Soviet Union: Postscript to Babi Yar

Everything screams in silence.

—Evgeny Evtushenko, Babi Yar

In 36 bloody hours at Babi Yar, a deep ravine outside Kiev, Hitler’s special commandos 28 years ago last week coldly machine-gunned 34,000 Jews. The massacre has become a symbol not only of Nazi persecution but also of the status of the Soviet Union’s 3,000,000 Jews, who are discriminated against in most areas of Soviet life. Soviet his tories all but ignore the tragedy. Only a simple stone marks the grass-covered site, and it says simply that “victims of fascism” lie below. The Jewish identity of the victims was not even mentioned at the anniversary ceremonies that the state grudgingly began conducting last year, the better to control the groups of Jewish mourners who had been gathering annually at Babi Yar.

Very Much Alive. At last year’s carefully sanitized rites, the official speaker took the occasion to rail against Israel. Among those upset by the performance was a 33-year-old radio engineer named Boris Kochubiyevsky. He protested: “Here lies a part of the Jewish people.” When a bystander said, “Too bad they didn’t get the rest,” Kochubiyevsky (whose parents died with the other Kiev Jews in 1941) began arguing with him. At one point, he complained that because he was a Jew “no one in this country considers me a fellow Russian.” Kochubiyevsky should have limited himself to a silent scream. For his comments he was denounced, arrested, and tried last May for spreading “Zionist propaganda.” A partial transcript of his trial, recently smuggled to the West, shows that anti-Semitism is very much alive in the Soviet Union.

Kochubiyevsky had felt its sting before. Early in 1968, he was hounded out of his job at a Kiev radio factory because he had dared to defend Israel during a political lecture. When he applied for an exit visa to Israel, his non-Jewish wife was expelled from the Young Communist League for “Zionism” and disowned by her father, a KGB security police officer. Just before Kochubiyevsky was to get his emigration papers, he was arrested for “slanderous fabrications against the Soviet state.”

Court Exchange. The trial was something out of Kafka. The prosecutor ridiculed him for having said that “Jews are oppressed here,” yet there was ample evidence of that in the province court at Kiev, where Ukrainian antiSemitism runs deep. When Kochubiyevsky’s brother tried to get in, a guard barred him, shouting “You’re no brother, you’re a kike, a kike, a kike!” The judge made no effort to discourage hooting and mocking among the spectators, many of them KGB men and local party hacks. He chided Kochubiyevsky’s wife, who was nine months pregnant, for having married a Jew, and advised her to “find yourself another husband.”

Nothing better illustrates the tenor of the trial than the following exchange, in which the prosecutor “proved” that anti-Semitism “cannot exist in our country”:

Prosecutor: Do you know against whom we fought?

Kochubiyevsky: The Nazis.

Prosecutor: And for what were we fighting? For Freedom?

Kochubiyevsky: Yes.

Prosecutor: Did we win?

Kochubiyevsky: Yes.

Prosecutor: So you see, it means we do have freedom.

Kochubiyevsky, in his final, futile statement, was repeatedly interrupted by the judge’s orders to “desist from engaging in anti-Soviet propaganda.” Concluded the engineer: “I am convinced that this trial will explain much.” Kochubiyevsky’s sentence: three years at hard labor.