THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 29interviews, and documents into a book,
“Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of
a Novel.” It was published in serial, cen-
sored 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 un-
derstand that the most precious thing
in this world is a man’s life and his free-
dom? 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 Vil-
nius, Lithuania; Riga, Latvia; and Kyiv
became focal points for Jewish activ-
ism. People gathered, or tried to gather,
at Babyn Yar every year, beginning in
September, 1966, to mark the anniver-
sary of the massacre. From the late six-
ties 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 politi-
cian Natan Sharansky, were briefly de-
tained when they attempted to travel
to Babyn Yar. Nevertheless, in Novem-
ber, 1966, the Soviet state set down a
plaque at the site; it read “A monument
will be constructed here to Soviet peo-
ple who fell victim to fascist crimes
committed during the temporary oc-
cupation 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 inscrip-
tion 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 mon-
ument and its first explicit reference to
Jews: a large bronze sculpture of a me-
norah. More than two dozen markers
followed, honoring, among others,
Ukrainian nationalists, Jewish resis-
tance fighters, Roma people, and sev-
eral 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 aestheti-
cally linked to any of the others. In
2000, a metro station opened nearby.
Residential development brought com-
merce: fast-food kiosks, a sports cen-
ter, and a shooting range.T
he quarter century following the
Cold War saw the museification
of the Holocaust. Cities from Berlin to
Warsaw to Washington opened Holo-
caust museums and memorials. In 2005,
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
museum and memorial in
Jerusalem, unveiled a large
new building. Even Hun-
gary, which has gone to great
lengths to obscure its war-
time 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 re-
move their shoes before they were shot.
“Holocaust recognition is our con-
temporary 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 hon-
ored—the recovered memory of Europe’s
dead Jews has become the very defini-
tion and guarantee of the continent’s re-
stored humanity.” But, as the last people
alive at the time of the Babyn Yar trag-
edy died, the site continued to be an in-
coherent 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 gov-
ernment protested for months in Kyiv’s
Independence Square, in what became
known as the Euromaidan or the Rev-
olution of Dignity. The President, Vik-
tor Yanukovych, fled to Russia. Petro Po-
roshenko, a businessman and a former
foreign minister, won the next election;
his mandate was to establish closer con-
nections 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 memori-
alize 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 govern-
ment, 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 an-
niversary of the massacre. The project
would be underwritten by
a group of wealthy Jewish
Ukrainian-born business-
men: Mikhail Fridman,
Pavel Fuks, German Khan,
and Victor Pinchuk.
Most Holocaust memo-
rials are public enterprises.
The Babyn Yar Holocaust
Memorial Center was wel-
comed by the Ukrainian
state, but it was a private un-
dertaking that reflected the ambitions
and desires of its backers. Fridman is a
co-founder of Alfa Bank, Russia’s larg-
est private bank; his net worth is esti-
mated 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 estab-
lishing a museum there. Fuks had made
his first millions in Russia; in 2014, he
embarked on significant investments in
Ukraine. Fridman brought in his busi-
ness 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 archi-
tects developed plans for a project in the
mold of other European Holocaust me-
morials: 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 Sha-
ransky; 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 in-
vited the Russian Jewish filmmaker Ilya
Khrzhanovsky, who they knew could