Babi Yar, page 9
In the first few minutes the Germans weren’t quite sure what to do, but then they linked arms, cordoned off the burning building and held everyone who happened to be near the house or in its courtyard at the time.
They had dragged out a lanky, red-haired youth and started beating him up mercilessly; the rumour went round that he was a partisan who had taken a radio set into Children’s World, supposedly to hand it in, and the set had contained an infernal machine.
Everyone who had been arrested was pushed into the cinema next door, so that it was soon crammed full of people, most of them injured, beaten up and covered in blood.
At that moment, in the ruins of the very same building, came the sound of a second explosion of equal force. This time the walls collapsed, and the German headquarters were transformed into a pile of rubble. The Kreshchatik was covered in a layer of dust, and a cloud of smoke hung heavy above it.
The third explosion sent the building opposite into the air—the one with the café and cake shop, stuffed full of gas-masks, and the German offices.
The Germans rushed out of the cinema shouting: ‘Run for it, get away from here! The whole Kreshchatik is going up!’ They dashed off, every man for himself, and after them went the people who had been arrested, including the red-haired lad.
People were in an amazing state of panic. The Kreshchatik was indeed being blown up.
Explosions could be heard at unequal intervals in the most unexpected and scattered parts of the Kreshchatik; there was no pattern to be seen in the way they happened.
The explosions continued throughout the night, spreading into the adjoining streets. The magnificent building of the circus was blown up, and the twisted remains of its dome were hurled right across the street. Next to the circus the Continental Hotel, now occupied by the Germans, was in flames.
Nobody will ever know how many Germans, along with their equipment and documents, or how many civilian inhabitants and their property perished in those explosions and the fire, because [neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis] have ever provided any information on this subject.
The weather at the time was very dry, with the result that the fire which developed could be compared, I suppose, only with the famous fire which swept Moscow during Napoleon’s campaign in 1812.
Large numbers of boxes of ammunition and bottles of an inflammable liquid for attacking tanks had been stored on the upper floors and in the attics of the buildings, because the Soviet military command had intended to defend Kiev street by street, which was why the whole city had trenches dug all over it and barricades across the streets. When the fire got to them, those boxes went off with a distinctive dull explosion, something like a sigh, which sent streams of fire pouring over the whole building. It was that which finished off the Kreshchatik.
The Germans, who had entered the city so triumphantly and had settled in so comfortably, were now rushing around on the Kreshchatik like mice in a mousetrap. They didn’t understand what was going on and they didn’t know where to put themselves or what to try and save.
But it must be said, to give them their due, that they got together teams of men who ran from house to house throughout the centre of Kiev, persuading the people living there to get out on the street and evacuating children and invalids. They didn’t have to do a lot of persuading. The people—some of them with bundles which they had managed to grab, others with only what they stood up in—were running to the parks above the Dnieper, towards Vladimir Hill, to Shevchenko Boulevard and the stadium. Many of them were suffering from burns or other injuries.
The Germans cordoned off the whole of the centre of the city. But the fire was spreading: the two parallel streets, Pushkin and Mering, were already ablaze, as were the streets which crossed the Kreshchatik—Proreznaya, Institute, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the Arcade. It seemed as though the whole city was being blown up.
Before the war they had started to build an underground railway in Kiev, and now rumours started to go round that it was not really an underground but just excavations in which to lay enormous mines under the whole of Kiev. Rather more likely were the stories which later began to circulate about the lorries which people remembered seeing driving into the courtyards after dark, and the men in N.K.V.D. uniform who had unloaded something into the basements. But the N.K.V.D.’s cars were turning up everywhere in those days after dark, and they were up to all sorts of tricks! And anyone who happened to see them from behind a curtain preferred not to notice but to forget. So nobody had any idea where the next explosion was going to take place, which is why they scurried away from the buildings and as far as they could from the Kreshchatik.
The Germans quickly had some long hose-pipes brought in by plane from somewhere, and laid them all the way from the Dnieper, through the Pioneers’ Park, and began pumping water up by means of powerful pumps. But the water did not reach the Kreshchatik, because somebody cut the hoses in the bushes in the park.
Up above the gigantic bonfire, which was what central Kiev had become, powerful currents of air formed, like tubes, which swept up burning pieces of wood and paper and scattered them as far as the Bessarabka and Pechersk. The Germans, the police, workmen and volunteers were scrambling up on to all the roofs, throwing sand on the burning pieces of wood and stamping out the fires. People made homeless by the fire spent the night in the anti-aircraft shelters and in the bushes on the boulevards and in the parks.
The Germans were unable even to retrieve the bodies of their own people or of the local inhabitants who had been killed; they were burnt to cinders. Everything the Germans had looted had gone up in flames, and so had the six-roomed flats crammed with pianos, the radio station, the cinemas and the big stores.
After a few desperate days spent fighting the fire the Germans gave up and abandoned what was now a furnace in which there appeared to be nothing left alive, and simply watched the fire from a distance.
The Kreshchatik, now completely empty of people, continued to burn. From time to time the distant sound of falling timbers in some building would indicate that a floor had caved in or a wall collapsed, and then more sparks and more burning splinters than usual would be seen in the sky.
