After eighty years, the site of a mass execution of Jews was about to be commemorated. Then Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In late September, 1941, after months of bombing and weeks of siege, German troops entered the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The brass seized the most desirable offices and apartments and began their occupation. Rank-and-file Germans took over the poorer areas, robbing the residents of what little they had left after the siege.
On the afternoon of September 24th, there were explosions along Khreschyatyk, Kyiv’s central avenue, which continued for four days and set off a massive fire. Before retreating, the Soviets had mined the city. An area the size of Manhattan’s financial district was decimated; the rubble of destroyed buildings rendered streets unrecognizable and impassable. The ruins smoldered for weeks. The number of victims of the blasts and fires is unknown, but likely included more Ukrainian civilians than German troops.
On September 28th, the Germans papered the city with flyers instructing “all Jews of the city of Kyiv and its environs” to report to the corner of Melnikova and Dehtiarivska Streets, on the outskirts of town, by eight the following morning. They were to bring “documents, money, valuables, warm clothing, linens, etc.” The notices were unambiguous: “Those Jews who do not carry out this order and are found elsewhere will be shot dead.” The gathering place was near two cemeteries—one Russian, the other Jewish—and a railroad station. Many people assumed that the Jews of Kyiv were being deported, probably in retribution for the mining of the city.
More than two hundred and twenty-four thousand Jews lived in Kyiv before the war, according to a 1939 census. Many Jewish men and women joined the Red Army; others, who had connections or decent jobs, evacuated before the Germans entered the city. Some who remained disobeyed the order and went into hiding. Those who did report to the corner of Melnikova and Dehtiarivska Streets as instructed were, for the most part, the poor, the sick, the very young, and the elderly. German soldiers beat them with sticks, confiscated their belongings, and marched them to the edge of a deep ravine called Babyn Yar, where they were stripped naked and shot. Thirty-three thousand seven hundred and seventy-one Jews were murdered at Babyn Yar in thirty-six hours. This was among the first acts of mass murder of Jews during the Second World War, and it remained the biggest single mass execution of the Holocaust. After the massacre, the Germans continued to use the ravine as an execution site for Jews, Roma, the mentally ill, and others. In 1942, Germany established a P.O.W. camp next to Babyn Yar. When Soviet troops were poised to retake the city, in 1943, German soldiers ordered the inmates to remove bodies from the ravine and burn them.
After reclaiming Kyiv, Soviet authorities gave a group of foreign journalists a tour of Babyn Yar. The footage of that tour, along with pictures taken earlier by a Nazi photographer and a number of photos taken by a special Soviet state commission which were kept secret for seventy years, made up the visual record from the time. In 1946, while the Nuremberg trials were under way, a court in Kyiv tried fifteen German officers who had committed atrocities in Ukraine. Several witnesses and survivors testified. The court sentenced twelve of the defendants to death; they were hanged in the city’s central square, now known as Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square. But following those executions the Soviet Union banned any public discussion of what had happened to Kyiv’s Jews.
Babyn Yar was more than forty yards deep and stretched the length of several city blocks. Soviet authorities decided to fill it in by directing wastewater mixed with clay from nearby brickmaking plants to the ravine. In the early nineteen-fifties, a dam was constructed to contain the flow, turning the ravine into a murky lake. On March 13, 1961, the dam burst. The ensuing mudslide killed hundreds of people; their remains mixed with the bones of those who had been shot by the Germans.
For forty-five years after the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union censored all documentation of the Holocaust, including any attempt to memorialize Babyn Yar. Even after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., twenty-five more years passed before a comprehensive memorial effort began. Then came a new war in Europe––Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
German forces carried out thousands of mass shootings of Jews in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, western Russia, and the eastern territories of Poland, in what has become known as the Holocaust by bullets. German soldiers and police, as well as contingents of local collaborators, murdered more than two million Jews. For decades following the war, none of the killing sites were marked as places of Jewish extermination. A group of Soviet Jewish writers––including Vasily Grossman, Margarita Aliger, and Ilya Ehrenburg––assembled a compendium of testimony and documents, but censors banned its publication. According to Soviet historiography, the Nazis had targeted all Soviet citizens equally. “If you emphasized Jewish losses, you were a bourgeois nationalist,” Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a professor of Jewish studies and history at Northwestern University, who grew up in Kyiv, told me.
