Talia Lavin: The Battle of Kyiv - Russia's forward advance in Ukraine is a journey backward in time

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Talia Lavin
@swordsjew
"Three days after the Nazis took the city they shot 33,000 Jews in a natural basin within the city limits known as Babi Yar, and forced Soviet POWs to bury them. (Note: shortly before publication of this post, a Russian bomb hit the Babi Yar memorial.)"

theswordandthesandwich.substack.com
The Battle of Kyiv
Russia's forward advance in Ukraine is a journey backward in time
10:49 AM · Mar 1, 2022

https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/the-battle-of-kyiv?utm_source=url

In the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, at the very end of a sprawling complex of sixteen exhibit halls, there is a final room, the last stop. It’s called the Hall of Remembrance, and there is no sound in the chamber but the rasp of scarves or the thump of visitors’ thick winter boots. When you enter the Hall, there is a welded tangle of bugles affixed to a wall, and, behind them, a mural devoted to all the pomp of victory, images of the storming of Berlin, the defeat of Germany in what many post-Soviet states still call the Great Patriotic War. But the bugles are silent: the rest of the room is dedicated to the price of that victory. A long, long table spans the massive room, set for a feast. In lieu of plates, there are death certificates; the walls are lined with six thousand photographs of the war dead. It is, as the museum notes on its website, “a symbolic funeral table”—echoing the Ukrainian tradition of feasting in memory of the dead—but there are no chairs; there is no drink; no laughter and no music; just six thousand dead, and their empty cups.

Eighty-one years have passed since that war, but the glasses of the dead never fill, and the theater of war shuffles through its players with appalling speed. Kyiv is one of only twelve cities in the entirety of the former Soviet Union that attained the distinction of “Hero City,” claiming a civic Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest honor. The price of that honor is blood: a soul for every inch of the city, enough blood to merit distinction even in a war that drenched Europe in blood, the Soviet Union in particular. Three-quarters of a million people, soldiers and civilians, died before Kiev was taken, the vast majority of the losses Soviet; the city was entirely encircled by German forces. Three days after the Nazis took the city they shot thirty-three thousand Jews in a natural basin within the city limits known as Babi Yar, and forced Soviet prisoners of war to cover the bodies with the black earth. (Note: shortly before the publication of this post, a Russian air strike directly hit the Babi Yar memorial.)

The Battle of Kiev in 1941 (I use the Russian transliteration deliberately here, as it was then capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) was among the first major clashes of Hitler’s push to the East, the astonishingly profligate destruction of life known as Operation Barbarossa. Kiev was deliberately taken before the Nazi attack on Moscow, despite the Russian capital’s infinitely greater symbolic value. This is because Ukraine was the principal target of Hitler’s acquisitive eastward march, the imagined lodestar of his land empire: by accident of geology, Ukraine’s black earth, its chernozem, astonishingly fertile and luridly green in spring, has made it the bloody plaything of empire after empire. As the historian Timothy Snyder documented in his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, “the forward motion of the Wehrmacht would be a journey backward in time.” Ukraine was the keystone of Hitler’s maniacal Hunger Plan, in which the Slavic population of Ukraine would be driven from the land and starved to death in order to feed the racially superior Germany and the rest of the territories it carved from Western Europe.

Of course, less than a decade earlier, Stalin had undertaken quite a similar initiative, if for different reasons: seeking to demonstrate the perfection of his enforced regime of collective agriculture, and then simply to take revenge on what he perceived as Ukrainian peasant sabotage, Moscow-directed grain requisitions forced the most fertile country in Europe into an entirely artificial famine, known in Ukraine as Holodomor (hunger-death). Up to ten million people died, the bread stolen from their mouths, cattle stolen from their byres, the whole country raided like a larder to feed the staggering hubris of empire. And then raided again, by another empire. And now: again, in 2022. Troops encircle Kyiv today as they did eighty years ago, another incursion by another tyrant, more blood soaking the black earth. This time the tyrant says he is trying to “denazify” Ukraine by killing its Jewish president; he is bombing Russian speakers in Russian-speaking cities so that, he says, they will be free to speak Russian. From inside the city, does it matter what alphabet is written on the sides of the tanks? You’re hiding anyway, dying anyway, digging anti-tank ditches like they did in 1941.

*snip*

[crickets]

1. Stunning photo of the Hall of Remembrance. Well worth the read. K&R