Three Dates In September
- Leonid Nevzlin
- 3.10.2026, 11:11
Courage under an authoritarian regime is far from always appearing as a noble gesture.
Eighty-five years ago, on September 29 and 30, 1941, the Nazis shot 33,771 Jews in Babi Yar. We know the exact number because the murderers themselves kept track of it.
To mark this anniversary, the Director General of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Chaim Ben-Yaakov published a column in the British newspaper The Telegraph, which I highly recommend reading. For me, it is one of the most insightful pieces on the politics of memory in recent times.
Ben-Yaakov’s main point is that to distort history, one does not necessarily have to deny it. The Soviet authorities did not hide the fact that a massacre took place at Babi Yar. They simply redefined the victims. The Jews of Kyiv became “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Technically, this was true. But the very reason these people were killed had disappeared from the wording.
The monument, unveiled at Babi Yar in 1976, was dedicated to Soviet citizens, prisoners of war, soldiers, and officers. Jews were not mentioned in the inscription. The menorah appeared there only on September 29, 1991, when the Soviet Union was already in its final months. It took half a century for the victims to have their names restored.
September brought together three significant dates. In addition to the anniversary of the massacre, September 19 marked the 65th anniversary of the publication of the poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko “Babi Yar” in Literaturnaya Gazeta, and September 25 marked the 120th anniversary of the birth of Dmitri Shostakovich, who used these verses as the basis for his Thirteenth Symphony. First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev criticized Yevtushenko for singling out the Jewish victims. The poet added lines about Russians and Ukrainians lying alongside the Jews. Shostakovich initially resisted, but ultimately agreed to replace eight lines for subsequent performances.
Ben-Yaakov does not portray them as saints. Both lived within the system and made compromises with it. But they did not abandon what mattered most: Yevtushenko did not renounce “Babi Yar,” and Shostakovich did not remove it from the symphony. Courage under an authoritarian regime does not always look like a noble gesture. Sometimes it is the ability to preserve enough truth for it to withstand the pressure.
Ben-Yaakov warns: the Soviet struggle surrounding Babi Yar is by no means a thing of the past. The vocabulary has changed, but the temptation remains the same. The victims’ identities are acknowledged when it is politically convenient, and dissolved into “universal” language when it is not. Anyone who has observed how the world spoke about October 7 will recognize this tactic.
The author’s conclusion is simple: the equality of victims does not require their anonymity. We must start with who was killed and why. It sounds obvious. But 85 years after Babi Yar, as it turns out, we still have to remind people of this.
Leonid Nevzlin, “Telegram”
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