Babyn Yar is the site of the largest single Nazi massacre in what was once the Soviet Union.
Over two days in 1941, German forces gunned down some 34,000 Jews in the ravine, which is located near Kyiv’s Dorohozhychi metro station. In the months following the initial mass killing, the Nazi regime and its local collaborators killed at least 100,000 more Jews, Roma people, psychiatric patients, Soviet prisoners of war and Ukrainian nationalists.
How Ukraine memorializes the site shows how society wants to remember these events.
Currently, however, there is no unified memorial. Instead, Babyn Yar features several different monuments — to Soviet citizens and soldiers killed there, to Jews, to Roma, to Ukrainian nationalists, to priests.
But that may change.
A private charitable project, with Ukrainian state support, has long been working to build a museum and memorial at the site of Babyn Yar.
But it is running into trouble.
The project chose Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, known for his scandalous DAU film series, to serve as the memorial’s artistic director. After a heated debate around his ideas for the memorial, Ukrainian cultural activists demanded his dismissal.
“Reputational losses to the memorial as a result of the appointment of Mr. Khrzhanovskiy as artistic director are destroying the results of the past three years and putting the institution on the brink of an international scandal,” they wrote in an open letter published on April 29.
The disagreement has taken what should be a fairly uncontroversial historical memory project and turned it into one of the biggest conflicts in the Ukrainian cultural world at the moment.
Yana Barinova, former executive producer of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, presents a lapidarium of Jewish tombstones at the Babyn Yar reserve in Kyiv on Sept. 27, 2017. Barinova quit the project in November 2019 because she disagreed with the scope of authority given to its artistic director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and his approach to the project. (Yana Barinova / Facebook)
Breakdown
Since the memorial’s inception in 2015, Yana Barinova worked as a coordinator and then executive director on the project. She gave it a name – the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, or BYHMC, and negotiated the area where it will be built with Ukrainian authorities. Finally, Barinova’s team conducted an international competition for the memorial’s architectural design in 2019.
Barinova also brought together leading international experts on the Holocaust to create the memorial’s most important document – the basic historical narrative – as well a collection of policies, missions and values. The goal was to make the center part of the family of Holocaust memorials around the globe like the well-respected ones in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C.
“These memorials are primarily based on research principles,” Barinova told the Kyiv Post. “Any Holocaust museum begins with this.”
But then came a creative disruption. In October, the supervisory board of the center announced that Khrzhanovskiy, the Russian film director, would take over the project an artistic director with overarching authority, including over the research and educational departments, according to Barinova.
“I think that a person who comes there should experience this story emotionally,” Khrzhanovskiy told Novoye Vremya radio about his view of the memorial.
Disagreeing with Khrzhanovskiy’s approach, Barinova and her core team – the executive director, the CEO, some department managers and advisors – decided to quit in November.
“When the scope of authority entrusted to the artistic director was announced, we realized that we wouldn’t be able to perform our functions and guarantee that the project will move in the direction that we previously declared,” Barinova says.
Members of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center supervisory board give a press conference after their meeting on March 19, 2017, in Kyiv. The board includes five Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who are major donors, and nine prominent and respected figures from around the world. (Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center)
‘A more creative stage’
Khrzhanovskiy was invited to the project in March 2019, reportedly by Mikhail Fridman, a Russian oligarch who is one of the founders and main donors of the center. By September, Khrzhanovskiy presented a draft for his concept. It was then that the supervisory board decided to hire him.
“A new, more creative stage begins in making our own original content. We decided that we need people who will focus on exactly that,” Fridman told The Page business media outlet in February.
Besides Fridman, the supervisory board includes other major donors – Fridman’s Russian-Jewish business partner German Khan, Ukrainian-Jewish oligarchs Victor Pinchuk and Pavel Fuks, and Ukrainian boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko. Together, they donated over $100 million for the development of the center.