In 1961, during a brief period of tentative liberalization known as the Thaw, Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem that began, “No monument stands over Babi Yar.” (Babi Yar is the Russian-language name of the ravine.) Yevtushenko became famous in the West for his courage in writing about a taboo subject. People outside Kyiv learned the name Babi Yar. But the obliteration of the site continued. Following the dam disaster, construction crews filled in the ravine. A new road was built alongside it and a residential neighborhood went up. In 1966, the Times published a dispatch with the headline “boys of kiev play ball on babi yar,” describing young working families who were now able to move “out to the fresh air of the suburbs from their old crowded and dingy apartments.” Not long afterward, the city built a television tower near the grounds and a TV-production center on the site of the old Jewish cemetery.
Yevtushenko was not the only Soviet writer to take on the subject of Babyn Yar. Around 1944, a teen-ager in Kyiv named Anatoly Kuznetsov, who lived near the site, began recording his memories. He ultimately assembled notes, interviews, and documents into a book, “Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.” It was published in serial, censored form in the journal Yunost (Youth) in 1966, as the Thaw was coming to an end. In 1969, Kuznetsov defected to the U.K. and published the unexpurgated version, including the final lines of his original manuscript, which the censor had cut: “I wonder if we shall 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.”
The sites of mass shootings in Vilnius, Lithuania; Riga, Latvia; and Kyiv became focal points for Jewish activism. People gathered, or tried to gather, at Babyn Yar every year, beginning in September, 1966, to mark the anniversary of the massacre. From the late sixties to the mid-eighties, at least nine of the commemorations’ organizers were arrested and given prison sentences of a year or longer; many more, including the dissident and future Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, were briefly detained when they attempted to travel to Babyn Yar. Nevertheless, in November, 1966, the Soviet state set down a plaque at the site; it read “A monument will be constructed here to Soviet people who fell victim to fascist crimes committed during the temporary occupation of Kyiv in 1941-1943.” Ten years later, the monument finally appeared: a mess of tangled bodies in struggle, forming a sort of pyramid. The inscription at its base said “Here, in 1941-1943, German fascist occupiers executed more than a hundred thousand citizens of Kyiv and prisoners of war.”
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. That year, Babyn Yar got a second monument and its first explicit reference to Jews: a large bronze sculpture of a menorah. More than two dozen markers followed, honoring, among others, Ukrainian nationalists, Jewish resistance fighters, Roma people, and several Ukrainian soccer players who had been gunned down at Babyn Yar after their team defeated a German team. Most of these are figurative sculptures, none of them physically or aesthetically linked to any of the others. In 2000, a metro station opened nearby. Residential development brought commerce: fast-food kiosks, a sports center, and a shooting range.
The quarter century following the Cold War saw the museification of the Holocaust. Cities from Berlin to Warsaw to Washington opened Holocaust museums and memorials. In 2005, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem, unveiled a large new building. Even Hungary, which has gone to great lengths to obscure its wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany, commissioned a striking memorial: a row of life-size shoes, forged of iron, lining the embankment of the Danube in Budapest where Jews and others had been ordered to remove their shoes before they were shot.
“Holocaust recognition is our contemporary European entry ticket,” the historian Tony Judt wrote in 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 honored—the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.” But, as the last people alive at the time of the Babyn Yar tragedy died, the site continued to be an incoherent space: a city park peppered with sculptural markers that meant little to most visitors.
In 2014, thousands of Ukrainians who were angry with their pro-Russian government protested for months in Kyiv’s Independence Square, in what became known as the Euromaidan or the Revolution of Dignity. The President, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia. Petro Poroshenko, a businessman and a former foreign minister, won the next election; his mandate was to establish closer connections with Europe.
In 2016, the Ukrainian government organized a major commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre. To become a European capital, it seemed, Kyiv had to memorialize its own landscape of the Holocaust. In late September, the words “Babyn Yar” could be seen on banners throughout Kyiv. The historian Timothy Snyder, whose book “Black Earth” provides an account of the Holocaust by bullets, came to Kyiv at the invitation of the government, delivered a public lecture on Babyn Yar, and appeared on seemingly every talk show. Poroshenko announced that a museum and memorial complex would be built in time for the eightieth anniversary of the massacre. The project would be underwritten by a group of wealthy Jewish Ukrainian-born businessmen: Mikhail Fridman, Pavel Fuks, German Khan, and Victor Pinchuk.
