No Monument

The REEES Reading Group / Kruzhok presents

"No Monument: Babyn Yar, the KGB, and the Silences of Soviet Memory"

Date: Friday, May 2, 2025 | 5:30 pm ET

This talk discusses how the resurfacing of Babyn Yar memory in the late Soviet period transformed the site into an important battleground of the Cold War. On March 13, 1961, an industrial accident in the heart of Kyiv—the Kurenevka flood—both literally and figuratively brought evidence of Babyn Yar back to the surface after twenty years of silence. The cultural and political reckoning that emerged in its wake, most famously with Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar,” quickly reached audiences across Cold War borders. In the Soviet Union, the poem’s opening line, “No monument stands at Babi Yar,” unsettled a postwar status quo that had relegated the Jewish experience of the war to the political margins. In the West, it forged new connections between Jewish communities across time and space. Focusing on the KGB’s strategies to contain grassroots commemorations of Babyn Yar and control foreign access to the site, the talk follows how events in Kyiv intersected with an emerging global Holocaust consciousness, the call for Jewish emigration among Soviet dissidents, and the movement to “Save Soviet Jewry” abroad. Finally, it will reflect on how monuments and memorials—both those built and not built—become not only sites of memory, but agents of politics.

Not Open to the Public; for more information on the kruzhok and to get involved, please visit it's webpage.