BABII YAR

Poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1961

Babii Yar is a ravine on the outskirts of the Ukrainian city of Kiev, where in 1941 the SS murdered more than 100,000 people—Jews and non-Jewish Ukrainians, Russians, and others—and buried them in a mass grave. In 1961, when Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited the site with fellow writer Anatoli Kuznetsov, the site was still unmarked, the event mostly buried in the memories of those who had witnessed or—rarely—survived it.

Yevtushenko responded with a poem of eleven rhymed iambic stanzas that was to galvanize audiences in Russia and abroad, call down a rebuke from nervous Soviet censors, and serve as an inspiration for other Russian artists including Dmitrii Shostakovich and Kuznetsov himself in his 1966 novel Babii Yar. Yevtushenko, who was not Jewish, took a radical and courageous stand when he wrote and performed this poem, which identifies with the Jews and condemns native anti-Semitism.

Yevtushenko was outraged that "Above Babii Yar there are no monuments," as he wrote in the first line. He was acutely aware of the need to address the past and perceived the neglect of this Nazi atrocity as an insult both to the victims and to the honor of his own people, who had led the long fight against fascism. Yevtushenko sees everything through the filter of conscience and of his own Russianness. His love for the Russian people and his commitment to warning them of manipulation by anti-Semites are central to this poem that focuses on Jewish victims.

Yevtushenko's reaction is deeply personal. The sight of the ravine evokes the response, "I am afraid …/… taking off my cap,/I feel how I slowly turn grey/… and I myself am like a massive, soundless scream/above the thousand thousand buried here." In the central device of the poem the poet ceases to be an observer and through his empathy becomes the victims. His persona fades as he takes on those of a series of Jews across the centuries. Beginning "Today I'm as old/as the whole Jewish race," he goes on, "Here I am wandering through ancient Egypt." He then assumes, one after another, the identities of a Jew crucified in Palestine; Dreyfus, reviled and imprisoned; a child begging for mercy during a pogrom in Bielostok; and Anne Frank, in love and "transparent as a twig in April." Returning to Babii Yar, he becomes, finally, "every old man shot dead here,/every child shot dead …"

The Soviet worldview officially condemned the Russian tradition of anti-Semitism. In this spirit Yevtushenko makes it clear that he speaks not only as a Russian but as a Soviet citizen: "The 'Internationale,' let it thunder/when the last antisemite on earth/is buried forever." The poem ends with the defiant paradox that though "there is no Jewish blood in my blood," because he has taken the side of the Jews, anti-Semites will now hate him as if he were one himself, and he is "for that reason—a real Russian."

These moving declarations alone caused consternation among right-wing nationalist critics. But there is an ambiguity in the poem that caused Soviet officials more serious concern about its possible destructive effects: nowhere in the poem does he mention Germans or Nazis. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, anything that Western audiences could construe as anti-Soviet was welcomed there, and many gleefully read "Babii Yar" as a condemnation of Soviet anti-Semitism alone. Given the lack of general knowledge of the atrocity in the USSR at the time, it was even possible to read the poem as an accusation of Ukrainian complicity in the murders. In addition there was fear that Yevtushenko's poem would foster divisive identity politics (a term nonexistent then) by focusing on one group of victims to the exclusion of the others. Thus Soviet officials were understandably worried about the popularity of this work, and despite Yevtushenko's insistence that his poem had been misinterpreted, after its initial publication in Literaturnaia gazeta it was not published again until 1983, and then with the addition of a footnote stating that Jews had not been the only victims.

The poem continued to reach audiences in another form, however. Dmitri Shostakovich, like Yevtushenko both a critical voice and a Soviet patriot, used five Yevtushenko poems, including "Babii Yar," as the basis for his Thirteenth Symphony, which debuted in 1962 to enthusiastic crowds. For the next performance censors required that a few lines be changed to emphasize the Soviet victory over fascism. This was the only change ever required in the text, but hostile critics spun persistent rumors, either accusing Yevtushenko of anti-Soviet writing or conversely accusing the Soviet state of suppression of a great poet. Despite the poem's continuing ambiguity, Yevtushenko created that monument to Babii Yar whose absence he decries in its opening lines.