34 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
community charged that the movie was
“filled with the narrative accusing.. .the
people of Ukraine of collaboration in
the mass killings of the Jewish popula-
tion.” 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 pro-
duced. I encountered occasional pock-
ets 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 Rus-
sia 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 grand-
mothers 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 memo-
rial 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 re-
nounced his Russian citizenship.
I asked Zissels what aspects of
Khrzhanovsky’s project ref lected 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 con-
tagion. The problem with Putin’s revi-
sionist history is not just the centrality
of the Soviet Union and Soviet military
glory; it’s that, like all Russian propa-
ganda, it intentionally sows chaos. The
effect is to produce a preferred histori-
cal narrative and a sense of nihilism—a
consensus that good and evil are indis-
tinguishable, 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.P
utin 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 Po-
land. 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 Ukrai-
nians were suspicious of his work on the
memorial. “When I came to Kyiv, I knew
that Putin was a scumbag, that the Don-
bas was at war, that his troops were help-
ing 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 help-
ing Ukrainians flee to safety, starting with
Holocaust survivors, other elderly peo-ple, 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 sanc-
tions 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 im-
possible to imagine. It’s genocide.” He
told me that he was focussing his time
and money trying to get military equip-
ment and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Desbois’s Ukrainian team of six re-
searchers of mass murder were now in-
terviewing 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 in-
terviewed 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 “geno-
cide” against ethnic Russian and Russian-
speaking populations. Several passages
in the address sounded like warmed-
over segments from Hitler’s 1938 Sude-
tenland speech, delivered in the run-up
to Germany’s invasion of Czechoslova-
kia. Within a few days of Russian troops
entering Ukraine, a symbol of the Rus-
sian war emerged: the letter “Z,” which
first appeared on Russian military vehi-
cles and spread to public transport, of-
ficial 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 fight-
ing 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 compar-
ison. 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, Ze-