Two kinds of Fascism
THORNE, LUDMILLA
Two Kinds of Fascism Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel By A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov) Translated by David Floyd Farrar, Straus and Giroux 477 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Ludmilla Thorne When...
...Now Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar has once again caused a sensation: In a new edition of the book, the author (who, since his defection to the West in July 1969, prefers to be known as A. Anatoli) reveals how much of the Babi Yar story remains untold in the USSR...
...This underlines the difference between the expurgated version (published in English translation by the Dial Press in 1967) and Anatoli's manuscript by employing roman type to indicate the material that appeared in Yunost, boldface for what was censored at that time, and brackets for additions made in 1967-69...
...But the appearance of these two works at least meant that the Soviet press could no longer play down fee horror of Babi Yar...
...he will learn to put up with Western critics...
...In moving, powerful language, the poet drew international attention to "the thousand thousand buried here," and to the fact that so many of the victims were Jews...
...For my part, I simply return to him the words with which he concludes Babi Yar: "I wish you peace...
...Five years later, when Kuznetsov's novel came out, there was still no monument...
...exclaimed the censor...
...Where the Dial included numerous hints that the Soviet population welcomed the invading Germans, preferring them to the Bolsheviks, the FSG makes this explicit...
...Stalin resolved to annihilate the peasants as a class...
...The Dial told how Kreshchatik, Kiev's main street, was suddenly blown up, killing many Germans...
...In an article entitled "My Diary in the Other World," Anatoli remarked that he did not dare offer the full manuscript of Babi Yar for publication "because it clearly suggested that there was no difference between Hitler's fascism and Soviet fascism...
...It begins: "The worst famine in the Ukraine's long history occurred under Soviet rule in 1933...
...But what happened to those who survived was censored: They were sent to Soviet concentration camps...
...Of course, as it turned out the numerous censors--the book had to pass through six or seven stages--found much that they disliked...
...Anatoli had three novels published in the Soviet Union besides Babi Yar: The Continuation of a Legend, In Your Own Home and Fire...
...No monument stands over Babi Yar," Evtushenko lamented...
...to dance, to love, to drink and sleep and breathe...
...Why are Soviet horses any worse than German ones...
...So the "editing" of the book proceeded without him...
...the phrase "to drink and sleep and breathe" was eliminated...
...Mayes cannot believe that Anatoli microfilmed his manuscripts and sneaked them by customs...
...Reviewed by Ludmilla Thorne When Anatoly Kuznetsov's documentary novel Babi Yar was first serialized in the Soviet magazine Yunost (Youth) in the fall of 1966, it created a sensation...
...For example, Anatoli wrote: "How pleasant it is, after all...
...He submitted instead "an inoffensive text in which, it seemed to me, the censorship would not find the slightest thing to object to...
...Indeed, the identity of Nazism and Soviet Communism was the major theme of Anatoli's book, as he wrote it...
...Two other works, he revealed in an interview over Radio Liberty, were too "frightening" to show to anyone in the USSR...
...What is beyond comprehension, though, is the excision of many items seemingly innocent of political innuendo...
...Comparing Russian and German horses, he had written that "our stunted Russian nags, half-dead from lack of fodder, on which the Red Army was retreating would have looked like foals against these giants...
...Hitler decided to eliminate the Jews as a people...
...The greater part of Anatoli's long "Chapter of Reminiscenses" was cut...
...And freedom...
...Herbert Mayes, in the Saturday Review, wrote that aspects of the novelist's story "didn't ring true" to him...
...It is the first thing I can remember clearly in my life...
...According to Soviet authorities, it was "callously destroyed by the German invaders...
...At this point the author lost control of himself and ran out of the editorial office of Yunost, hoping never to hear of Babi Yar again...
...As a result, the Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) version is 78 pages longer than Dial's, but they are separated by more subtle and significant details than size...
...The film was concealed in the lining of Anatoli's coat...
...Anatoli writes that his grandfather "longed for the arrival of the Germans as liberators, on the assumption that there could be nothing worse in the whole world than the Soviet system...
...In the new version, he goes on to explain how the famine was artificially created by the Soviet regime to force the peasants into the collective farms, and how 7-10 million of them perished...
...Better to die in one's own camps, it was felt, than at the hands of foreigners...
...In fact, as the FSG makes clear, the beautiful Kreshchatik was mined by the Soviet secret police, and many residents of the city were killed along with the Germans...
...Recalling the German occupation of his native Kiev in World War II (at the time he was a boy of 12), Kuznetsov described with almost unbearable realism the massacre at Babi Yar (Old Wives' Guiley...
...Anatoli managed to cope with Soviet censorship...
...These sentiments changed, however, after Babi Yar began to fill up with the bodies of Jews, gypsies, Russians, and Ukrainians...
...The Dial edition gave a gruesome account of how thousands of Soviet prisoners starved in the German camp at Darnitsa...
...Lillian Hellman, for instance, censured him for "betraying innocent friends" in the Soviet Union and for protesting "only when he was in the soft, welcoming arms of Britain...
...I have a Russian friend who three years ago did just that, and now lives in New York...
...Last year, at a conference on Soviet censorship sponsored by London's Institute for the Study of the USSR, Anatoli described his final session with the censor...
...Can Mayes be unaware of the multitude of samizdat material that is constantly getting through...
...It is not surprising, given Anatoli's theme, that certain "editorial changes" were made...
...Mayes does not understand, either, how Anatoli could have "concocted" a story about wanting to swim to Turkey with the help of a raft...
...Approximately 200,000 people--including Kiev's entire Jewish population--were slaughtered in this massive ravine on the city's outskirts...
...Noting that the sense of the original was distorted by Soviet censorship, he states in the Preface that he wishes "the present text of Babi Yar to be regarded as the only true one...
...Evgeny Evtushenko's poem bearing the same title had stirred a similar excitement in 1961...
...And Soviet authorities were finally compelled to admit that the Jews had suffered more from Nazi persecution than had other peoples of Russia...
...Since defecting to the West, Anatoli has been the object of much criticism and suspicion...
...Stop...
Vol. 54 • April 1971 • No. 7
