Vol. 80/No. 40 October 24, 2016
75th anniversary of massacre of Jews marked at Babi Yar
Helped by Ukrainian collaborators, this “holocaust by bullets” foreshadowed Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, Treblinka and elsewhere.
In June 1941 Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union, nullifying the 1939 Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact. This drew the Stalinized Soviet Union into the second imperialist world war, which ultimately pitted the rulers in Germany, Japan and Italy against those in the U.S., France, the U.K. and other European powers, as well as Moscow. By mid-September, the Soviet army was driven from Kiev.
Starting Sept. 24, bombs planted by retreating Soviet forces exploded in downtown Kiev, causing a large fire killing hundreds of German officers and soldiers and leaving thousands of Ukrainians homeless. The Nazis blamed the Jews of the city.
Nazi circulars ordered all “Yids” to assemble and bring their documents, money, valuables and warm clothes. Rumors were spread that U.S. ships would take the Jews to Palestine and that those who didn’t show would be shot.
As thousands began arriving with whatever they could carry, men, women and children were marched to Babi Yar, told to undress, then shot in the ravine, leaving layer after layer of dead and dying.
By the time Soviet troops retook Kiev in 1943, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar. The overwhelming number were Jews, but Romas, Soviet prisoners, Ukrainian partisans and anyone who put up resistance to the Nazi occupation were killed as well.
After the Soviet troops defeated the fascist forces, Stalinist officials both in Moscow and Kiev refused to build any monument to the victims in Babi Yar.
Jews and opponents of Stalinist dictatorial rule in Ukraine tried to get out the truth of what happened. They stepped up their efforts after Stalin’s death in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations about Stalin’s anti-Semitic policies.
In 1959 Viktor Nekrasov, an award-winning author for In the Trenches of Stalingrad, published a call for a monument to the slaughter of the Jews at Babi Yar. But authorities built a dam instead, planning to fill the ravine and build a park and sports stadium. The dam collapsed in 1961, leaving 150 dead in surrounding working-class neighborhoods.
After the disaster, Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the site and wrote the poem “Babi Yar,” which begins “No monument stands over Babi Yar.”
The next year composer Dmitri Shostakovich worked with Yevtushenko to write his 13th Symphony, “Babi Yar,” based on the poem and some of Yevtushenko’s other anti-Stalinist poems. They were told it would be banned unless they toned it down.
More exposure of the truth came in 1966 when Anatoly Kuznetsov published a heavily censored book called Babi Yar. One chapter detailing the slaughter of the Jews was written by Dina Pronichev, one of the massacre’s few survivors.
On the 25th anniversary in 1966 hundreds gathered in the ravine in an unauthorized rally. Pronichev, Nekrasov and Ivan Dzyuba spoke. Dzyuba was a Marxist and author of Internationalism vs. Russification, defending the course of the Russian Revolution under V.I. Lenin, including the fight to free Ukrainians and other oppressed peoples from years of oppression under the czarist empire. After Lenin’s death, Stalin led a counterrevolution, restoring Russian domination over Ukraine.
In 1976 Soviet officials finally put up a monument at Babi Yar, but dedicated it to “Soviet citizens” who died there, refusing to say that Jews were the main target. Finally in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine, a menorah was erected at the site dedicated to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
On the 75th anniversary of Babi Yar this year there were a number of events organized to memorialize those killed. Dzyuba, now 85, was awarded a medal Sept. 28 by the World Jewish Congress for his fearless stance against anti-Semitism.
One feature of the activities was an ongoing debate over the role of various Ukrainian nationalist forces that collaborated with the Nazis and aided the killing of Jews during the German occupation.
In 2014 as part of what became known as the Maidan, Ukrainian working people mobilized and overthrew the repressive pro-Moscow regime of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. The Moscow-controlled media tried to smear the massive street protests in Kiev with false charges that they were “fascist” and Ukrainian workers who participated in them anti-Semitic.
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home