Probably few people in this country have heard of Babi Yar, but if recent proposals by the Kiev city authority go ahead, England soccer fans travelling to the 2012 European Championships to be held in Ukraine may well find themselves staying in a hotel built at the site of one of the most notorious massacres of the second world war.
Between 29 and 30 September 1941, German SS troops assisted by local auxiliaries killed more than 33,000 of Kiev's Jewish inhabitants at a ravine that ran through parkland on the city's periphery. It was the culmination of a genocidal sweep through Ukraine that wiped out one community after another. Eventually, about 700,000 Ukrainian Jews would perish at the hands of the Germans, their Romanian allies, and Ukrainians recruited into police battalions. Thousands of Gypsies were also murdered throughout Ukraine, many at the ravine that became a favourite murder site until the city was liberated.
Babi Yar was the most horrific single act of slaughter, yet for decades after the war there was no memorial there. Groups of Jews gathered annually to commemorate the atrocity, but unofficially. In 1961 the dissident Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko created a stir with a poem lamenting the massacre and the attitude of local people to the fate of the Jews. His poem was later put to music by Dimitri Shostakovitch in one of the composers most powerful and affecting compositions. Meanwhile, the city expanded and encroached on the site until it was reduced to a park in a suburb, but a park with a unique history.
The Soviet authorities refused to memorialise the crime until 1976. Even then the officially erected memorial referred to the murder of innocent Soviet citizens by "the fascist occupiers". It did not say that the victims were mainly Jews or that there had been extensive collaboration. This mealy-mouthed response reflected the trouble which the Soviets had commemorating the mass murder of its Jewish population. It wanted to avoid anything that fortified a distinctive Jewish identity, least of all Jewish nationalism. And it was desperate to cover up the extent to which other national groups had willingly worked with the Germans.
The politics of memory in Ukraine have been no less fraught since the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Western oriented politicians have made an effort to commemorate the slaughter of the Jews as a way of reaching out to the west, the Americans and Germans in particular. During the 1990s a stream of foreign dignitaries were taken to the Babi Yar site, including Presidents Bush and Clinton, Chancellor Kohl, and Pope John Paul II. The first president of independent Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, made a searing speech at a memorial gathering in October 1991 during which he admitted that Ukrainians shared some responsibility for carrying out the atrocity. More recently it has been proposed that the whole site should be fenced off and turned into a memorial complex.
Sadly, Ukrainian politics are a morass of factions and there is a hard core of rightwing nationalists who reject any suggestion of collaboration. They prefer to commemorate the suffering of Ukrainians at the hands of Stalin and his henchmen during the genocidal famine of the early 1930s. Some are keen to remind the public that Jews were prominent in the Soviet apparatus that inflicted this misery. Antisemitism remains at a high level throughout the country and almost every month brings news that Jewish cemeteries or holocaust memorials have been vandalised.
So the decision to give the comfort of international soccer fans priority over the uncomfortable memory of war and genocide is not wholly surprising. All the same, it marks a setback for progressive politicians who have reached out to the Jewish community and understood that reconciliation, based on honesty, is one potential bridge to the west.
It also marks a setback for efforts to inform the wider world about Ukraine's plight under Soviet rule. Coincidentally, a play about the great famine is about to open at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon. Written by a young Ukrainian dramatist, Natal'ia Vorozhbit, The Grain Store is one of the first attempts to introduce a British audience to the story of the Holodomor – the state-inflicted starvation that claimed the lives of millions.
However, if Kiev decides to trample over the memory of Nazi barbarism it will be harder to arouse sympathy for the victims of Stalinist atrocity. Building a hotel at Babi Yar will not only overshadow a place of unimaginable horror, it will cast Ukraine's standing with the west into permanent darkness.
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