Today we are delighted to begin a new regular feature – Authentic Histories – columns and short feature stories, on historical themes by one of Ukraine’s best known and prolific historians of the modern period – Yuri Shapoval.
He is a Doctor of Sciences in History (since 1994), Professor (since 2000) of History at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Head (since 1998) of the Center for Historical Political Studies. As an author, radio and TV broadcaster and documentary film-maker he has done much to recover Ukraine’s history and make it better known.
Anatoly Kuznetsov’s belated return to Kyiv – Street renamed after Babi Yar “dissident” documentalist
In the summer of 1969, a man with a ticket to London boarded a Soviet Aeroflot plane at a Moscow airport. At first glance, he looked the same as all the other passengers. Yet, he was someone unusual indeed. The man’s body was secretly wrapped with photographic film depicting a text.
The man was Anatoly Kuznetsov, a famous writer. He was not traveling as a tourist. He had officially been sent on a mission to write a novel about the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. London was the venue of that congress in 1903. The centennial of Bolshevik leader Lenin’s birthday was looming (its anniversary was to be celebrated in 1970) and the writing of a novel about the assembly at which Bolshevism was born seemed appropriate to that party’s “founding fathers.”
Prior to the trip, Soviet secret service agents took precautions: Kuznetsov was offered to cooperate with the KGB as a condition for his departure. The writer did not hesitate to accept the offer. Was it surprising? It wasn’t because Kuznetsov had already decided not to return.
And so it happened. Kuznetsov sought political asylum. His interview for an English newspaper was published shortly afterward. Kuznetsov spoke in detail about how he had been recruited and blackmailed.
So the West received another Soviet defector. The photographic film previously mentioned made him special, as the full text of the novel Babi Yar was on that film. Shortly thereafter, in 1970, the novel was published by the New York Russian publishing house Posev in the way the writer himself wanted to see it.
Way back at school, in 1966, I read the Soviet version of the novel by Kuznetsov in the Yunost magazine, which was extremely popular in the USSR. It said at the end of the magazine that its circulation at that time was 2 million copies. Then the same work by Kuznetsov was published by the Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”) publishing house with a circulation of 150,000, and they began to translate and publish the book abroad. But it became clear after the writer’s escape that the text had been carefully mutilated by communist censors.
Kuznetsov was born in Kyiv on Aug. 18, 1929, and raised in Kurenivka, a Kyiv neighborhood, as he himself wrote: “a stone’s throw from a vast ravine whose name was once known to locals only – Babyn Yar [the Ukrainian spelling of Babi Yar].” Kuznetsov’s father was Russian and his mother was Ukrainian. It was decided that “Russian” would be mentioned as the nationality in his passport.
As a boy, Kuznetsov had to survive the Nazi occupation of Kyiv [it lasted from September 19, 1941 through November 6, 1943], and he witnessed what had been happening in Babyn Yar, that is, the massacre of members of the Jewish community in Kyiv, as well as representatives of other nationalities – Russians, Ukrainians, the Romani people.
Kuznetsov recalled:
“The ravine was enormous, you might even say majestic: deep and wide, like a mountain gorge. If you stood on one side of it and shouted, you would scarcely be heard on the other. It is situated between three districts of Kyiv (Lukyanivka, Kurenivka, and Syrets), being surrounded by cemeteries, woods, and allotments. Down at the bottom ran a little stream with clear water.“
And once Kuznetsov found a piece of a charred human bone in that " little stream with clear water," then a charred layer was discovered from which unknown boys "extracted" half-fused gold rings, earrings, gold teeth crowns. Kuznetsov then picked up a piece of ash and took it with him to keep. He recalled: "It contains the ashes of many people, all mixed up together – a sort of international mixture. It was then I decided that I must write it all down, from the very beginning, just as it really happened, leaving nothing out and making nothing up."
At the age of 14, he began to write down everything he had seen and heard about Babyn Yar in a thick, homemade notebook. One day his mother found that notebook and read what was written. She cried and advised that the notes be kept for writing a book someday. Then the boy grew up, became a writer, and wrote a book.