Fridman’s and Khan’s involvement in the project has long faced criticism because they are co-owners of Alfa Group investment consortium, which is known for its ties to the Kremlin. Ukrainian critics allege that the project is part of the Kremlin’s attempt to rewrite history and also present Babyn Yar as a memorial site for Jews only at the expense of other ethnic communities.
However, Barinova says she never felt pressured by the supervisory board in working on the historical narrative and other parts of the project. Both the old and new management say that Fridman and Khan have real sentiments in commemorating the victims: both are Ukrainian-born Jews, and Khan has 13 relatives who died in Babyn Yar.
Besides five donors, the supervisory board includes nine prominent people like former UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova, former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, former German Vice Chancellor Joschka Fischer and former U.S. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman.
“The people who are financing and supporting the creation of the center have been open to ideas and creativity from the very beginning,” Yaakov Dov Bleich, chief rabbi of Kyiv and Ukraine and member of the supervisory board told the Kyiv Post in an email. “If the BYHMC ends up being just another Holocaust museum, it will defeat its purpose. There must be something special and unique about the center.”
The supervisory board officially hired Khrzhanovskiy in November after Barinova’s team quit. They also hired Max Yakover, a successful business manager who developed Kyiv’s UNIT.City innovation park and VDNH exhibition center, to be the project’s CEO.
The new management got off to a rough start when the public and the local authorities rejected their suggestion to rename Dorohozhychi metro station after Babyn Yar in February.
Because of Khrzhanovskiy’s changes to the concept, they also decided to revise the architectural design that won the competition, organized by the previous management. As a result, the opening of the memorial was postponed from 2021 to 2026.
Meanwhile, more people quit at the end of 2019 when their contracts expired. A few others left in March and April this year and some were fired to “optimize staff” due to the novel coronavirus quarantine, Yakover says.
Like Barinova, many former employees cite Khrzhanovskiy’s ideas and the scope of his authority as reasons for their departure. Barinova and Karel Berkhoff, a historian who led the development of the historical narrative, say that, as artistic director, Khrzhanovskiy was said to have authority over all content, including historical research.
Yakover and Bleich deny that. Yakover says that the two research institutes and research council at the center report to the research deputy, who in turn reports to him, the CEO. He says that center continues to work within the framework of the historical narrative.
“The historical narrative has been set and is not up for change,” Bleich says. “Mr. Khrzhanovskiy was brought in as the ‘artistic director.’ He will not be deciding on the content as far as the historical narrative is concerned.”
Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy speaks at a press conference for one of his films in the DAU project on Feb. 26, 2020 at the Berlinale International Film festival in Berlin, Germany. Khrzhanovskiy was appointed an artistic director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in November 2019 and develops a concept for the memorial amid public concerns. (AFP)
Khrzhanovskiy’s ideas
Khrzhanovskiy’s new concept is not yet public. Natan Sharansky, a Soviet dissident and former head of the Jewish Agency who chairs the supervisory board, told the Kyiv Post that the board will review the concept in June. Khrzhanovskiy says that it will be presented to the public after that.
But there are already some hints from two sources: Khrzhanovskiy’s interviews and the concept draft that he presented to the supervisory board in September. The slideshow for this presentation was leaked to the media last week.
The presentation suggests that visitors to the memorial will “go on a challenging and sometimes shocking emotional journey with ethical choices at its core.” They will “be required to take part in experiments of a moral or ethical nature” chosen based on “the visitor’s personal score.” The notorious Stanford Prison and Milgram Shock experiments are set as examples that may be adopted.
These ideas correspond to what Khrzhanovskiy said in recent interviews.
“A person should come there and gain experience,” Khrzhanovskiy told Novoye Vremya radio on April 27. “This experience should be associated with the person themself. Historical facts in the form of numbers don’t make an emotional impression on a person.”