Most Holocaust memorials are public enterprises. The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center was welcomed by the Ukrainian state, but it was a private undertaking that reflected the ambitions and desires of its backers. Fridman is a co-founder of Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private bank; his net worth is estimated at around eleven billion dollars. In September, Fridman told me that Fuks, a developer, had called him to say that he was eyeing a plot of land near Babyn Yar and was thinking of establishing a museum there. Fuks had made his first millions in Russia; in 2014, he embarked on significant investments in Ukraine. Fridman brought in his business partner, Khan, who had made his fortune in energy, and Pinchuk, a Ukrainian businessman with interests in everything from steel to media. (In 2021, Fuks abandoned the project after he was accused by the Ukrainian government of having engaged in corrupt business practices, an allegation he denies.)
During the next couple of years, a team of researchers, curators, and architects developed plans for a project in the mold of other European Holocaust memorials: self-contained, respectful of the landscape and the life that had taken root there since the war. But the funders aspired to something more spectacular. In 2019, they put together a high-profile supervisory board that included Sharansky; Svetlana Alexievich, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature; and the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder.
To lead the project, the funders invited the Russian Jewish filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who they knew could create on a grand scale. In 2005, he had begun a monumental film project, “Dau,” about the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet physicist Lev Landau. Khrzhanovsky had constructed an immense set in Kharkiv that conjured an entire world of the Soviet nineteen-forties and fifties: the apartments, furniture, appliances, clothes, and foodstuffs, as well as the paranoia, surveillance, and arrests. A rotating cast of nonprofessional actors took on assigned identities and inhabited them—and the period world—around the clock. The project ran in Kharkiv for five years, and Khrzhanovsky still hasn’t finished editing all the footage. In January, 2019, twelve feature films were screened as a single installation in Paris, followed by a two-film screening at the Berlin International Film Festival. Some screenings were dogged by allegations of violence and exploitation on the set. (Khrzhanovsky has denied that actors or staff were mistreated during filming.)
Khrzhanovsky’s central subject is humankind’s capacity for evil. “Dau” was a years-long Milgram experiment, and all of the resulting films portray people’s relationships to the allure and the threat of overwhelming authority. One of the lead amateur actors in the project was a Ukrainian former prison official; a small part went to a real-life Russian neo-Nazi, who played himself. Between 2015 and 2020, while he was editing “Dau,” Khrzhanovsky, who lives primarily in London, also created an installation in a building in Piccadilly—a kind of totalitarian house of horrors, featuring ghouls in Soviet secret-police uniforms. It doubled as a drinking club that brought together artists, writers, and billionaires, including Fridman and Pinchuk. Khrzhanovsky’s ambitions matched those of his funders: Europe’s last Holocaust memorial—whatever it became—would be its greatest.
Khrzhanovsky is forty-six, plump, boyish, and soft-spoken. He dresses in generously cut black suits and black trench coats that faintly suggest a visitor from the mid-twentieth century. I’ve talked to him several times in the past two years, in different cities. Last year, in Moscow and in Kyiv, we spent many hours discussing Babyn Yar and the talented people—both illustrious artists and newcomers—whom he had drawn into the project. But whenever I asked why one particular choice or another had been made, Khrzhanovsky replied, “Because that’s what is needed here.” I didn’t read this as evasion so much as a summing-up of his approach to art: make a world, populate it, and see what happens.
The offices of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center are two large apartments on two floors of a building in Kyiv. Furniture, light fixtures, books, wall art, and even the dishes in the office kitchen were chosen to match the object of study. Without waiting for the new museum to be constructed, staff members had started to build what became a giant collection of artifacts and documents that might have belonged to Ukrainian Jews before the war. They scoured antique shops and online auctions; they bought entire family archives and trunks full of unsorted photographs and mementos. They were trying to compile a complete list of the Jews who lived in Ukraine before the massacre, and an accurate list of everyone who died at Babyn Yar.
Oleh Shovenko, the project’s deputy artistic director, told me that, in an antique store in Lviv, he found a chandelier from a synagogue that had been destroyed. Through an online shop hawking Nazi memorabilia, he bought an album of photographs of a German officer who posed at sites in various European cities and next to the bodies of murdered Jews. Shovenko dressed in vaguely nineteen-forties fashion and wore his wispy dirty-blond hair thrown back; he looked like every boy in my grandmothers’ black-and-white university pictures, taken just before they went off to fight in the Second World War. Shovenko had uncannily bright blue eyes. He told me that he wasn’t sure what the goal of the project’s huge collection was, but it had something to do with “understanding.”
