Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel; New, Complete, Uncensored Version

A blend of memoir and fiction, Kuznetsov’s book offers an eyewitness account of the Nazi occupation of Kyiv between 1941 and 1943. A teenager at the time, he lived with his family right next to Babi Yar, a ravine where, in 1941, the Nazis murdered over 33,000 Jews. All together, the Nazis killed about 100,000 people in the same spot, among them Kyiv residents and Soviet prisoners of war. At 14, Kuznetsov started recording what he saw. Those records formed the basis of his book, a story of barbarism, extreme privation, and continual mortal danger. The book’s major episodes include a series of explosions on Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street, organized by Soviet operatives within days of the start of the Nazi occupation, apparently aimed at turning the Nazis’ rage toward the city’s residents, who had often welcomed their German occupiers as liberators. This episode and many more were absent from the 1967 Soviet edition of Kuznetsov’s chronicle, which was mutilated by Soviet censors. The full version was published in the West after the author’s defection in 1969 and has just been republished, 50 years later. To Kuznetsov, Babi Yar was a symbol of wanton savagery committed by two murderous regimes. His condemnation—“I hate you, dictators!”—sounds tragically timely as Russia now wages a brutal war against his native Ukraine.