Appeal to build headstone for the grave of author behind searing Babyn Yar account

Mr Bright’s appeal for £2,000 has, at the time of publication, already reached £1,143 in pledges.
Kuznetsov lies two plots away from the actor Sir Ralph Richardson and just across from the artist Patrick Caulfield.

Pilgrims to the monument to Karl Marx walk past the author’s anonymous plot every day without realising they are passing the last resting place of this important witness to the horrific human cost of totalitarian ideology.

Babyn Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel was published in 1966, three years before Kuznetsov defected to the UK after finally losing faith in the Soviet Union following its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

He recorded how posters were put up by the Nazis throughout the city, occupied only days earlier, ordering “all the Jews of Kiev and surroundings” to assemble at 8am the following day at Babyn Yar.

They were ordered to bring documents, money, valuables and warm clothing. The posters warned that all Jews failing to comply with the order would be shot. Many of the Jews, according to Kuznetsov, thought they were to be evacuated to a zone away from the front.

Kuznetsov described how the following morning. German troops checked the Jews’ documents, and helped by Ukrainian policemen, forced them to undress and march into the ravine.

There, Kuznetsov reported, machine guns mowed them down. Most, he wrote, were shot through the back.

He told of a Jewish woman who saved herself by crawling out during the night and of soldiers ordering the shooting of Ukrainians who had got into the ravine by mistake, in case they spread word about what had happened at Babyn Yar.

Throughout the Soviet era, leaders followed a policy of speaking of Nazi terror against Russians and Ukrainians without mentioning Jews. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia mentions only that, at Babyn Yar, the Nazis shot “195,000 peaceful citizens”.

It is believed the Nazis killed 33,771 Jews at the ravine and, during the course of the occupation, it is estimated that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian Jews were murdered, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev objected strenuously when Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote his poem Babi Yar, in which he criticised the absence of a monument at the site for the murdered Jews. Yevtushenko had to alter part of his poem to satisfy Khrushchev’s denial that Jews were the only victims of the massacre.

Luke Harding, author of several books on Russia, has described Kuznetsov’s book as “a brilliant documentary novel” and “a vivid, terrible and authentic account”.