“It’s like I can see a headline, ‘How could people kill thirty-four thousand other humans in the space of two days?’ ” he said. “I guess I’ve learned that social progress is like a house of cards. If you have no running water, no heat, and no electricity, it’s easy to spread xenophobia.”
Anna Furman, a deputy director who ran the Names Initiative, told me about creating what she described as “already the largest digital archive in Ukraine and, maybe, soon to be the largest in Europe.” Her job was to interview witnesses and survivors of the massacre and their descendants and to cross-check available testimony and archival documents, restoring a usable past for the city of Kyiv and for the families of the victims. “One person had the wrong name of his great-grandfather,” she said. “We found the correct name and address, and he told us, ‘Now when I walk down that street, I look in a different set of windows.’ ” The researchers were gradually filling in the list of people shot at Babyn Yar and supplementing it with the names of victims who died on the way to the ravine, or who didn’t make the journey. They found that some people, and entire families, had committed suicide rather than go to the killing site.
Over dinner by candlelight in the office, Maksym Rokmaniko, a thirty-year-old architect, told me about the reconstruction of the massacre site. Using techniques developed by the Israeli British architect Eyal Weizman, Rokmaniko’s group had created three-dimensional models based on the few available photographs. Rokmaniko pulled a new rendering up on his tablet. It showed piles of naked bodies—the perfect bodies of young men, as though drawn from Greek statues. “That needs to be adjusted,” Khrzhanovsky said. “It was mostly women, children, and old people.”
At the end of their workday, around eleven in the evening, as Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” played on a replica of a nineteen-thirties phonograph, I talked with Furman and several other staffers, all women, about what they had known of Babyn Yar before taking jobs at the memorial center. Dasha Dzhuromska, who was twenty-five, said that she didn’t learn of its history until after she finished high school. “We had nothing about it in school,” Kaleria Kozinets, the staff cook, said. She was forty-nine and Jewish. “When I told my father where I was working, he told me that my grandfather Ilya was there as a boy and survived because some man covered him with his body.” Kozinets had never heard this story. About twenty-five people are believed to have survived the massacre.
“Every time I go to Babyn Yar, I can’t stop thinking about the thirty-four thousand in two days,” Valeria Didenko, who was twenty-one and who worked as Khrzhanovsky’s assistant, said. “When Maksym showed us his model, it had only nine thousand bodies visible in it, and I thought, What’s thirty-four thousand like?”
They fell quiet. In six months, bombs began to fall on Kyiv again. In Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson, and other cities, people struggled to survive without heat or running water, and with dwindling supplies of food. Millions of refugees, almost all of them women and children, streamed into Europe. Bodies piled up in bombed-out buildings and in the streets. The dead numbered in the many thousands. In the first days of April, when Russian troops retreated from the suburbs of Kyiv, they left behind mass graves; streets strewn with bodies of civilians with their hands tied behind their backs, executed at close range; and bodies they had attempted to burn. None of this had been imaginable, much as the carnage of Babyn Yar was unimaginable.
The conversation turned to 2014, when more than a hundred Ukrainian protesters were shot as they rallied at Independence Square. Not long after, Russia occupied Crimea and fomented a war in the Donbas. Dzhuromska’s family lost their income because of the war and she had to quit university in Poland after one semester. Didenko spoke of the fracture of her mother’s family, which came from Donetsk, in the east: one uncle joined the Euromaidan and supported the Ukrainian Army while another declared himself Russian. Furman talked about seeing the dead bodies in Independence Square. “You ask how it’s possible to execute so many people in two days,” she said. “The thing is, it’s possible for people to execute people.” Furman and her colleagues weren’t comparing their hardships to the Holocaust. They were talking through the way life as you know it can end overnight.
When I visited Babyn Yar, it was close to the eightieth anniversary of the massacre, but the memorial complex that Poroshenko had promised five years earlier was not ready. Khrzhanovsky led me on a late-night tour. At an entrance to the park, we walked down a gravel path to an installation called the Mirror Field. The first thing I noticed was a howling sound—it seemed to come from the nearby road, and the structure, an elevated round mirrored platform with ten mirrored columns protruding upward from it, was amplifying the sound. (An electroacoustic organ is hidden in the installation’s base, augmenting ambient noise.) Then there was a crackling and, finally, a woman’s voice, saying the names of the dead.
