30 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022create 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 So-
viet nineteen-forties and fifties: the apart-
ments, furniture, appliances, clothes, and
foodstuffs, as well as the paranoia, sur-
veillance, 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 edit-
ing 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 other screenings were
derailed by allegations of violence and
exploitation on the set.
Khrzhanovsky’s central subject is hu-
mankind’s capacity for evil. “Dau” was
a years-long Milgram experiment, and
all of the resulting films portray peo-
ple’s relationships to the allure and the
threat of overwhelming authority. One
of the lead amateur actors in the proj-
ect was a Ukrainian former prison of-
ficial; 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 in-
stallation 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.K
hrzhanovsky is forty-six, plump, boy-
ish, 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 dis-
cussing Babyn Yar and the talented peo-
ple—both illustrious artists and new-
comers—whom he had drawn into the
project. But whenever I asked why one
particular choice or another had beenmade, 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, pop-
ulate it, and see what happens.
The offices of the Babyn Yar Holo-
caust 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 of-
fice 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 be-
came a giant collection of artifacts and
documents that might have belonged
to Ukrainian Jews before the war. They
scoured antique shops and online auc-
tions; 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 an-
tique store in Lviv, he found a chande-
lier from a synagogue that had been de-
stroyed. 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 Sec-
ond World War. Shovenko had uncan-
nily 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 de-scendants and to cross-check available
testimony and archival documents, re-
storing 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 vic-
tims who died on the way to the ravine,
or who didn’t make the journey. They
found that some people, and entire fam-
ilies, 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. Us-
ing techniques developed by the Israeli
British architect Eyal Weizman, Rokma-
niko’s group had created three-dimen-
sional models based on the few available
photographs. Rokmaniko pulled a new
rendering up on his tablet. It showed
piles of naked bodies—the perfect bod-
ies of young men, as though drawn from
Greek statues. “That needs to be ad-
justed,” Khrzhanovsky said. “It was mostly
women, children, and old people.”
At the end of their workday, around
eleven in the evening, as Sinead O’Con-
nor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” played on
a replica of a nineteen-thirties phono-
graph, 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 Dzhu-
romska, who was twenty-five, said that
she didn’t learn of its history until after
she finished high school. “We had noth-
ing 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 grand-
father Ilya was there as a boy and sur-
vived 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