THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 33bol of how the over-all project at Babyn
Yar had gone pretentiously off the rails.
“That wall is beyond critique,”
Petrovsky-Shtern, the Northwestern his-
tory professor, said. “Whatever is done
there needs to be modest, a noninvasive
way of connecting all these sorrows.”
The difference between Khrzhanov-
sky’s showy approach and more conven-
tional ways of memorializing the Holo-
caust goes beyond issues of dignity and
taste. The primary purpose of most Ho-
locaust 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 Holo-
caust memorials: the main exhibit space
of Yad Vashem is built to feel claustro-
phobic; 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., encour-
ages 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 pre-
sentation contained results of a brain-
storming session, and not anything near
the final blueprint.)
Khrzhanovsky collaborated with Pat-
rick Desbois, a French Catholic priest
whose title at Georgetown University
is professor of the practice of the foren-
sic study of the Holocaust. Desbois, who
wrote the book “The Holocaust by Bul-
lets,” led the scientific committee for
the Babyn Yar project, which he called
a “historical and anthropological revo-
lution”—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 Na-
tive Americans in Costa Rica?”
Desbois shared Khrzhanovsky’s com-
mitment to re-creating the context and
the circumstances of the Babyn Yar mas-
sacre in every possible detail, including
the inhabitants of what Primo Levi
called the “gray zone”—the unwilling
or unthinking assistants to the perpe-
trators. (Desbois found testimony from
a man who had delivered sandwiches
to the executioners.) Most of all, Des-
bois wanted to identify all the perpe-
trators: “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 tri-
als and punishments. In 1951, Paul Blo-
bel, who had directed the mass execu-
tions 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 di-
rector. A fourth trial, of three men, oc-
curred in 1971. But most of the Babyn
Yar executioners never faced justice.
“I want to reëstablish the responsi-
bility of humans for mass crimes,” Des-
bois said. Unlike the annihilation of mil-
lions in death camps, mass murder by
bullets still happens all the time, and
usually goes unpunished.W
hen I told acquaintances in Kyiv
that I was writing about the proj-
ect at Babyn Yar, they sighed, rolled their
eyes, or laughed uncomfortably. No one,
it seemed, trusted the project—partlybecause 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 for-
mer 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 uni-versities, where he runs the Jewish-stud-
ies 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 the Putin regime,
and three of them had carried Russian
passports at some point. “It’s hybrid war-
fare,” Zissels said. “They are trying to
foist memory that’s not our memory.”
He talked about what Ukrainians
and some Russians call pobedobesiye (lit-
erally, “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, Rus-
sians wear orange-and-black commem-
orative ribbons on their clothes and
bags. The especially zealous decorate
their vehicles with slogans such as “On-
ward to Berlin” or “1941-1945. We could
do it again.” One popular decal features
two stick figures in the act of anal in-
tercourse; the top has a hammer and
sickle for a head, the bottom a swastika.
The Russian memory project is ex-
plicitly 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 Hit-
ler and Stalin ended and the war be-
tween 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 vic-
tory, but the triumphalism in Russia is
more pronounced. Now Russian lead-
ers brand real or imagined challengers
to their power as Nazis.
Some critics suspected that Khrzha-
novsky’s project, in keeping with Rus-
sian propaganda that increasingly la-
belled Ukrainians as Nazis, would focus
on local collaborators in war crimes. In
2021, Sergei Loznitsa, one of the best-
known Ukrainian directors, made a doc-
umentary, “Babi Yar. Context,” under
the auspices of the memorial center;
other members of the Ukrainian film