“When you look here, you see yourself shot,” Khrzhanovsky said.
“What do you mean, you see yourself shot?” I asked. I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to look down into the mirror at my feet or straight ahead at one of the columns. Everything was riddled with holes, as though bullets had ripped through metal.
“You see yourself with holes,” Khrzhanovsky said. “Come, stand here.” He went on to explain that the holes matched the calibre of the bullets used by the executioners, and that the low-grade background hum matched frequencies that involved the numerical expression of the letters that made up the names of the dead. I couldn’t follow the explanation, and wasn’t convinced that Khrzhanovsky understood it, either.
Our footsteps on the mirrored platform made the sound of breaking glass. I have visited most Holocaust monuments and memorials in Europe: the small ones and the big ones, the elegant ones and the inept ones. I had tried to keep an open mind on my way to Babyn Yar, but the ride, in a luxury car, and Khrzhanovsky’s boastful tour had made this difficult. Now, though, I found myself moved. This monument was unlike any other: it was constructed of light, temporary material; it pulled you in without telling you exactly what to think; and it made you feel alone in a fragile, crackling, howling, grieving world. The woman’s voice was now replaced with that of a cantor in prayer.
Khrzhanovsky led me a short distance away from the mirrored platform and pointed to a boulder with a tiny viewfinder in it. I saw a rotating gallery of prewar photographs of some of the dead. We walked into an alley that runs along the edge of the park, and I heard something new: the sound of prayer had faded, and a woman’s voice, half whispering, said a name, then another. I now noticed that a speaker was mounted on every lamppost along the alley.
The next day, I went to Babyn Yar again, without Khrzhanovsky. I rented an electric scooter and rode around the park. Somehow, amid the young families with baby strollers and the teen-agers hanging out after school, the effect of the audio installations was more striking. In the alley, I felt that I kept overhearing names said just over my shoulder. Where once there had been silence, now you could hardly come to this park without being reminded of the massacre. It was like walking around Berlin, where the eye is always happening upon reminders of the Second World War: an information stand telling you that this was the site of Hitler’s bunker, or the Stolpersteine—the “stumbling stones” inlaid in sidewalks in front of the last residences of Holocaust victims.
Khrzhanovsky told me that he planned to create fifteen museums: of the Babyn Yar massacre itself, of the Holocaust in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, of local history, of the lost world of Ukrainian Jews, of the 1961 mudslide catastrophe, of the history of oblivion, and some others—he trailed off. More than half a dozen permanent installations had already been completed at the Babyn Yar site, including a tiny but fully functional wooden synagogue, designed by the Swiss architect Manuel Herz, built to open like a giant crank-operated pop-up book. The most controversial installation was Marina Abramović’s “Crystal Wall of Crying,” made of local coal interspersed with large, protruding crystals, a work that makes clear yet awkward reference to the Western Wall, in Jerusalem. In her artist’s statement, Abramović proposed that visitors lean against the wall and meditate on the tragedy of Babyn Yar. The crystals were positioned to align with the faces, chests, and bellies of people of different heights. The wall was ostentatious and tone-deaf, unlike her best work. It gave Khrzhanovsky’s detractors a symbol of how the over-all project at Babyn Yar had gone pretentiously off the rails.
“That wall is beyond critique,” Petrovsky-Shtern, the Northwestern history professor, said. “Whatever is done there needs to be modest, a noninvasive way of connecting all these sorrows.”
The difference between Khrzhanovsky’s showy approach and more conventional ways of memorializing the Holocaust goes beyond issues of dignity and taste. The primary purpose of most Holocaust memorials is to document the names and the fates of the victims, the customs and the traditions of the lost world, and to convey the scale of the tragedy. For Khrzhanovsky, this is only a part of the project. Early in his time in Kyiv, he shared a slide presentation with his staff and investors which leaked to Ukrainian media. It included references to building a labyrinth of narrow dark corridors with an interactive exhibit; it would be enhanced by facial-recognition technology that would chart a “separate path” for every visitor. The ideas were not wholly unrelated to existing Holocaust memorials: the main exhibit space of Yad Vashem is built to feel claustrophobic; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, features rows of hundreds of concrete slabs that lean in, creating a narrowing and darkening path; and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., encourages its youngest visitors to identify with a composite character named Daniel. But Khrzhanovsky’s leaked presentation gave rise to fears that he was going to create some kind of Holocaust theme park. (He later explained that the presentation contained results of a brainstorming session, and not anything near the final blueprint.)
