely the only Russian independent journalist reporting from the war zone—was ready to file her first report, Novaya Gazeta had decided to submit to the new censorship demands in the hopes that this would allow it to continue publishing. Kostyuchenko devised a system for communicating to the reader what had happened to her text. Where censorship requirements had compelled her to replace graphic descriptions with euphemisms, she used italics; where she had had to cut words or phrases, she inserted ellipses in brackets. I asked Kostyuchenko if she had read the unabridged and revised edition of Babi Yar that had used the same devices. She had not; she had invented this wheel on her own.

As I write this introduction to the current edition of Babi Yar, the Russian regime is destroying Ukrainian grain supplies and holding tons more of Ukrainian grain hostage in the port of Odesa, using the threat of famine to terrorize Ukraine—and the world—once again. The Russian army, formed by a country and a culture that censored its own history, particularly the history of the Second World War, is reprising, in Ukraine, the crimes of both the Soviets and the Nazis. They are pillaging, they are committing mass murder of civilians, they are executing unarmed hostages, and, most important, they have made clear their genocidal intent.

The history of the European continent is being rewritten. The postwar period is over. When this war ends—whenever that is—it is unlikely that the monument and museums at Babyn Yar will be built in the way that anyone might have imagined them before 2022. Newer tragedies will almost certainly eclipse the memory of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. What will remain is this, a document in the form of a novel, a memorial in the form of a book, created by a man who dreamed of being a writer but lived and died as a builder of one monument, a crafter of memory.

Masha Gessen

Kyiv–New York City–Oslo

May–June 2022

ASHES

This book contains nothing but the truth.

Whenever I used to tell parts of the story to people they would always, without exception, declare that I ought to turn it all into a book.

[I have in fact been writing that book for many long years. What might be called the first version was written when I was only fourteen. In those days, when I was just a hungry, frightened little boy, I used to write down in a thick, home-made notebook everything I saw and heard and knew about Babi Yar as soon as it happened. I had no idea why I was doing it; it seemed to me to be something I had to do, so that nothing should be forgotten.

The notebook was labelled BABI YAR, and I hid it away where other people should not set eyes on it. There was an outbreak of violent anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union after the war, which included a campaign against so-called ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the arrest of a group of Jewish doctors as ‘murderers’, and it was practically forbidden to mention the name Babi Yar.

One day my mother came across my notebook as she was cleaning the house. She read it, wept over it and advised me to take good care of it. She was the first to say that I ought someday to make it into a book.]

The longer I lived in this world the more convinced I became that I had an obligation to do so.

Time and again I set about the task of writing an ordinary documentary novel on the basis of my notes, but without the slightest hope that it would ever be published.

Apart from that, something rather strange happened to me. I had been trying to write a straightforward novel in accordance with the rules of ‘socialist realism’—the only guide to writing which I knew and which I had been taught ever since my schooldays. But the truth of real life, which cried out from every line written in my child’s notebook, immediately lost all its vividness and became trite, flat, false and finally dishonest when it was turned into ‘artistic truth’.

[’Socialist realism’ requires an author to describe, not so much what really happened, as what ought to have happened, or at any rate what might have happened. This method, false and hypocritical in intention, has in fact destroyed Russian literature, which produced so much that was great in the past. I refuse ever again to follow those rules.]

I am writing this book now without bothering about any literary rules [or any political systems, frontiers, censors or national prejudices].

I am writing it as though I were giving evidence under oath in the very highest court and I am ready to answer for every single word. This book records only the truth—AS IT REALLY HAPPENED.

[I, Anatoli Vasilevich Kuznetsov, author of this book, was born on August 18th, 1929, in the city of Kiev. My mother was Ukrainian, my father Russian. On my identity card my nationality was given as Russian.]

I grew up on the outskirts of Kiev, in the Kurenyovka district, not far from a large ravine the name of which—Babi Yar—was known then only to the local people. Like the other parts of the Kurenyovka it was our playground, the place where I spent my childhood.

Later it became famous, suddenly, in a single day.

For more than two years it was a forbidden area, fenced off with high-tension wires which enclosed a concentration camp. There were notices saying that anyone who came near would be fired on.

On one occasion I was even inside the camp office, but not, it is true, actually in the ravine itself, otherwise I should not be writing this book.

We could only hear bursts of machine-gun fire at various intervals: ta-ta-ta, ta-ta … For two long years I could hear them, day after day, and even now they still ring in my ears.

Towards the end a heavy, oily column of smoke was seen to rise above the ravine. It hung over the camp for three long weeks.

It was hardly surprising that when it was all over, despite our fear of mines, I went along with a friend to see what was left behind.

The ravine was enormous, you might even say majestic: deep and wide, like a mountain gorge. If you stood on one side of it and shouted you would scarcely be heard on the other.

