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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

>But his fame was secured by the publication in 1961 of what must be the poem of the 1960s, Babi Yar. It derived from his visit to a ravine near Kiev where the Nazis had perpetrated a massacre 20 years before.

I guess a poem about the Katyn Woods would have been a step to far.

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Why put that on him, rather than Adam Zagajewski or Czesław Miłosz or Wisława Szymborska? I'd rather see more commentary on the incident from Polish artists (and less such commentary from deranged paranoid lunatics who somehow win power despite being clearly insane).

>Why put that on him, rather than Adam Zagajewski or Czesław Miłosz or Wisława Szymborska?

Because by 1961 the Nazis had been destroyed, so it was very much beating a dead horse, and because his country was the one that perpetrated the massacre in Poland and never owned up to it.

See the comment upthread about de facto Holocaust denial in the Soviet Union. This was an act of moral courage that Yevtushenko is justly lauded for.

This is not correct though. Holocaust was ignored or silenced due to ideology, not denied.

Not trying to say this is somehow better, but this just different. In other words Yevtushenko wasn't trying to bring to reason, but rather make sure people won't forget.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021078

I don't think you can reproach anyone for not being a hero, and especially for not "owning up" to crimes they never committed. That said, I just listened to that poem and it appears to be a stab at Russian antisemitism much more than at Nazis. I believe by the 60s antisemitism was already an unofficial government policy in the USSR, so he's in no way beating an officially designated dead horse. Pretty sure publicly mentioning Katyn at that time and place would have been suicidal.

Katyń was a political massacre of the Polish officer corps by the Soviet Union. Babi Yar was part of a genocidal campaign of extirpation against the Jews.

Katyń was a horrible crime. But you can't, and should not, compare the two.

Of course they're comparable. When you deliberately kill that many people the reasons are really beside the point.

NB: You're arguing your point against a native of Poland.

NB: It doesn't matter.

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