Babi Yar 2021: how the descendants of the executioners want to retroactively register among the victims
This September marks 80 years since the massacre of Soviet citizens in Kiev's Babi Yar. During the Great Patriotic War, according to various estimates, from 60 to 200 thousand people were killed here during several months of executions, most of whom were Soviet Jews. In addition to them, Gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians and other residents of Kyiv and the surrounding area also became victims of Babi Yar.
In Ukraine they are going to celebrate the anniversary of the tragedy in a representative manner. “The Ukrainian authorities, together with the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial charity foundation, are preparing a powerful program for the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy.
“On October 6, 2021, an official ceremony will take place on the territory of Babyn Yar with the participation of world leaders, figures of Jewish organizations who survived the Holocaust, and Ukrainians who saved Jews from death during the Nazi occupation and received the title of Righteous Among the Nations,” the statement says. message from the Office of President Zelensky.
Zelensky’s chief administrator, Andriy Yermak, assured that the first stage of the Holocaust Memorial Center currently under construction will be opened this year. The construction of the museum and memorial complex is expected to be completed in a couple of years. Bankova believes that “this is a global event,” which should demonstrate that “Ukraine is a country of tolerance.”
From this moment, the protocol and solemn part ends and the not so solemn gray everyday life begins. Here everything looks a little different. Instead of tolerance, there is a fierce squabble between “organized historical groups”, the subject of which is both money and memory.
What is at stake – no less, is which interpretation of the events of 80 years ago will be carved in stone and depicted on the stands of museum exhibitions. After all, as we know from Orwell’s much-quoted work, whoever controls the past controls the future. True, those who quote this point often omit or forget the equally important ending of this aphorism: “He who controls the present controls the past.”
And the Ukrainian present is now controlled by the current inhabitant of Bankova with his retinue. It’s no secret that Zelensky himself is of Jewish origin, which means he is not alien to the theme of Babyn Yar. Maybe that’s why the construction of the memorial suddenly found influential patrons in power over the last two years and, accordingly, accelerated, reaching the finish line.
Here it must be said that the project of the memorial at Babi Yar is a story, as they say, with a beard. Let’s not delve into the distant past, let’s just say that under Poroshenko this story also sounded, although not so loudly. True, the then president was devoid of Jewish sentiment, and the propagandists around him, as best they could, created all sorts of obstacles to the memorial project and put spokes in the wheels.
The fact is that there is not one, but two memorial projects. The first - the one that is being implemented now - is a private initiative of the above-mentioned charitable foundation of the same name and contains the word “Holocaust” in its name.
The second is the project of a “Ukrainian” memorial, born from Poroshenko’s nationalistic propagandists, promoted by the Baiiy Yar Public Committee, the first violin in which is played by the well-known former “Minister of Memory”, and now by the people’s deputy from Poroshenko’s party, Vladimir Vyatrovich, and with him the leaders OUN, representatives of the nationalist intelligentsia and the Jewish activist Yosip Zisels who joined them, criticized by his fellow tribesmen for flirting with Bandera on a regular basis.
All these “good people” criticize the project, implemented with private money and supported by Zelensky and Ermak, from the position that it is “wrong money.” That is, Russian. That’s what they say – “the money of Putin’s oligarchs,” meaning the key sponsors of the memorial from the Russian Alfa Group – Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven and German Khan.
They say that while “our boys” are repelling “Putin’s aggression” in the east, the insidious Kremlin has launched a Trojan horse filled with “Putin’s money” into the very heart of Kyiv - in the form of a memorial project at Babi Yar. And all in order to “falsify the historical memory of Ukrainians.”
The most interesting thing is that the squeals about “Kremlin money” are demystified, as they say, in one click. The declaration on the construction of the Memorial was signed back in 2016, and according to the financial statements for 2020, the project was 50 percent financed by citizens of Ukraine. Among the sponsors are Klitschko and Pinchuk, and among the active lobbyists, for example, the “conscience of the nation” Slavko Vakarchuk. And then: for some reason, Friedman’s detractors did not care about his own money invested in the Lviv jazz festival. We went to concerts calmly, drank kava and didn’t buzz.