Prior to that, in the postwar period, he studied ballet, played in the drama theater, tried to be a painter, a musician. He worked as a carpenter, a bridge builder, a concrete worker, built the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station on the Dnipro, and also worked at the Irkutsk and Bratsk hydroelectric power stations in Siberia, the then-Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Eventually, he began studying to "become a writer." Kuznetsov entered the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, graduated from it in 1960. He decided not to return to Kyiv, where his mother was living. An attempt to stay in Moscow failed. The party demanded that some new blood be sent out to provincial organizations for writers, and Kuznetsov ended up facing a choice of several cities. So, he went to Tula together with his pregnant wife.
In the 1960s, he was considered to be one of the brightest writers, one of the founders of the so-called confessional prose. His short story Supernumerary Actor, published by Novy Mir [a Russian-language Soviet monthly literary magazine] in 1968, was compared to Ukrainian-born author Nikolai Gogol [Ukr., Mykola Hohol – ed.] and his short story published in 1842 The Overcoat and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Poor Folk [an epistolary novel published in 1846]. His books were published with huge circulation, translated into many languages; they were staged as plays and shot as movies.
However, the "document in the form of a novel," as he called it, that is Babi Yar, made him really famous. Kuznetsov himself wrote in the preface: "Everything in this book is true. When I recounted episodes of this story to different people, they all said I had to write the book. The word 'document' in the subtitle of this novel means that I have provided only actual facts and documents without the slightest literary conjecture as to how things could or must have happened."
Kuznetsov's letters to the Israeli journalist, writer and translator Shlomo Even-Shoshan are still available. In one of them, dated May 17, 1965, one can read how the writer assessed the tragedy of Babyn Yar in general: "Until September 29, 1941, Jews were being slowly killed in camps, with a created illusion of the rule of law. Treblinka, Auschwitz, etc. happened later. They used a pattern from Babyn Yar. I hope you know how it was? They ordered all Jews in the city to come with their belongings and valuables to the area of a freight railway terminal, then surrounded them and started shooting. Many Russians, Ukrainians and others who accompanied relatives and friends to the "terminal" died in that crowd; children were not killed, but buried alive; the wounded were left to die. The ground above the ditches was moving. Then, Russians, Ukrainians, Romani people, people of any nationalities had been shot dead in Babyn Yar for two years. The theory that Babyn Yar is the grave of only people of Jewish nationality is wrong, and [Soviet and Russian writer and poet Yevgeny] Yevtushenko reflected only one aspect of Babyn Yar in his poem. This is an international grave. No one will ever count which and how many nationalities were buried there, because 90% of the corpses were burned, and the ashes were mostly scattered in the ravines and fields."
Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who was one of Kuznetsov's friends and studied at the same institute, wrote a poem titled: No Monument Stands over Babi Yar. For this, the Soviet regime virtually labeled Yevtushenko a "Zionist" at the time. Even more surprising is the fact that it was decided that the censored version of Kuznetsov's novel should be published as a refutation of the already mentioned poem by Yevtushenko. Kuznetsov, of course, did not write any "refutation." And he didn't even think about it. Do you know how it all ended? The book Babi Yar was recognized as "pro-Jewish" and it was neither reprinted nor available in libraries.
"Based on my own experience and others', and looking back on the many thoughts, explorations, worries, and calculations, this is my word to you: Woe betide him who overlooks politics. I never said I loved it. I hate and despise it. I'm not pleading with you to love or respect it. I'm only asking you never to overlook it." These are the words of Anatoly Kuznetsov. Politics interfered in his life. His defection abroad for political reasons was the main reason for his non-return, especially in the current Russian literary space. Unfortunately, Kuznetsov is not often mentioned in modern Ukraine.
All the more unexpected and pleasant to me was the news that one of the streets in Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky district was renamed in honor of Anatoly Kuznetsov in December 2021. That street is located in Kurenivka. That is, where, as I have already said, his most famous work started – the novel Babi Yar.
Yuri Shapoval, Professor, Doctor of Sciences in History