It is situated between three districts of Kiev—Lukyanovka, Kurenyovka and Syrets, surrounded by cemeteries, woods and allotments. Down at the bottom ran a little stream with clear water. The sides of the ravine were steep, even overhanging in places; landslides were frequent in Babi Yar. In fact it was typical of the whole region: the whole of the right bank of the Dnieper is cut into by such ravines; Kiev’s main street, the Kreshchatik, was formed out of the Kreshchaty ravine; there is a Repyakhov ravine, a Syrets ravine and others, many others.

On our way we caught sight of an old man, poorly dressed and with a bundle in his hand, making his way from one side of the ravine to the other. We guessed by the sureness of his step that he lived thereabouts and had used the path before.

‘Please, mister,’ I asked, ‘was it here they shot the Jews, or farther on?’

The old man stopped, looked me up and down and said:

‘And what about all the Russians who were killed here, and the Ukrainians and other kinds of people?’

And he went on his way.

We knew the stream like the palms of our hands. As children we had made little dams to hold it back and we had often swum in it.

The river bed was of good, coarse sand, but now for some reason or other the sand was mixed with little white stones.

I bent down and picked one of them up to look at it more closely. It was a small piece of bone, about as big as a fingernail, and it was charred on one side and white on the other. The stream was washing these pieces of bone out of somewhere and carrying them down with it. From this we concluded that the place where the Jews, Russians, Ukrainians and people of other nationalities had been shot was somewhere higher up.

We carried on walking for a long time on these bits of bone until we reached the very top of the ravine, and the stream disappeared in the place where it was first formed by the many springs which trickled from the layers of sandstone. It must have been from there that it carried the bones down.

At this point the ravine became much narrower and split into several branches, and in one place we saw that the sand had turned grey. Suddenly we realized we were walking on human ashes.

Near by there had been a fall of sand, following the rains, which had exposed an angular projection of granite and a seam of coal about a foot thick.

There were goats grazing on the hillside with three little boys, each about eight years old, looking after them. They were hacking away diligently at the coal with little picks and breaking it up on the granite block.

We went up to them. The coal was brown and crumbly, as though it was a mixture of the ashes from a railway engine and carpenter’s glue.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘See here!’ And one of them pulled out of his pocket a handful of something which glittered where it was not covered in dirt, and spread it out on his hand.

It was a collection of half-melted gold rings, ear-rings and teeth.

They were digging for gold.

We walked around the place and found many whole bones, a skull, still not dried out, of someone recently buried, and more pieces of black ash among the grey sand.

I picked up one of the pieces weighing four or five pounds and took it with me to keep. It contains the ashes of many people, all mixed up together—a sort of international mixture.

It was then that I decided that I must write it all down, from the very beginning, just as it really happened, leaving nothing out and making nothing up.

And that is what I am doing, because I know I have to do it, because, as it says in Till Eulenspiegel, Klaas’s ashes are knocking at my heart.

So the word ‘Document’ which appears in the sub-title of this novel means that I have included in it only facts and documents, and that it contains not the slightest element of literary invention — of what ‘might have been’ or what ‘ought to have been’.

Part One

THE END OF SOVIET RULE

Soviet Informburo

Evening Bulletin

September 21st, 1941

In the course of September 21st our troops continued to fight the enemy along the whole front. After many days of bitter fighting our troops withdrew from Kiev.*

I saw them running and knew that it was all over. The men of the Red Army in their faded khaki uniforms, some of them with packs on their backs, others without even their weapons, were running in twos and threes through the courtyards and across the back gardens and jumping over fences.

Stories were told later about the soldiers rushing into the houses and pleading for civilian clothes. The women quickly dug out some old rags, the men changed into them in the hope of hiding themselves, and the women stuffed their useless weapons and tunics with badges of rank into the cesspools.

Then it became very quiet. The fighting had been going on for many days, with cannons thundering, sirens wailing and air raids coming one on top of the other. At night the whole horizon had been lit up by flashes and fires. We had slept on our bundles in a trench, with the earth shaking and bits of it falling on our heads.

But now it was quiet—the sort of quiet which seemed worse than any shooting. And we didn’t know where we were: still under Stalin, already under Hitler, or were we in a narrow strip in between?

A machine-gun could be heard chattering away very clearly near by, from the direction of the railway embankment. Little branches and leaves were falling off the old elm tree above the trench. I crashed through the entrance-hole and tumbled into the dugout, where my grandfather silenced me and gave me a clout.

We had dug our trench in the garden; it was the usual kind of air-raid shelter—the ‘slit-trench’—of those days, shaped like a letter T, six to seven feet deep and about two and a half feet across. There were similar trenches in all the courtyards, squares and streets; the government had appealed over the radio for people to dig them and explained how to do it.

But my grandfather and I had put in several days’ work improving the design. We had lined the earth walls with boards, paved the floor with bricks and covered over the top. We did not, of course, have enough timber to do it properly, but we laid some nine-foot boards across the top of the trench and then piled on top of them all the pieces of wood we could find in the barn.

My grandfather had worked it out that if a bomb were to fall on the trench it would, he explained, hit the pieces of wood first and they would cannon off it like billiard balls and the explosion would never reach us. The damned thing would have no hope of destroying such a fortress!

