Many, in fear of their lives, complied. They gathered as they were told and were herded towards and lined up next to the large Babi Yar ravine. There, they were swiftly and mercilessly shot, their bodies thrown into the cold depths below. According to direct reports sent to Berlin by leaders of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) 33,771 Jewish people were slaughtered in the last two days of September 1941 (Arad, et al. 1). The massacre was “one of the largest mass killings at a single location in WWII” (U.S. Holocaust Museum). In late 1943, the Soviet Union regained control of the city. As time passed, however, it became clear that they had no interest in remembering the lost souls at Babi Yar, and that the Jewish victims of the massacre would not be memorialized. “In fact, the Soviet government had intended to fill in the ravine . . . and [build] a sports stadium on top of it” (Bergman 479); a project that, thankfully, never came to fruition. The reasons for this disregard were ideological. The ruling Communist Party was strictly secular in outlook and, to varying degrees at different times in the Soviet era, pushed against established religion. Some party ideologues insisted that religious identity had no place in the Soviet Union. They envisioned an idealized Soviet as an exemplary citizen, a true socialist, an unwavering supporter of the United Soviet Socialist Republics (a confederation of 15 national republics, one of which was Ukraine). According to such party ideologues, identifiers such as religion or ethnicity, or any form of anti-Soviet nationalism, were incompatible with this singular devotion. As a result, while post-War propaganda mourned the millions of Soviets who had died in the Nazi occupation and in defense of the USSR, the massacre at Babi Yar was not memorialized even though it occurred on Soviet soil. To ideologues, those who were pushed into the ravine did not die as Soviets, but as Jews. In addition, because many Soviet citizens understood that their wellbeing and safety depended on showing absolute loyalty to the party, Jewish people and allies of the Jewish community learned to keep their beliefs silent for fear of attracting scrutiny. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem entitled "Babi Yar" independent of Shostakovich. Shostakovich read the poem a year later and, by many accounts (Wilson 355) began immediately to set it to music, intending for it to be a standalone choral piece. He also reached out to the poet. In a 2006 interview conducted by Lewis Owens at Tulsa University, Yevtushenko recounted: Someone called my wife, and full of indignation she threw the phone down and exclaimed that some hooligans are calling and named themselves Shostakovich. Immediately after a second call, she became pale and gave me the phone whispering, ‘It seems to be it is him.’ I then talked with Shostakovich, who was an idol of my childhood.3 74
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