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Despite relative continuity in Ukraine’s official history policies after the election of Zelens’kyy as President of Ukraine, and in spite of only limited public interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 was, however, no less turbulent than preceding years when it came to Ukrainian memory affairs. The most heated public controversies during 2020 were no longer related to the history and memory of the OUN, but instead to one of the most tragic pages in the history of Ukraine’s capital. A major Ukrainian public discussion evolved in 2020 around the question of how to memorialize the September 1941 Nazi mass killing of most of Kyiv’s Jewish population in the ravine of Babyn Yar (literally: Old Woman’s Gully) which was then located near, but has now become a part of, the city. Over the entire period of Kyiv’s occupation by the Nazis during 1941–43, about 100,000 people were killed and/or buried at Babyn Yar.9

In spring 2020, a public dispute started when Ivan Kozlenko, a Ukrainian film-director and, at that time, head of Kyiv’s reputed Dovzhenko Cinema Art Center, published an op-ed on the planned project for a Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC). Kozlenko criticized the BYHMC’s new art director, the Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who had been appointed to this post in December 2019.10 In Kozlenko’s opinion, Khrzhanovsky’s plans for the future BYHMC entailed the application of unethical artistic methods to the public memorialization of the Nazis’ mass killings at Babyn Yar.11

Also in April 2020, the BYHMC planning committee’s main consulting historian since 2017, the Dutch Holocaust and Eastern Europe expert Karel Berkhoff, demonstratively left the project.12 Berkhoff too accused the new leadership of the BYHMC of inappropriate approaches to the memory of the tragedy at Babyn Yar.13 In the following months, a major public debate involving many Ukrainian public figures and prominent writers took off. Two open collective letters signed by hundreds of intellectuals from Ukraine and abroad were published. The signatories demanded that the BYHMC project be cancelled on the grounds that, in their opinion, it violated basic ethical norms that should govern the work of a museum devoted to a genocidal mass murder like that at Babyn Yar.14

Khrzhanovsky’s controversial project for the BYHMC was partly inspired by the famous Stanford prison and Milgram shock experiments. His main concept was to immerse the memorial’s visitors into the “real life” of Kyiv in 1941 when the city was occupied by German troops, and the mass extermination of Jewish population of Kyiv took place. Before entering the memorial and beginning this interactive experience, each visitor would, moreover, have to undergo a psychological test for the purposes of being assigned a role as a member of one of three groups: perpetrators, witnesses, or victims.

By early 2021, when we wrote this introduction, the controversy had not yet been resolved. As a result of the 2020 debates, there had emerged a situation in which two projects were competing at the memorial space at Babyn Yar: the “National Historical Memorial Preserve Babyn Yar,” commissioned by the Ukrainian government and developed by the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; and the above BYHMC project, a private initiative funded by three oligarchs of Ukrainian-Jewish origin, all of whom are residents of the Russian Federation—a factor which further fueled the controversy.

The Babyn Yar memorial controversy, to be sure, is not entirely unique. It should be positioned within the broader context of world-wide debates about the limits and ethics of adequate representation of tragic historic events. In the present Ukrainian situation, the discussion of the idea of dignity in memory politics became even more relevant and urgent through the Euromaidan protests, also called “the Revolution of Dignity.”15 Khrzhanovsky is trying to show, with his methods, that every human being can be stripped of her or his dignity—an aim of his project that he has repeatedly described in interviews. His opponents instead speak about the need to protect human dignity. The new director of the UINP, Anton Drobovych, who had worked with the previous team of the BYHMC project until 2019, i.e., before the arrival of Khrzhanovsky, also mentions dignity as a main theme in his critique of the new BYHMC team’s project.16

The history and memory of Babyn Yar as a major site of the Holocaust is, in a number of ways, also connected to the history and memory of the OUN and UPA. Above all, recent studies have confirmed earlier allegations concerning Ukrainian ultra-nationalist collaboration with the Nazis that included certain Ukrainians’ participation in the extermination of Ukraine’s Jews.17 A number of scholarly papers and books published in recent years have detailed and/or summarized partly already known and partly only recently documented episodes in which OUN members and subunits participated in the Holocaust.18

At the same time, a whole number of Ukrainian nationalists were killed by the Nazis and some were buried in the Babyn Yar ravine, together with other victims of German mass murder. Among the twenty-five monuments and memorial signs currently located at Babyn Yar, there is thus also a monumental cross in memory of 621 members of the OUN killed by the Nazis and buried in the ravine as well as a separate monument to Olena Teliha, a poet and OUN leader killed by the Nazis and buried in Babyn Yar in 1942. These instances illustrate that commemoration and discussions of the events of World War II in Ukraine can often not help but to, in one way or another, include and touch upon certain aspects of the history of the OUN and UPA. This recurring circumstance is one of the reasons why we are continuing the present series of special sections dedicated to the history and memory of the OUN and UPA.