To make it even stronger we shovelled earth on top of the wood and then covered it with turf to camouflage it, so that we had an impressive and clearly recognizable hillock beneath which, when the entrance-hole was shut, it was as quiet and as dark as the grave.

It was our good fortune that nothing exploded near our trench and that not even a sizeable piece of shrapnel fell there, otherwise all that wood would have come tumbling down on our heads. But at that time we were still unaware of this and were only proud of our handiwork and quite sure we had provided ourselves with a perfect shelter.

Earlier, when we did not have such a fine air-raid shelter, my grandfather, my grandmother and I used to hide from the bombs beneath the bed.

It was an old-fashioned bed, good and strong, and the ends were made of sheets of metal with pictures painted on them in oils—mills, lakes with swans, and castles. We reckoned that if a bomb were to fall it would come through the roof and the ceiling, bounce off the spring mattress and explode. But the eiderdown on top of two quilted blankets would not, of course, let any splinters through.

So that we should not have to lie on the bare floor my grandmother used to

Reviews for Babi Yar

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Babi Yar is a ravine near the city of Kiev where the Nazis massacred thousands of Jews during World War II, primarily shooting them as they stood naked on the edge of the ravine. The author was a 12 year old boy living in Kiev, and this book describes his experiences surviving under the Nazi occupation of Kiev. As he narrates, he frequently reminds the reader that everything he is saying is true.The author did not directly witness the atrocities at Babi Yar, although he and other residents of Kiev heard the constant sound of gunfire, day after day. He does, however, include what he says are close to verbatim accounts by some of those who narrowly escaped death at Babi Yar. The author himself, although not a Jew, frequently had to dodge deportation to Germany to work in the factories, and daily faced starvation.I had long heard of this book, and expected a lot more from it than I got, perhaps because there have been so many more personal accounts of surviving the Holocaust that were published after Babi Yar. Babi Yar was important at the time it was published, because it was one of the first, if not the first, open admission by the Soviets that these events occurred. This book, along with Yevtushenko's moving poem opened the dialogue in the Soviet Union, and the world on the massacre.

[meggyweg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is brilliant -- by far a top-tier Holocaust book and World War II book in general. The author was a boy of twelve when the Nazi occupation of Kiev began, and began recording his experiences then; these jottings were part of the basis for this book, which is both a memoir and a documentary nonfiction.Although the story centers around the September 1941 mass murder of some 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev, that's not all this story is. Kuznetsov's writing encompasses far more than that, and you really get a feel of what life must be like in a war-ravaged city. His description of the destruction of the Kreshchatik (the oldest and most beautiful section of Kiev) made me think of how New York City must have been like after 9-11 -- except the Kreshchatik bombings were a lot worse. In his list of "the number of times I should have been shot," Kuznetsov shows that all the inhabitants of Kiev (not just the Jews or soldiers or political activists or partisans, but EVERYONE) had to risk their lives every day, and how many lost their lives simply by being there. He includes printings of actual primary source documents such as memos, reports, handbills etc., from this time period as well as his own writings.Most intriguingly: Babi Yar was initially published in Russia during the 1960s. I'm surprised it was published at all, as it was very critical of the Soviet regime. In any case the Soviet censors redacted large parts of it. When Kuznetsov defected to England, he took the original manuscript with him on microfilm, and added parts to it before publishing it in full in the West. The original Soviet text is in regular type, the parts the Soviet censors cut out are in boldface, and the parts Kuznetsov added after his arrival in England are in brackets. It's interesting to see what was taken out and what was allowed -- they made some surprising choices.I really cannot recommend this book highly enough, for Holocaust scholars and World War II scholars alike.

[sross008 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Babi Yar was included on so many Top 100 lists that I was intrigued, and I can't say I was disappointed in the book, but it wasn't the gripping expose I'd expected. The free-flowing structure makes for an easy read, with anecdotal vignettes loosely fitted together, like pages of an autobiography scattered about in a war-torn field (and not necessarily put back together in the "proper" order.) It is an idealistic anti-fascist testimony that documents the massacre of Ukrainian Jews and so many others--some arbitrary bystanders--the Nazis found to be "undesirable." Its compelling account of the sheer circumstances of how some live and many do not survive a war is captivating, and I believe I will remember this book for quite some time. I've spent countless hours examining the horrid images on the U.S. Holocaust Museum website, and Babi Yar gives voice to the helplesness and fatalism that must have been pervasive for all of those tragic victims of the war.

[s_mcinally · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the most moving books I have ever read. The urgency of the author's message continues to ring in my ears almost 5 years after having read it. If I had to choose the best book about the horror of war then it would have to be this one. If I were in charge for only one day then this would be compulsory reading for everyone when they turn 15, it is terrifying.

[miketroll · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story of events during the German occupation of Kiev in WW2, when Nazi soldiers slaughtered 200,000 enemies of the Third Reich, mainly Jews, in the ravine at Babi Yar. Comfortable reading it isn’t. No less memorable is the fact that, for decades after the war, the Soviet regime refused to permit any local memorial to the slain.