▲ 128 points
back
61 comments
According to wikipedia:
When Yevtushenko first visited Babi Yar he was shocked to find no memorial. Instead he saw a garbage dump, right on top of thousands of dead bodies, with trucks coming in to dump more garbage.
He was so moved by the sight that he wrote the poem in a couple of hours in his hotel room.
To anyone reading the original or a translation, also recommend listening to the poem performed by the author: https://youtu.be/OlWWhLVDd80
The context to this is that Yevtushenko was a Soviet poet who wrote a poem named Babi Yar in the 1960s that exposed what was essentially an official policy of Holocaust denial on the part of the government at the time.
The story of how the poem was published is also interesting. When Yevtushenko brought the poem to the editor of the magazine in which it was to be published, the editor asked to make a call to his wife before making the decision. The editor realized that publishing this poem would be the end of his career, and he wanted to get his wife's blessing. Ultimately they decided to go ahead, and the editor was fired from his job on the next day.
Soviet Union never denied holocaust.
No, but it did have a tendency of omitting/censoring[1] the fact that it was primarily directed at Jews and Romani, as highlighted by Yevtushenko in his poem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar_memorials#Commemorati...
The USSR was profoundly multinational, and many of the Republics - most notably Russia itself - were, in turn, fractally multiethnic, consisting of many semi-autonomous ethno-national regions (this is why it was called the Russian Soviet _Federative_ Socialist Republic, and the Russian Federation today).
On top of the already complex ideological balancing act involved in managing so many distinctive national and ethnic identities, particularly along the periphery, there was the strong official Marxist internationalism, the idea of friendship among the proletariat of all nations, and of the Soviet Union as a superlative embodiment of this, etc.
With such ideological/rhetorical objectives in mind, whatever you may think of them, it is easy to see why it would be a problem to give any particular people a sense of preeminent victimhood or confer unto them some special recognition. It can lead to enhanced claims for special status or compensation from those people, as well as animate the grievances of other ethnicities who were the victims of Stalinist policies such as forced mass resettlement, or who lost disproportionate numbers in the war, or succumbed to famines and collectivisation of agriculture, etc. Besides that, the USSR lost an estimated 27 million soldiers and civilians fighting the Germans--people of all sorts of ethnicities, but of course to no small extent Russian-Slavic. A self-interested government would not wish to antagonise veterans or grieving families by creating the perception that the mantle of victimhood was being somehow disproportionately alloted to a particular group.
So, there was generally a political reluctance to cast any particular spotlight on the distinctive plight of Jews in WWII. Doubtless, some amount of inertial anti-Semitism and a suspicious view of Jews played a role too.
It is possible to recognise without conferring a sense of preeminent victimhood, and doing so may even have benefits for internationalism; but I do not wish to argue this point. The response above is just an elaboration on the parent's simplistic claim.
From the same Wikipedia page: "An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976." Yevtushenko starts with an incredulous observation that there is no memorial at all, as of 1961. Your comment hints at a possible reason: it may be difficult to commemorate this specific site if one is unwilling to mention the Jews. It is imaginable that had a memorial existed--in any form--the poem may not have been written, but its lack had caused the poet to search for reasons.
Not some amount, a very large amount of anti-Semitism and discrimination against other non ethnically Russian people too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Under_the_Soviet...
You seem like a Soviet apologist
> a tendency of omitting/censoring[1] the fact that it was primarily directed at Jews and Romani
Same in the GDR by the way. Memorials in concentration camps often highlight anti-fascist fighters who died there - no mention of Jews, Roma or Homosexuals.
What are talking about? Entire concentration camps are preserved as memorials to their prisoners with museums and tons of memorabilia. Of course there would also be memorials to heroic Soviet liberators. Let's also not forget how many Soviet citizens were in the camps.
The reason why East Germany was doing this is the same why the Soviet Union was. The Babi Yar massacre was carried out with the enthusiastic help of the local population. After the war, the Soviet authorities felt that it was best to let bygones be bygones, especially since the sentiments that led to the massacre remained wide spread. In fact, persecution of homosexuals is practiced by the Russian government to this day.
Soviet Union was an international country inhabited by soviet people. The policy was to not segregate by ethnicity as much as possible. Of course there was some residual antisemitism but Babi Yar was presented as a tragedy for soviet people in general not for any specific ethnicity. The spin on the story to specify that it were the jews who were shot segregates jews from the rest of soviet people. This would be an approach of a racist.
And yet, passports said "Ethnicity: Jew". "Ukrainian". "Georgian". For a country inhabited by Soviet people, it had a surprising lack of people identified as simply Soviet in their documents; hard to have it both ways.
Technically, yes. But they severely downplayed it to an extent that was hardly any better than outright denial.
Hence, the Babi Yar "garbage dump".
I know this sounds naive and stupid and maybe even glib, but I just don't understand how and why something like this could happen.
How could anyone be complicit in the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in a single day, not even just in a moral sense but even in a physical sense. How does the body not shut down when confronted with the horror of such a thing?
If someone was shot in the head as I watched, even if I knew there was zero danger of being shot myself, I know that my body would react with pure revulsion and I would find it hard to stand up, much less take part. It seems it would just be an evolved response, something intrinsic.
But these men just slaughtered thousands of people like pigs - how? Why?
That's the most horrible thing we learned during the 20th century.
That kind of atrocities haven't been perpetrated by 'monsters', 'psychopath' or however we could depict the authors to remove their humanity. They have been done by 'us', normal human, people who thought of themselves as good persons and thought they were fighting for a good cause and doing the right thing.
They way you do it is little by little. You first makes the person feel entitled, you give him reasons to hate the 'enemy', you remove accountability of the executant by using a strict hierarchy and by engineering the killing process. At one point it becomes 'normal' and 'logic' to do what you do.