Khrzhanovsky collaborated with Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest whose title at Georgetown University is professor of the practice of the forensic study of the Holocaust. Desbois, who wrote the book “The Holocaust by Bullets,” led the scientific committee for the Babyn Yar project, which he called a “historical and anthropological revolution”—the first museum to mark the site of a genocidal massacre. “Normally, we build countries on mass graves,” he told me over Zoom from Georgetown. “Where is the museum of the mass graves in Darfur? Who is going to visit the museum of the destruction of Native Americans in Costa Rica?”
Desbois shared Khrzhanovsky’s commitment to re-creating the context and the circumstances of the Babyn Yar massacre in every possible detail, including the inhabitants of what Primo Levi called the “gray zone”—the unwilling or unthinking assistants to the perpetrators. (Desbois found testimony from a man who had delivered sandwiches to the executioners.) Most of all, Desbois wanted to identify all the perpetrators: “The victims were not killed by a storm or a tsunami. Every one of them was shot by someone.” The hangings of some of the executioners, in Kyiv in 1946, were followed by a few other trials and punishments. In 1951, Paul Blobel, who had directed the mass executions in Ukraine, was hanged in Germany. Eleven more executioners were tried in Germany in 1967; they had long since returned to civilian life—one worked as a salesman and another as a bank director. A fourth trial, of three men, occurred in 1971. But most of the Babyn Yar executioners never faced justice.
“I want to reëstablish the responsibility of humans for mass crimes,” Desbois said. Unlike the annihilation of millions in death camps, mass murder by bullets still happens all the time, and usually goes unpunished.
When I told acquaintances in Kyiv that I was writing about the project at Babyn Yar, they sighed, rolled their eyes, or laughed uncomfortably. No one, it seemed, trusted the project—partly because it was privately funded, partly because it was directed by Khrzhanovsky, but most of all because of Russia. The project’s most outspoken opponent was Josef Zissels, a seventy-five-year-old former dissident and a leader of Ukraine’s Jewish community. I met with him in January at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, one of Ukraine’s largest and oldest universities, where he runs the Jewish-studies center. His primary objection to the project, he said, came from the sense that Putin and his imperial agenda were the forces behind it. Although all four of the rich men who were bankrolling the memorial were Jews who were born in Ukraine, they had benefitted from their connections to Russia, and three of them had carried Russian passports at some point. “It’s hybrid warfare,” Zissels said. “They are trying to foist memory that’s not our memory.”
He talked about what Ukrainians and some Russians call pobedobesiye (literally, “victory mania”), which forms the foundational historical myth and the central public ritual of Putin’s Russia. Every year, the Soviet victory in the Second World War is celebrated with greater fanfare and bigger fireworks, military parades, and reënactments. For months leading up to May 9th, when the country celebrates Victory Day, Russians wear orange-and-black commemorative ribbons on their clothes and bags. The especially zealous decorate their vehicles with slogans such as “Onward to Berlin” or “1941-1945. We could do it again.” One popular decal features two stick figures in the act of anal intercourse; the top has a hammer and sickle for a head, the bottom a swastika.
The Russian memory project is explicitly anti-Western. What the world calls the Second World War, Russia calls the Great Patriotic War. What for most of the world began on September 1, 1939, for Russia started on June 22, 1941, when the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin ended and the war between the two countries began. The U.K., the U.S., France, and many other Allied countries look back on the war with a sense of both tragedy and victory, but the triumphalism in Russia is more pronounced. Now Russian leaders brand real or imagined challengers to their power as Nazis.
Some critics suspected that Khrzhanovsky’s project, in keeping with Russian propaganda that increasingly labelled Ukrainians as Nazis, would focus on local collaborators in war crimes. In 2021, Sergei Loznitsa, one of the best-known Ukrainian directors, made a documentary, “Babi Yar. Context,” under the auspices of the memorial center; other members of the Ukrainian film community charged that the movie was “filled with the narrative accusing . . . the people of Ukraine of collaboration in the mass killings of the Jewish population.” In fact, “Babi Yar. Context,” which employs footage shot by German and Soviet propagandists, does not address the question of collaborators.
