Babi Yar, page 2
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.