The smell of burning pervaded the whole city; at night it glowed red and, according to what they said later, the glow could be seen hundreds of miles away, serving as a beacon for aircraft.
The actual explosions came to an end on September 28th. The main fire continued for two weeks, and during that time it was cordoned off by soldiers armed with Sten guns.
When the cordon was removed and the Germans went in again, there were in fact no streets left: buildings had collapsed on both sides of them and blocked them up. It took about a month of intensive work to clear a way through. The scorched ruins went on smoking for a long time; even in December I saw with my own eyes wisps of smoke still coming out from beneath the rubble.
The blowing up of the Kreshchatik and its destruction by fire, which no one has ever described before, ought in my opinion to be recorded as one of the principal turning-points in the history of the war.
To start with, it was the first time in history that an operation of that kind and on that scale had been prepared with such care and discipline. I must explain just what the Kreshchatik meant to Kiev. Comparatively speaking, it was like blowing up the whole of the centre of Moscow as far as the ring-road, the Nevsky Avenue in Leningrad and all the streets around it, or, say, the heart of Paris as far as the great boulevards. Until the Kreshchatik was destroyed it was difficult to imagine such a thing happening at all. But the N.K.V.D. found it possible to imagine and opened, you might say, a new page in the history of warfare. It was only after the Kreshchatik affair that both German [and Soviet] authorities made it a rule to examine carefully every building they occupied and write on it: ‘Checked for mines.’ The destruction of bridges and of military and industrial installations in the course of a retreat is understandable. But this was a case of destroying the completely peaceful heart of a city, with all its shops and theatres.
In the second place, many people regarded the Kreshchatik operation as the first demonstration of genuine patriotism on such a scale. Not a single capital in Europe had given Hitler the sort of welcome Kiev gave him. The city of Kiev had no longer been capable of defending itself; the army had abandoned it, and the city itself seemed to be prostrate at the mercy of the enemy. But it destroyed itself by fire under the very eyes of the Germans and sent many of them to their graves as it did so. They had indeed entered the city as they had become accustomed to entering the capitals of Western Europe, preparing to celebrate. But instead they received such a blow that the very earth beneath their feet caught fire. Where had that ever happened before?
[On the other hand, to destroy the ancient and beautiful centre of a capital city for the sake of giving the enemy one good patriotic slap in the face and killing a great many civilians as you did it—was that not going too far? And now we come to some very odd aspects of the affair.]
[The Soviet authorities never, either at the time or later, admitted their responsibility for the destruction of the Kreshchatik. On the contrary, they attributed it to the Germans. They declaimed in the press about Fascist barbarism and later, after the war, stuck posters over the ruins and published articles in all the papers saying: ‘We shall restore the Kreshchatik, pride of the Ukraine, callously destroyed by the German invaders.’
The whole of Kiev, the whole Ukraine, the whole population knew perfectly well that the Kreshchatik was destroyed by the Soviet authorities. Nevertheless they had it drummed into them that it was the work of the cursed Germans. Which was like saying that the Germans were supposed to have entered a beautiful city, taken over its magnificent central part, and then spent five days planting mines underneath themselves, so that they could blow themselves up. What for? To this there was a clear answer: the Nazis were barbarians. No one would quarrel, of course, with this statement. But the fact remains that the Kreshchatik was blown up by the Bolsheviks.
It was not until 1963 that the K.G.B. issued for popular consumption] a ‘Report by the Committee for State Security of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian Republic concerning acts of sabotage and reconnaissance carried out by a group of underground fighters in the city of Kiev under the leadership of I. D. Kudrya’. [This report does not discuss the destruction of the Kreshchatik; it only mentions certain ‘explosions’, avoiding altogether the word ‘Kreshchatik’.]
It appears from the report that I. D. Kudrya, known as ‘Maxim’, was an employee of the security service, on whose instructions he had been left behind in Kiev, along with a group including D. Sobolev, A. Pechenev, R. Okipnaya, E. Bremer and others. Here is a quotation:
Fires and explosions continued in the city, and were especially violent from September 24th to 28th, 1941. Among the places blown up were the shop containing the radio sets taken from the population, the German military headquarters, the cinema used by the Germans and other buildings. Although nobody can say with certainty who actually organized these explosions, which sent hundreds of the ‘victors’ to their graves, there can be no doubt that people connected with the ‘Maxim’ group had a hand in it. The most important achievement was that the explosions let the arrogant Nazi ‘victors’ know they were not masters of the territory they had invaded.
Later on it is revealed that D. Sobolev died in the course of one of his numerous operations, and that A. Pechenev shot himself as he lay wounded in bed when Gestapo men came to arrest him. Kudrya ‘Maxim’, R. Okipnaya and E. Bremer were captured in Kiev in July 1942, but there is no reliable account of how they died.
In 1965 Pravda published, without any commentary, a decree posthumously awarding I. D. Kudrya the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. [It had apparently required more than twenty years of vacillation over this decision to make absolutely sure that Kudrya was really dead and that he hadn’t slipped across to the Germans and was working somewhere in the West.