I spent many days talking with members of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center team and combing through the materials they had produced. I encountered occasional pockets of ignorance, primarily on matters of Soviet Jewish history, but didn’t see any indication that the project or its funders were promoting a Russia-centric, much less a Putin-style, narrative. Few on the team had been educated in Russia or had lived there for a significant amount of time. Khrzhanovsky had spent the majority of the past two decades in Kharkiv and London.
Fridman told me, “I expected that we’d encounter resistance, but I never thought we’d be called agents of the Kremlin.” He was born in Lviv. Both of his grandmothers were from Kyiv and had been lucky to leave Ukraine in 1941 with their children. Fridman’s great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust; Fuks, Khan, and Pinchuk had lost relatives, too. At least seven of Khan’s family members were killed at Babyn Yar. (Khrzhanovsky’s maternal grandmother, too, fled Ukraine in 1941.) Sure, the funders of the memorial had made their money in Russia—it was a good place to do business—but they had complicated relationships with the country. Several years ago, Fuks renounced his Russian citizenship.
I asked Zissels what aspects of Khrzhanovsky’s project reflected the Kremlin’s historical narrative. “I can’t prove it,” he said. “But I can feel it.” The apprehension, it seems, was a fear of contagion. The problem with Putin’s revisionist history is not just the centrality of the Soviet Union and Soviet military glory; it’s that, like all Russian propaganda, it intentionally sows chaos. The effect is to produce a preferred historical narrative and a sense of nihilism—a consensus that good and evil are indistinguishable, that nothing is true and everything is possible. This was what made it hard for so many Ukrainians to trust a project funded by people who still did business in Russia. Khrzhanovsky’s avowed obsession with the nature of evil, his willingness to examine it at close range, only fed the distrust.
Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th. A few days later, Khrzhanovsky was on the phone with Anna Furman, who had been in charge of compiling the list of victims at Babyn Yar. Khrzhanovsky was begging: “Anechka, you know how this goes. Please take your mother and leave.” Furman and her mother ended up going to western Ukraine, as did a few other staff members; still others left for Poland. Shovenko, the artistic director, and Didenko, Khrzhanovsky’s assistant, surprised everyone by announcing that they were getting married. After a small ceremony (Khrzhanovsky attended via Zoom), Didenko went to Lviv, and Shovenko reported for duty with the Ukrainian Army.
Khrzhanovsky used to say, “Babyn Yar is not in the past—it is now.” But he didn’t realize that “now” meant now. He is no longer surprised that so many Ukrainians were suspicious of his work on the memorial. “When I came to Kyiv, I knew that Putin was a scumbag, that the Donbas was at war, that his troops were helping fight it, but I didn’t realize the extent of it, and the Ukrainians did,” he told me from London in March. The memorial center has reoriented itself toward helping Ukrainians flee to safety, starting with Holocaust survivors, other elderly people, and the disabled. “It’s clear that there won’t be a Babyn Yar memorial the way we envisioned it,” Pinchuk told me in late March, from his home in London.
Fridman was one of the super-rich Russians to be sanctioned in response to the war, initially by the European Union and then by the United Kingdom. He complained to the media that the sanctions were unfair, but he resigned from the memorial center. Days later, the E.U. sanctioned Khan, and he, too, resigned. That left Pinchuk. On my computer screen, a month into the war, he still looked and sounded shocked. “This is just beyond, beyond,” he said. “It was impossible to imagine. It’s genocide.” He told me that he was focussing his time and money trying to get military equipment and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Desbois’s Ukrainian team of six researchers of mass murder were now interviewing victims and witnesses of new Russian war crimes. By the first week of April, they had completed thirty-seven investigations in Bucha, Mariupol, Irpin, Kherson, and Kharkiv. The day before Desbois and I spoke, the team had interviewed a young Ukrainian man who had been tortured by Russian troops for three days. The Russians had demanded that he confess to being a Nazi.
Putin, in his speech on the eve of the February invasion, called the Ukrainian government—which is led by a Jewish President, Volodymyr Zelensky—one of “radicals and nationalists.” He said that Ukraine had no right to exist as a state and accused it of perpetrating “genocide” against ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking populations. Several passages in the address sounded like warmed-over segments from Hitler’s 1938 Sudetenland speech, delivered in the run-up to Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. Within a few days of Russian troops entering Ukraine, a symbol of the Russian war emerged: the letter “Z,” which first appeared on Russian military vehicles and spread to public transport, official documents, T-shirts, and billboards; it was also painted on the apartment doors of activists and journalists who opposed the war. Russians, in fighting a war of annihilation, had adopted a symbol that looked and functioned like the swastika; Ukrainians were now fighting their own great patriotic war.
