The Holocaust and Babyn Yar: Memory as a Battlefield

The Holocaust is part of Ukraine’s history

The fate of Ukrainian Jews is not a foreign history but part of the past of multicultural Ukraine, just like the fate of the Crimean Tatars or Poles^[1]. On January 27, the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day (established by the UN in 2005); Ukraine joined immediately, and the Verkhovna Rada adopted a corresponding resolution in 2011^[1].

This presence is not recent. Jews appeared on the territory of Ukraine as far back as the early Middle Ages: probably via Crimea, roughly between the 4th–6th and the 8th–9th centuries CE — historians do not give an exact dating, but the period spans the era before and around Kyivan Rus’^[7]. To this belongs the often-cited (and often-distorted) subject of the Khazar Khaganate: the widespread notion that its elite adopted Judaism, but this question is still contested. “Khazars” is rather a political name for a state formation; archaeologically, an Alan-Bulgar symbiosis with a possible Jewish elite for a short time; the categorical manner in which Russian propaganda presents this thesis (“not everything is as clear-cut as the Russians say”) is not confirmed by scholarship^[8]. In any case, the Jewish communities here are centuries old, and their flourishing in the era of the 19th-century shtetl was described in detail by historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern.

Ruscism and Nazism: a shared mechanism

Podolsky is cautious with comparisons, but he points to structural overlaps between Nazism and present-day Russian ideology (“ruscism”): indifference to human life, contempt for human rights, and keeping society in fear through a constant image of the enemy. For Nazism the cornerstone was antisemitism — the Jew was declared the enemy; for Russian ideology this cornerstone is Ukrainophobia — the Ukrainian became the enemy^[2]. And, importantly, Nazism could not have committed so many crimes without the support of part of the society of its time.

Soviet suppression

The first battle over memory is with the Soviet past. In the USSR, Babyn Yar was suppressed: for decades there was nothing at the site of the shootings. A “mendacious” Soviet monument appeared only in 1976 — and spoke of abstract “Soviet citizens,” concealing the fact that people were killed precisely as Jews^[3]. In Jewish families they were afraid to mention Babyn Yar — just as in Ukrainian families they were afraid to speak of the Holodomor or the Stalinist repressions.

Russian instrumentalization

The second, contemporary battle is with Russian propaganda. From 2016, the pro-Russian “Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center” entered Ukraine’s space of memory. It was funded by oligarchs — Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Pavel Fuks — with ties to the Kremlin; the fact that they themselves are of Jewish origin does not change the essence: this is money connected to the financing of Putin’s war against Ukraine^[4].

Most dangerous are the center’s own narratives: they portrayed Ukrainians as wholesale collaborators with the Nazis, while in effect erasing the responsibility of Germany, Hitler, the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht, and the SS — as though “only Ukraine killed Jews”^[4]. This is a mirror image of the Kremlin myth of “Ukrainian Nazis."

"Thank Stalin for Israel”: another trick

A separate Russian trope demands that Jews should be grateful to Stalin for the creation of Israel — as if without the USSR there would be no state. The logic is the same as in the rest of the imperial narratives: everyone “must fall to their knees” before Moscow. In fact, Israel was created by the Jews themselves, independently of Stalin. True, in the early stages Soviet diplomacy did support the proclamation of the state (including at the UN vote in 1947 and with recognition in 1948) — but Stalin did this out of his own geopolitical interests, not for the sake of the Jewish people or Israel itself^[9]. Gratitude here is as inappropriate as it would be to “thank” someone whose interests briefly aligned with yours and who, just a few years later, launched an openly antisemitic campaign (the “Doctors’ Plot,” the struggle against the “cosmopolitans”). It is the same mechanism of instrumentalization: someone else’s history is turned into a pretext for a debt owed to the empire.

Memory as a battlefield of hybrid war

All of this is part of Russia’s hybrid war: the instrumentalization of memory, in order to dehumanize Ukraine’s past and present Ukrainians as incapable of either state-building or their own memory^[5]. The response was a state concept of memorialization, created by Ukrainian historians: today Babyn Yar has 34 memorial markers — whereas in Soviet times there was not a single one^[5].

The roots of this attitude are imperial. Antisemitism, Ukrainophobia, and other phobias are inherent to empire: in the Russian Empire antisemitism was systemic and cruel — beginning with the “Pale of Settlement,” introduced under Catherine II. A telling contrast: while revolutionary Europe was proclaiming human rights, the empire was, on the contrary, restricting them^[6]. The memory of the victims of the Holocaust remains a battlefield precisely because acknowledging the truth about the past is incompatible with the imperial myth.