The presentation suggests using “online registration,” “personalization questionnaires,” “facial recognition” and “psychometric algorithms” to “tailor strong personal experiences” to the visitors. They would encounter holograms of people from the past or their hologram doubles created with deepfake technology. There would be virtual reality zones “placing visitors in the role of victims, collaborators, Nazis and prisoners of war who had to burn corpses, amongst others.”
“Of course we will use the latest technologies because they have come at this moment … including technologies of recreating some events,” Khrzhanovskiy said in the interview.
Some former employees have criticized these ideas. Berkhoff said that he senses that the project has lost its “moral compass.” His contract as chief historian elapsed in January 2020, and he declined the position of adviser.
“I am fearful that the progress that has been made with the center is at risk,” Berkhoff told the Kyiv Post. Khrzhanovskiy’s “plans seem to be in conflict with the standards that exist for developing memorial museums, such as the International Memorial Museums Charter.”
“With these ideas sketched out in the presentation, the core exhibition dangerously approaches the impression of a Holocaust ‘Disney’ rather than a place of remembrance and reflection of an unbelievable drama that happened in Babyn Yar and Eastern Europe,” Dieter Bogner, former head of the project’s core exhibition development group, wrote in a letter to the supervisory board when he left in November.
“The exposition space should not frighten, suppress, frustrate and deprive visitors of their faith in humanity,” Barinova says. “Yes, a person should walk along the edge of the abyss of horror and hopelessness, look into the face of despair, but he or she must not lose to it, must not fall into this void.”
A shot from “DAU. Degeneration,” one of the films from the DAU project filmed in Kharkiv and directed by Ilya Khrzhanovskiy. A Ukrainian children’s neuropsychology expert accused the film crew of inflicting psychological trauma on infant actors. The Kharkiv juvenile prosecution opened an investigation into the allegations. (Courtesy)
DAU history
The Ukrainian public’s distrust of Khrzhanovskiy stems primarily from the controversies surrounding his previous work: the DAU film series. There are fears that he may use some of the methods of DAU in his work on the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
For nearly three years, the mostly amateur actors of DAU were filmed while living and working in an environment historically recreated to resemble a totalitarian Soviet “institute” in Kharkiv. The films are fictional, but most actors were not merely acting, but genuinely experiencing the scenes directed by Khrzhanovskiy.
One of the films in the DAU series received the Best Film prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. At the same time, the project received significant criticism in the French and German press for scenes of unsimulated violence. Many rumors surround the project, with people accusing Khrzhanovskiy of human and labor rights violations, humiliation and sexual harassment during the filming process.
In one case that Khrzhanovskiy does not deny, he hired real Russian neo-nazis to come on set. There, they slaughtered a pig on camera and drew a Star of David on its head. Khrzhanovskiy said he did not direct them to do so, but agreed when they suggested the idea. The scene made it into one of the films.
In another scene from DAU, Soviet scientists perform experiments on infant children who were cast at an orphanage in Kharkiv. After watching the scene, an expert in children’s neuropsychology, Olena Samoylenko, said that the film inflicted real psychological trauma on the babies. Mykola Kuleba, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner on children’s rights, filed a police report and the Kharkiv juvenile prosecution opened an investigation into the “fact of torture, as well as the production and distribution of works promoting a cult of violence.”
Khrzhanovskiy says that the scene with the children was entirely fictional and that the crew had all the necessary permits to film them. Nurses looked after the babies on set, he says, and the babies cried only because the nurses changed their clothes and it’s “natural” for babies to cry.
Khrzhanovskiy has confirmed that he would like to use some of the methods from DAU in his work for the Babyn Yar center – in recreating life in Kyiv before World War II, for example. At the same time, Khrzhanovskiy says that DAU and the center are entirely different projects and should not be associated.
“First of all, because it (Babyn Yar memorial) deals with real events – that’s why it’s not the author’s project like DAU,” he says. “The supervisory board operates the project, and the board decides whether the ideas that I develop will be implemented.”
