Dmitri Shostakovich, Babi Yar, and Negotiations of Holocaust Memory in the Former USSR

Babi Yar became the primary symbol of the Holocaust in Ukraine like Warsaw, Auschwitz and Treblinka for Poland, Maly Trostnets for Belarus, Rumbula for Latvia, and Ponary for Lithuania. The site remains a place of contested memory, where “all the silence screams” as the poet Yevtushenko wrote. Clandestine groups of Jewish Holocaust survivors began to gather at Babi Yar in the 1960s, but it was not until 1976 that an official monument was erected using the euphemistic language of “peaceful Soviet citizens” killed by “Nazi occupiers” rather than specifically mentioning a Jewish tragedy or the complexities of Ukrainian collaboration. Ukrainian poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko memorialized Babi Yar as a specifically Jewish catastrophe in his eponymous poem, and in 1962, the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich included Yevtushenko’s poem in one movement of his thirteenth symphony “Babi Yar” which addressed antisemitism from the Dreyfus affair through the Holocaust. As Arkadi Zeltzer has highlighted, Soviet memorialization of the Holocaust as a Jewish catastrophe was an “unwelcome memory” and often involved a negotiation involving blat or local bribes, changing memorial politics between the relatively liberal 60s to the contraction of the 1970s, and regional differences of the Soviet Jewry.^[3]  Today, the site remains politically charged with Ukrainian Zelenskyy decrying after a March 2022 bombardment “What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?”

Shostakovich worked with Jewish music and Jews in two primary ways. First was directly supporting and working with Jewish people, from advising Moisei Beregovskii in the 1940s after Beregovskii returned from creating ethnographic collections in Ukraine, to interceding on behalf of Mieczyslaw Weinberg when he was entangled in postwar antisemitism and denunciation in 1948, to his extensive working relationship with David Oistrakh, the violinist to whom both of Shostakovich’s violin concertos and the sonata are dedicated. Shostakovich also drew from these collaborations, infusing Jewish idioms into his compositions. Judith Kuhn codifies these “Jewish” features succinctly in her analysis of the Shostakovich String Quartets: first is modality which evokes Jewish melodies, second is the use of “iambic primes” or altered pitches on weak beats which are then repeated on strong beats, third is a dance-like accompaniment, fourth is the use of musicalized speech and liturgical texts as in the 13th symphony or more notably the From Jewish Folk Poetry, and finally the feeling of “laughter through tears”: an incongruity between form and inflection.^[5] Shostakovich was raised in a democratic, idealistic, and international family, his borrowing of Jewish idioms from the 1930s onward was part of his personal commitment to these ideals and representing an oppressed people while infusing his work with personal tributes to his colleagues and subtle digs at the Soviet state.^[6]

Within Soviet musical culture, Dmitri Shostakovich was an epoch making composer, leaving a legacy which the composers of the Thaw had to address. Composers like Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Denisov, Ustvolskaya, Sil’vestrov, and Weinberg all directly memorialized Shostakovich in their compositions, dually grappling with his compositional and aesthetic legacy and the changing cultural landscape of the USSR in the 1970s and 80s.^[7] Shostakovich himself was a memorialized figure, and by the 1960s his positionality at the helm of the Soviet musical world was clear. Shostakovich commenting on Babi Yar as a Jewish tragedy, combined with the emblematic verse of Yevtushenko, was a clear and powerful statement of memorialization in the 1960s.

Shostakovich’s 13th “Babi Yar” symphony derives its title from the first movement which integrates Yevtushenko’s poetry about the site with textual commentary and narration of the Dreyfus Affair, the Bialystok pogrom, and the story of Anne Frank. The other movements, II. Humor, III. In the Store, IV. Fears, and V. Career don’t address Judaism or the Holocaust explicitly. Rather, they address other Soviet issues like the useless and careerist bureaucrats, food shortages, and the oblique “fears” of everything from war which is alluded to with a Soviet marching song, to the insidious “shadows which penetrated every floor” referencing the terror of the 1930s and the unseen world of denunciations and police machinations. The work expanded outward from Shostakovich’s initial concept of a single movement work based only on Babi Yar, to a larger portrait of Soviet grievance which included the stain of Soviet antisemitism.^[8] Official censure plagued the premiere with Yevtushenko eventually changing lines of the Babi Yar text in 1963, and Shostakovich being accused of “moralizing” through his selections of text.^[9] The movement “Babi Yar” was the one most attacked by the authorities, followed by the movement “Fears”.^[10]

Eighty-three years after the shootings at Babi Yar, with Ukraine and the same site under new siege, it is essential to prioritize these musical memorials as physical sites become inaccessible or destroyed. Shostakovich, a memorial or a relic of Soviet musical culture himself, left enduring testaments to antisemitism in the wider context of Soviet repression and memory politics. As Etkind argues, in Russia, “mastering the past is an important part of the political present.”^[11]

Alexandra Birch, September 2024

Sources

1. Yitzhak Arad, ed., The Destruction of the Jews of the USSR during the German Occupation (1941-1944), Jerusalem 1991, pp. 107-111. 
2. A. Anatoli (Kuznetsov), Babi Yar, transl. David Floyd, Washington, 1970, pp. 66-68.
3. Arkadi Zeltzer, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018). Zeltzer also makes excellent points specifically about Babi Yar and the impact of Yevtushenko’s poetry on advancing the specificity of Jewish victimization within Soviet war memory (246). 
4. Jeffrey Veidlinger quoting President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “What Happened at Babi Yar, the Ukrainian Holocaust site reportedly struck by a Russian Missile?” Smithsonian Magazine, March 8th 2022, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/babi-yar-ukraine-massacre-holocaust-180979687/. ;
5. Judith Kuhn, Shostakovich in Dialogue: Form, Imagery, and Ideas in Quartets 1-7 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 50-52.  
6. Alexander Tentser, "Dmitri Shostakovich and Jewish Music: The Voice of an Oppressed People," The Jewish Experience in Classical Music: Shostakovich and Asia (2014): 3. Tentser provides an excellent and compact perspective on the impact of Shostakovich on Jewish music in the USSR and what this means for performers.
7. Peter J. Schmelz, What Was “Shostakovich,” and What Came Next?. Journal of Musicology 1 July 2007; 24 (3): 297–338. doi: doi.org/10.1525/jm.2007.24.3.297. ;
8. Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Second Edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994, 2006), 400. 
9. Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich (Boston: Pimlico, 1990), 230. 
10. Roy Blokker with Robert Dearling, The Music of Dmitri Shostakovich: The Symphonies (London: The Tantivy Press, 1979), 140.
11. Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).