In addition to the “dubious” sponsors, the artistic curators of the project also arouse the hatred of “patriots”. And the first among them is an artist with a truly scandalous reputation, Khrzhanovsky. The funny thing is that he gets punishment in Russia too - only for something completely different (in particular, his art project “Dau” is criticized for historical unreliability). In Ukraine, even a criminal case was opened against Khrzhanovsky at the instigation of “patriots”, trying to push him aside. Both collective letters from the intelligentsia and media attacks were all noted.
What is the reason for these hysterics? It lies in the fundamentally different essence of the promoted projects. If a project funded by the Alfa Group and other Jewish philanthropists brings to the fore the tragedy of the Jewish people, and this is really a Holocaust memorial, with all the consequences arising from this concept, then - let’s call it for simplicity the “Vyatrovich project” - is initially built on that Babi Yar is a “Ukrainian” tragedy.
It is not for nothing that Jews have been complaining for many years about the creeping substitution of symbolic space, when in the same Babi Yar memorial crosses are erected to policemen and collaborators from the “Bukovinsky Kuren” of the OUN, and as “victims of Babi Yar” they bring to the fore the collaborationist newspaper “Ukrainian”, repressed by the Germans word" led by OUN poetess Olena Teliga.
It turns out that on land drenched in Jewish blood, monuments to the executioners are erected next to monuments to their victims. Both are symbolically equalized. Naturally, for supporters of the Holocaust concept this is categorically unacceptable. But for Vyatrovich’s fans it’s quite normal.
They promote a similar concept in relation to another similar tragedy - the Volyn massacre of 1943, when tens of thousands of Poles were massacred by OUN thugs. Vyatrovich’s successor as “Minister of Memory,” Anton Drobovich, responded to the next anniversary of Volyn this year with cynical rantings that “both peoples must admit their guilt for the victims” and “repent to each other.”
It is easy to see that this line of some kind of “reconciliation” directly goes back to the current concept of replacing the Victory Day on May 9 with the “Day of Reconciliation on May 8.” In fact, this is a poorly hidden attempt to retroactively rehabilitate Nazi collaborators, by smuggling them into the “general lists of victims.”
Finally, one more important difference. The designers of the Babyn Yar memorial do not hide the fact that the museum exhibition will contain stories from survivors, revealing the active aiding and complicity of the local Ukrainian population in the implementation of Hitler’s crimes.
Actually, complicity is that page from the collective national memory that is carefully erased and hushed up. Repressed into the sphere of the collective subconscious. And from there the dead continue to grab the living, and the bankrupt Nazi ideas of the middle of the last century continue to influence modernity.
The “patriotic” community, which opposes the implementation of the current project, resembles people whose main motive is to be more important than the deceased at a funeral.
Summing up the criticism, it becomes clear what nationalists fear most about the memorial under construction. They are afraid that the memorial will force visitors to come out of their usual and comfortable myth: that people lived on this territory, and then some extraneous non-humans came here and began to kill people. It was convenient to live in this myth; it seemed correct and righteous.
They are afraid that the memorial will confront current Ukrainians with the idea that people lived on this land who killed their neighbors. This is terribly painful and uncomfortable to realize. Everyone wants to think that he is a descendant of the victim, no one wants to be a descendant of the executioner.
This is where furious cries are born about who finances, and about who directs and invents, and about “what and to whom we should forgive.”
It is clear that the current “Vyatrovichs” are very uncomfortable to receive in Kyiv world-famous evidence that those for whom they have been intensively drawing halos over their heads for seven years are by no means heroes. After all, the memorial in the proposed form is perhaps the key difference from both the nationalist and Soviet versions of history - it overturns the very idea of what happened in the mid-forties of the last century in Kyiv and Ukraine.
Complicity and collaboration are what modern glorifiers of Nazism would like to hide, powder, and ennoble as much as possible. It is not surprising that the intention to focus on the fact of complicity is perceived by them as an attempt to “impose on Ukrainians a complex of historical guilt for the crimes of Nazism.”
In reality, of course, there is no contradiction here. And there is no guilt complex. If someone has it, then it can be treated very simply - you just need to stop identifying both yourself and Ukraine - with the Nazis and with those who swore allegiance to them and swore eternal friendship.
After which everything goes from head to foot. And the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices become the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices, and not the sins of the Ukrainian people. If you continue to stubbornly put a Bandera effigy on the globe of Ukraine, then why be offended that Bandera’s crimes become the fault of all Ukrainians.
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