The only institution which could fill in the details of the long story of the Kreshchatik is the K.G.B. But it prefers to keep them to itself. So there are a great many things which remain unclear and unverified.] There are plenty of rumours and stories of heroic deeds: of a police agent who threw his life away when he blew himself up in the vestibule of the Continental Hotel—pressing the detonator and perishing on the spot. There is another story about a desperate character who blew up the Shantser Cinema during a film show, when it was packed full of Germans. There are many more like that. It is difficult to check them. [But one thing is quite certain: the laying of the mines was well planned and carried out very thoroughly long before the Germans took Kiev, and that the more important mines had a mechanism which made it possible to detonate them as and when required.
There are witnesses still living who saw the explosives being delivered on N.K.V.D. lorries a month or six weeks before they were exploded. It did not occur to them then that mines were being laid, because the Germans were a long way from Kiev and the newspapers and radio stations were full of assurances that Kiev would never at any price be abandoned to the enemy. But the secret police apparently had a better idea of the true situation.]
[What was the real reason for blowing up the Kreshchatik, then?
I shall give you my opinion, which is the opinion of the majority of people living in Kiev, and you can judge for yourselves.
What was blown up was the centre, which had belonged to the party and government elite, the bureaucracy and the secret police themselves. They had not, of course, wanted to abandon their flats and comfortable armchairs. So they decided to arrange a surprise for the Germans, and then, once they had blown up the Kreshchatik along with the Germans, they were so busy gloating over what they had done that they didn’t even have the wit to make it appear like an act of patriotism and put all the blame on the enemy. This is the sense behind the passage in the admission that was later squeezed out of them and which appeared in their report that ‘these explosions let the arrogant Nazi “victors” know that they were not masters of the territory they had invaded.’
By blowing up the purely civilian buildings on the Kreshchatik, however, they had inflicted an appreciable military loss, and the fact that three times as many civilians perished in the course of it never bothered the Soviet authorities. Especially since, according to Soviet thinking, people who stayed behind on occupied territory were being disloyal to the Soviet regime, which meant they did not count as people.
The Soviet police agents held on for five whole days, their hands on the detonators, to make sure that as many Germans as possible should move into the Kreshchatik and to decide on the order in which the buildings were to be blown up. The first to go up was the German headquarters. And still those five days made it possible to put all the blame on the Germans.
But there was another, much more sinister, aspect of the Kreshchatik affair: it was intended to infuriate the Germans, so that in their fury they would no longer handle the population with kid gloves. The Soviet State Security organs deliberately provoked the Germans into being ruthless. As it happened, the Germans were good pupils when it came to that.
And the Germans fell for it. They revealed their reply to the Kreshchatik five days later, on September 29th, 1941.]
The Germans made no official statement about the Kreshchatik affair; nor did they punish anyone for it publicly. [But they began to look very stern and bitter; the smiles vanished completely from their faces. It was rather frightening to look at their grimy, worried countenances; it seemed as if they were preparing something.]
THE ORDER
On the morning of September 28th, Ivan Svinchenko from Litvinovka village turned up unexpectedly at our house. He was on his way home out of the encirclement.
He was a peasant, a decent, open-hearted, more or less illiterate man, a tremendously hard worker and the father of a large family. Before the war, whenever he came from the country to the city market, he would sleep at my grandparents’. He never forgot to bring me some simple present from the village, but I was shy of him, perhaps because he had a speech defect: sometimes as he was speaking he would seem to choke and all you could hear was a sort of indistinct mumbling—‘bala-bala’. It was a very strange defect.
Like all people who worked on the collective farms in the neighbourhood, he had always turned up covered in mud and dressed in rags and tatters. But now he appeared in such rags and in such a frightful condition we could hardly recognize him. Somewhere he had managed to swap his army uniform for some old clothes.
This is what had happened to him.
Ivan Svinchenko had been defending Kiev along with his unit when the order had come to retreat, and they had crossed over on to the left bank of the Dnieper to Darnitsa. For a long time they wandered about aimlessly through the woods and along the cart-tracks, were bombed and raked with machine-gun fire from the air, and none of their officers had the slightest idea what to do. Then the officers themselves disappeared altogether and the men started shouting that they should go home. Everybody had the feeling the war was over.
But in the depths of the forest they ran into some partisans led by N.K.V.D. officers, well equipped, with transport and plenty of food; and they had a lot of weapons. The partisans warned of the dangers of falling into German hands and made Ivan join them. But he hated the N.K.V.D. and was longing to get home.
‘So I hung around a bit—bala-bala—till it was dark, and then skipped!’ he explained.
He spent several days walking through the woods and open fields and everywhere he went he came across people like himself who didn’t want to fight. What were they supposed to be fighting for, they asked—for the collective farms, for the prison camps at Kolyma, to go on being poor? When all around was their native Ukraine and somewhere not far away a home, wife and children? The Ukrainians went off to their homes; the Russians, whose homes were where the Soviets were, wandered about not knowing where they were going, or else they went off in search of the Germans to give themselves up.
