#Opinion by Maria Zakharova
💬 Antony Blinken’s lies on the anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy
Antony Blinken had the audacity to lie about one of the most appalling tragedies of World War II: the massacre of civilians in Soviet Kiev on September 29-30, 1941, in the Babi Yar ravine. Right after occupying the city, the Nazis began their cleansing operations. Within a few days, tens of thousands of Jews, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war were executed. On September 29-30 alone, the Nazis brutally butchered 34,000 people: this was what Blinken was referring to as he cynically lied (more on this below) about the memory of this tragedy in the USSR, “forgetting” that the executions continued right up to the liberation of Kiev by the Red Army in November 1943.
But we remember everyone: tens of thousands of people of non-Aryan race, partisans and prisoners: all those whom the Nazis sentenced to die and whose remains were left in the Babi Yar ravine. Everyone who lost their lives. Everyone who fell victim to the German idea of superiority. Those who did not live to see the liberation of the Ukrainian SSR capital by the Soviet soldiers.
The US Secretary of State wrote in his post: “Soviets buried this history” by which he meant that they hushed it up. This is a blatant lie, monstrous in its ignorance and cynicism.
No other country in the world so consistently held Nazism accountable for the crimes of the Holocaust as the Soviet Union.
Perhaps there are still decent people left in the State Department who can convey the following information to Mr Blinken.
Already in March 1945, even before the Victory, Resolution No 378 of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee, On the Construction of a Memorial at Babi Yar, was adopted, in accordance with which work began to create a park and install a monument on the burial site of the victims of the Nazi occupiers. It was unveiled on July 2, 1976, on the territory that was later named the Babi Yar National Historical Memorial Reserve in Kiev.
For the Soviet people, Babi Yar was a bleeding wound like Khatyn, Treblinka or Auschwitz, which was liberated by Soviet soldiers. Famous authors and artists dedicated their works to this tragedy: Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov (novel Babi Yar, 1966), director Mark Donskoi (film The Unconquered, 1945), and composer Dmitry Shostakovich (Requiem for Babi Yar symphony, 1962).
Yet Blinken had the audacity to write that we don’t or didn’t remember the past, and he did that on the anniversary of the tragedy. On the other hand, what is left to be desired from the US Secretary of State who was declared one of the most influential Jews in the world last year by an Israeli magazine but who found no words to condemn the honouring of a Nazi in the Canadian parliament? What do we want from the US Secretary of State who issues orders to finance the Nazi regime in Kiev, a regime that glorifies the collaborators Bandera and Shukhevich? What do we want from the US Secretary of State who issues an order to vote against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning neo-Nazism, racism and xenophobia?
We want nothing except one thing: for everyone who lies about such things to live as long as the Nazi Yaroslav Gunko, so that they can face their shame when they are of sound mind, surrounded by their family.
P.S. Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was a Holocaust survivor who was in several death camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. He recalled with gratitude the role of the USSR and Soviet soldiers’ contribution to the Victory over Nazism until the end of his life. Here is an almost prophetic quote of his from an interview with RIA Novosti in 2010: “We, Holocaust survivors who went through Auschwitz, are disappearing one after another. Very soon there will be no eyewitnesses of this catastrophe. And history will speak in the impersonal voice of novelists, researchers and historians at best. Remember Yevtushenko’s poem ‘There Are No Monuments Over Babi Yar’? Shostakovich wrote his 13th symphony called “Babi Yar.” At worst, these will be the voices of demagogues, falsifiers, those who say the Holocaust never happened.”
I wonder what he would say today about his stepson’s lies...