Babi Yar

"For 25 years after the war, the Soviet Union barely acknowledged Babi Yar. No memorial marked the site. In 1961, in protest against plans to build a sports stadium on the site, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, then a young Soviet poet, wrote a moving poem, Baby Yar, which begins

No gravestone stands on Baby Yar;
Only coarse earth heaped roughly on the gash:
Such dread comes over me.

A year later the poem was set to music by Dmitry Shostakovich as part of his choral 13th Symphony, first performed in Moscow in December 1962. Both Yevtushenko and Shostakovich were reprimanded for their “cosmopolitanism” by the Soviet authorities, who refused to acknowledge the special Jewish significance of a site where other Soviets had been killed.

A small obelisk was constructed at Babi Yar in 1966. In 1974 a 50-foot (15-metre) memorial statue was finally erected. Identification of the victims was vague; the word Jew was not used. Not until 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacres, was the identity of the victims recorded on the monument by the newly independent Ukrainian government."