On March 20th, Zelensky addressed the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. He invoked the Holocaust and Babyn Yar. “This is a large-scale and treacherous war aimed at destroying our people,” he said. “Destroying our children, our families. Our state. Our cities. Our communities. Our culture. . . . That is why I have the right to this parallel and to this comparison. Our history and your history. Our war for our survival and World War II.” About a week later, speaking over video to leaders of the European Council, Zelensky recited the names of member countries, thanking them for their support. When he got to Hungary, which has refused to send military aid to Ukraine, Zelensky asked Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to visit the Holocaust memorial on the Budapest waterfront: “Look at those shoes. And you will see how mass killings can happen again in today’s world. And that’s what Russia is doing today.”
Petrovsky-Shtern told me, “From a purely historical standpoint, there is no comparison” between the Holocaust and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Jews were a stateless nation. No one protected them. Ukrainians are on their own land, protected by landscape, their own army, and growing world opinion.” But, he added, “from the point of view of rhetoric, the comparison makes sense. He is saying, They are coming to erase us.”
When this war is over, Europe will no longer be defined by the history of the Second World War. The next era of European history, whenever it begins, will be the aftermath of the war in Ukraine.
I most recently visited Kyiv at the end of January. For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on January 27th, the memorial center had originally planned a conference, a ceremony, and the opening of its biggest installation so far, a tumulus-shaped building with Rokmaniko’s models inside. The installation wasn’t finished, and some of the conference events were cancelled. The office seemed in disarray. Several employees had left their jobs. In the library, two young staff members were sorting through newly acquired identity documents for people presumed to have died at Babyn Yar. When Dasha Dzhuromska and I walked in, conversation turned to the center’s plans for safeguarding the collection in case of war, and then to the staffers’ plans for saving themselves and their families. Would they flee? Arm themselves? Learn to drive? A Russian invasion was all anyone talked about, and yet it seemed impossibly unlikely.
European and Ukrainian dignitaries and several Ukrainian rabbis gathered in the tiny synagogue. The interior is intricately painted with prayers, blessings, and a menagerie of animals, all in the colorful style of synagogues in western Ukraine that were destroyed in the Second World War. Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxer and now the mayor of Kyiv, said, “We stand in a place where innocent people were killed. . . . We are a peaceful nation. We have not attacked anyone. But we will defend our land. And we will especially remember this day.” He spoke in Ukrainian. Moshe Azman, the chief rabbi of the Brodsky Synagogue, in Kyiv, spoke in Russian. “I want to address my words to all the world’s leaders,” he said. “Remember what happened in Babyn Yar. . . . It’s easy to start a war. Let’s all do everything to make sure a war doesn’t start. I pray that the Lord may place righteous thoughts in the minds of all authorities.”
After the speeches ended, the visiting dignitaries piled into vans that took them back to the center of Kyiv. It was snowing heavily. The sky was dark. From a distance, the mirror installation looked like a bottomless pit, the columns like birch trees. I walked down to the reflective field and stood for a few minutes, as the sky started clearing and a hint of blue appeared at my feet. There was no wind, no howl. The names of victims and the prayers sounded in stillness.
I walked away from the installation, past the remains of a soccer goal, into what felt like a half-abandoned industrial zone. It housed a hip coffee shop, the shooting range, and the sports complex. On March 1st, a Russian missile, possibly meant for the television tower, hit near the sports complex. It burned, and four people burned with it. Several people affiliated with Babyn Yar sent me video recordings of the burning bodies. A witness, likely a firefighter, can be heard saying, “So, Russians, who are you fucking fighting? This is a child.” Unlike the last war fought in Ukraine, this one will leave ample visual evidence. ♦
An earlier version of this article failed to include a denial from Ilya Khrzhanovsky about the mistreatment of staff on the set of “Dau” and misstated the extent to which those allegations affected screenings. The article has also been updated to clarify the connections of the Babyn Yar funders to Russia.Published in the print edition of the April 18, 2022, issue, with the headline “The Memorial.”
