No Monument: Babyn Yar as Site of History, Memory, and Politics

A lecture by Victoria Smolkin, Associate Professor of History, Wesleyan University.

Moderated by Anna Bisikalo, PhD candidate in modern Eastern European History at Harvard University.

About the Lecture

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.

About the Speaker

Victoria Smolkin is Associate Professor of History and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Wesleyan University. She holds a BA in European Literature and History from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MA and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton University Press, 2018), which was awarded Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in 2019. The Russian translation, published by New Literary Observer in 2021, was long listed for the Alexander Piatigorsky Literary Prize. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, and Politico, among others. Smolkin's work has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including Princeton University’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, the Social Science Research Council, the Newcombe Fellowship in Religion and Ethics, the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Remarque Institute for European Studies at New York University. She is currently at work on two projects: The World of Tomorrow: Communism, Cosmism, and the Fate of Utopia and The Wall of Memory: Histories of Ukraine. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine.

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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series.

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Hanna Leliv, HURI Events Logistics Coordinator, at hleliv@fas.harvard.edu at least two weeks in advance of the session.

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