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Comment by KKKKkkkk1 | Hacker News Reader

The context to this is that Yevtushenko was a Soviet poet who wrote a poem named Babi Yar in the 1960s that exposed what was essentially an official policy of Holocaust denial on the part of the government at the time.

The story of how the poem was published is also interesting. When Yevtushenko brought the poem to the editor of the magazine in which it was to be published, the editor asked to make a call to his wife before making the decision. The editor realized that publishing this poem would be the end of his career, and he wanted to get his wife's blessing. Ultimately they decided to go ahead, and the editor was fired from his job on the next day.

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Soviet Union never denied holocaust.

No, but it did have a tendency of omitting/censoring[1] the fact that it was primarily directed at Jews and Romani, as highlighted by Yevtushenko in his poem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar_memorials#Commemorati...

Soviet Union was an international country inhabited by soviet people. The policy was to not segregate by ethnicity as much as possible. Of course there was some residual antisemitism but Babi Yar was presented as a tragedy for soviet people in general not for any specific ethnicity. The spin on the story to specify that it were the jews who were shot segregates jews from the rest of soviet people. This would be an approach of a racist.

But the Nazis were in fact applying overtly racist policies. Admitting this fact doesn't make you a racist. Denying it instead makes you a liar or even a negationist.

This fact was properly recorded. Neither was it denied.

So they've created a garbage dump in the Babiy Yar... for what? To "properly record" it?

And yet, passports said "Ethnicity: Jew". "Ukrainian". "Georgian". For a country inhabited by Soviet people, it had a surprising lack of people identified as simply Soviet in their documents; hard to have it both ways.

This is a weak argument. EU and US passports also have fields for nationality. It doesn't make neither EU nor US inherently racist.

I have a few in front of me.

From a US passport: "Nationality: United States of America"

From an Australian passport: "Nationality: Australian"

I have not seen an EU passport, but as far as I know EU does not claim ideological erasure of any national identity in favour of some ideal "European".

[Edit: No accusation of racism had been made, whether I believe it to exist or not. The point is that it is difficult to claim ethnic identity does not exist, while explicitly highlighting it at every opportunity. The two countries I single out above make a point of being "melting pots", and are much more consistent in applying that.]

I have to admire the European love of sophistry as an end in itself, for surely you have not advaned the argument.

A British one has:

Country Code: GBR Nationality: British Citizen

Along with the town of birth, which is not enough to get any more information about ethnicity than you could from the name and picture.

Soviet passports had a field for ethnicity, not nationality. A French citizen of Arab descent doesn't have "Arab" anywhere in the passport, does she ? Soviet passports did

Bullshit. The Soviet Union was "internationalist" on paper only. It was anti-semitic and racist in reality.

The USSR was profoundly multinational, and many of the Republics - most notably Russia itself - were, in turn, fractally multiethnic, consisting of many semi-autonomous ethno-national regions (this is why it was called the Russian Soviet _Federative_ Socialist Republic, and the Russian Federation today).

On top of the already complex ideological balancing act involved in managing so many distinctive national and ethnic identities, particularly along the periphery, there was the strong official Marxist internationalism, the idea of friendship among the proletariat of all nations, and of the Soviet Union as a superlative embodiment of this, etc.

With such ideological/rhetorical objectives in mind, whatever you may think of them, it is easy to see why it would be a problem to give any particular people a sense of preeminent victimhood or confer unto them some special recognition. It can lead to enhanced claims for special status or compensation from those people, as well as animate the grievances of other ethnicities who were the victims of Stalinist policies such as forced mass resettlement, or who lost disproportionate numbers in the war, or succumbed to famines and collectivisation of agriculture, etc. Besides that, the USSR lost an estimated 27 million soldiers and civilians fighting the Germans--people of all sorts of ethnicities, but of course to no small extent Russian-Slavic. A self-interested government would not wish to antagonise veterans or grieving families by creating the perception that the mantle of victimhood was being somehow disproportionately alloted to a particular group.

So, there was generally a political reluctance to cast any particular spotlight on the distinctive plight of Jews in WWII. Doubtless, some amount of inertial anti-Semitism and a suspicious view of Jews played a role too.

It is possible to recognise without conferring a sense of preeminent victimhood, and doing so may even have benefits for internationalism; but I do not wish to argue this point. The response above is just an elaboration on the parent's simplistic claim.

From the same Wikipedia page: "An official memorial to Soviet citizens shot at Babi Yar was erected in 1976." Yevtushenko starts with an incredulous observation that there is no memorial at all, as of 1961. Your comment hints at a possible reason: it may be difficult to commemorate this specific site if one is unwilling to mention the Jews. It is imaginable that had a memorial existed--in any form--the poem may not have been written, but its lack had caused the poet to search for reasons.

I didn't say it's impossible, just that the reluctance to walk this tightrope on the part of the Soviet leadership was considerable. It was a descriptive account. :-)

As to your larger point, entirely fair.

Note that the memorial erected in 1976 still did not mention Jews, just "Soviet citizens", as the quote says.

It took until 1991 for a memorial explicitly mentioning Jews to appear.

Not some amount, a very large amount of anti-Semitism and discrimination against other non ethnically Russian people too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Under_the_Soviet...

You seem like a Soviet apologist

Do I really?

Not to me.

You cannot just throw a link to an unrelated Wikipedia article and an ad hominem and call it a day, can you?

Sure you can. When it comes to discussions of the complexity of Soviet politology, the standard protocol is to just throw out a link about extermination and oppression, sputter some Cold War platitudes, drop the mic and walk away.

> a tendency of omitting/censoring[1] the fact that it was primarily directed at Jews and Romani

Same in the GDR by the way. Memorials in concentration camps often highlight anti-fascist fighters who died there - no mention of Jews, Roma or Homosexuals.

What are talking about? Entire concentration camps are preserved as memorials to their prisoners with museums and tons of memorabilia. Of course there would also be memorials to heroic Soviet liberators. Let's also not forget how many Soviet citizens were in the camps.

The reason why East Germany was doing this is the same why the Soviet Union was. The Babi Yar massacre was carried out with the enthusiastic help of the local population. After the war, the Soviet authorities felt that it was best to let bygones be bygones, especially since the sentiments that led to the massacre remained wide spread. In fact, persecution of homosexuals is practiced by the Russian government to this day.

Technically, yes. But they severely downplayed it to an extent that was hardly any better than outright denial.

Hence, the Babi Yar "garbage dump".

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