Thats a great way of describing the process of creating an enemy, the question is what you do with that enemy. Natzy Germany took it to the extreme of total extermination. I can't help but notice how this is still a very effective tactic that governments, in particular in the west, continue to use to advance its military agenda - we just haven't got to the point of were we see another full blown extermination in progress. However, and the scariest part of this is that all the machinery to achieve that is in place and has only improved. The media (willingly or unwillingly) is very effective at painting an enemy, dehumanizing him and eventually justifying military action. Can this be changed, is there a way of doing the right thing, without abusing it?
The banality of evil.
Almost everyone would react the way you describe-- the first time. But people are resilient. Expose them to enough atrocity, and if they survive, the horror of it will fade until it becomes a prosaic fact of life. We see it in soldiers. We see it in EMTs.
The coping mechanisms are not perfect. What we now call PTSD has and will continue to destroy lives long after the fighting is over. But they do allow for continued functioning in the field. For better or for worse.
In fact, it was rather draining. The Einsatzgruppen - SS task forces that manually machine-gunned people (mostly Jews) during the invasion of the Soviet Union, including at Babi Yar - were disbanded fairly early in the war because of mental health problems among the staff. One of the main motivations of the characteristically "industrial" methods of the later Holocaust - first gassing trucks, then gas chambers and starvation - was to reduce the exposure of SS personnel to the act of killing, even when they were aware of and enthusiastic about their mission.
Source: "The Third Reich At War", by Richard J. Evans.
The key, as it has always been through the centuries, is to not think of whoever you're killing as "people". Yes, they slaughtered thousands of people like pigs, because they didn't view them very differently from pigs.
Turns out, in addition to our evolved horror of killing someone like ourselves we also have an evolved ability to dehumanize the other to the point where the "someone like ourselves" label no longer applies. Came in pretty handy, evolutionarily speaking, when two packs of monkeys ended up in close proximity, with insufficient food.
Different people react differently. The first dead I saw was a women, falling to her death from the 9th floor. I was 3 at the time and there was no revulsion, just curiosity I guess. Maybe just because I didn't have enough of understanding of 'death' at that time.
I've seen people die (or dead already) many times since then and... It doesn't really make you sick. The unpleasant feeling is still there, yes, but it's more about disgust than anything else.
Methamphetamine
It never occured to me that Yevtushenko is known in the West. Why it's even the case?
Many of us are interested in foreign affairs?
Though less famous than Babi Yar, I would suggest this poem as a more general read, applicable to scenarios including but beyond wartime atrocities: https://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/yevgeny-yevtushenko/li...
Do you happen to have a link to the original? I tried some searching based on back-translation attempts, but coming up empty so far...
I once hung out with Professor Yevtuschenko at a LazerQuest in Tulsa, OK. Cool guy, accent a little like Count Chocula, knowledge of poetry and European politics second to none.
>But his fame was secured by the publication in 1961 of what must be the poem of the 1960s, Babi Yar. It derived from his visit to a ravine near Kiev where the Nazis had perpetrated a massacre 20 years before.
I guess a poem about the Katyn Woods would have been a step to far.
Why put that on him, rather than Adam Zagajewski or Czesław Miłosz or Wisława Szymborska? I'd rather see more commentary on the incident from Polish artists (and less such commentary from deranged paranoid lunatics who somehow win power despite being clearly insane).
>Why put that on him, rather than Adam Zagajewski or Czesław Miłosz or Wisława Szymborska?
Because by 1961 the Nazis had been destroyed, so it was very much beating a dead horse, and because his country was the one that perpetrated the massacre in Poland and never owned up to it.
See the comment upthread about de facto Holocaust denial in the Soviet Union. This was an act of moral courage that Yevtushenko is justly lauded for.
This is not correct though. Holocaust was ignored or silenced due to ideology, not denied.
Not trying to say this is somehow better, but this just different. In other words Yevtushenko wasn't trying to bring to reason, but rather make sure people won't forget.
I don't think you can reproach anyone for not being a hero, and especially for not "owning up" to crimes they never committed. That said, I just listened to that poem and it appears to be a stab at Russian antisemitism much more than at Nazis. I believe by the 60s antisemitism was already an unofficial government policy in the USSR, so he's in no way beating an officially designated dead horse. Pretty sure publicly mentioning Katyn at that time and place would have been suicidal.
Katyń was a political massacre of the Polish officer corps by the Soviet Union. Babi Yar was part of a genocidal campaign of extirpation against the Jews.
Katyń was a horrible crime. But you can't, and should not, compare the two.
Of course they're comparable. When you deliberately kill that many people the reasons are really beside the point.
NB: You're arguing your point against a native of Poland.
NB: It doesn't matter.
[Redacted]
I would have deleted this earlier when someone else posted a better clarification than mine, but I couldn't because it had been replied to. And now I am being smeared by someone apparently incapable of granting me an assumption of good faith.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14019182 and marked it off-topic.
> I mistook this as criticism, as a cryptic statement that this man should not be mourned.
On the contrary, I don't think any kind of commentary could make the impact of those links less or worse, if you do read them be prepared to be moved in a way that you had not planned on for Sunday evening and that will likely be with you for the rest of the week (or your life, depending on how such things impact you).
The links are here for context, not as criticism or commentary, and they're in the order that I intended them to be, which was no accident.
Redacted
FTLOG would you mind? You're putting words in my mouth and thoughts in the heads of some imaginary others to justify your own interpretation. I don't think this is the time and place to discuss whether or not I know the meaning of the words 'on the contrary'. Think of this as a funeral and you as someone that loudly disses the order in which someone places their flowers at the headstone. Please stop.
FWIW, I did not read Mz's comment as being critical of you.
If anything it was a confession that she misinterpreted your comment.