Babi yar, p.1
Babi Yar, page 1
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 In the Soviet Union a writer is constantly faced with a choice: either he will not be published at all or he can publish what the censorship will permit.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 si tes 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.
