A few days ago, as a failed exercise in rage containment, I did a short diary on the Russian bombing of the Holocaust mass grave named Babyn Yar (Babi Yar in Russian), a place where over thirty thousand Jews, effectively the entire Jewish population of Kyiv, were slaughtered in the course of two September days.
There’s a story that means a lot to me about Babi Yar, and an important artistic response to it, but I knew I was in no condition to get it right, so I deferred it to a separate diary — this one.
There are people who will assure you, to the bottom of their hearts, that they are not antisemites and do not endorse antisemitism, but who then utterly fail the sniff test.
When it comes to antisemitism, as a Jew, how do you know who your friends are?
Here is the story of some friends.
Antisemitism is malleable. It changes with the times and it changes with the audience. And that means that it doesn’t manifest itself the same way on the left as it does on the right. Antisemites on the right wave their banners (and torches) high. Antisemites on the left insist that no no no, heavens no, they’re not antisemites — as long as you use their definition of antisemitism.
So it’s no surprise that the Soviet Union was antisemitic, and it’s no surprise that they denied it. With Stalin there was the Doctor's Plot, in which physicians were accused of a conspiracy to murder high Soviet officials — yet, wouldn’t you know it, only the physicians with Jewish-sounding names. (The graphic novel that “The Death of Stalin” is based on mentions this antisemitism directly — how Stalin had murdered them for being “Zionists,” which is Sovietspeak for “Jews we want to kill with impunity, because it lets us pretend it’s merely a political action even though we’re doing it out of raw antisemitism.” I wish that point had gotten into the movie.)
For a decade or so after Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev experimented with allowing more freedom of expression and opinion than was allowed under Stalin. Admittedly, that’s the broader side of the barn to hit. One of the voices who stepped up under the “Khrushchev thaw” was a poet named Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The shorthand description of Yevtushenko often uses the adjective “Dylanesque,” the voice of a generation that had been lied to and knew it. He tested the boundaries of what would be allowed, but not to the point of suicidal stupidity.
But Dylan is Jewish, and Yevtushenko — who eventually emigrated to the US, and is I believe buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma — wasn’t.
That is, he didn’t have to do this next part, but he did it, because he’s a friend.
He saw the gap between the Soviet rhetoric and their acts when it came to the Jewish community, and picked as an example a particularly egregious case of what David Baddiel would later call “Jews Don’t Count”— the lack of any memorial whatsoever to the murdered Jews at Babi Yar. Not even a plaque.
And from that came a poem.
Yevtushenko frames his argument very clearly: antisemitism is not merely immoral but against the principles of socialism and communism, and any true Soviet citizen therefore fights it at every opportunity. Which is to say, he called the Soviet bluff. The Soviet stance was “antisemitism is a matter for the party, comrade, not you — although the party doesn’t actually give a damn about antisemitism and will come down hard on you if you start agitating about it.”
By saying “put up or shut up,” Yevtushenko was, on principle, willing to weather the Soviet blowback. And the blowback was intense, all kinds of attacks from all sides, orchestrated from the top levels of the party.
In the middle of this, Yevtushenko got a phone call from out of the blue. The guy on the other end identified himself: “This is Shostakovich”— by far the most famous of the Soviet composers. And he said: “I saw your poem. Would you mind if I set it?”
(It’s a bit like getting a cold call from Steven Spielberg saying, “hey, I saw that story of yours, mind if I make a movie of it?”)
Yevtushenko said yes. And Shostakovich said: “A relief. I’m very pleased. Because I have already written it.” He immediately invited Yevtushenko to his apartment and played it through an hour later.
Shostakovich, like Yevtushenko, wasn’t Jewish. He didn’t have to do that, but he did, because he’s a friend. His Piano Trio #2, from 1944, includes a mournful Jewish theme — the only music I know of to commemorate the Holocaust’s Jewish dead written during the war, written of the moment. (He quoted that theme again in his heartbreaking autobiographical Eighth Quartet, as a sign of how much it meant to him.)
Shostakovich then set four more of Yevtushenko’s poems in a similar setting for bass vocalist, bass chorus (!), and orchestra. To make the work impossible to ignore, rather than calling it a cantata or song cycle, he called it a symphony — because a Shostakovich symphony is big, big news, international news.
And right up front was “Babi Yar.”
The premiere approached, and the Soviets — to put it mildly — didn’t want it.
Shostakovich was willing to shoulder the blowback. He had outlasted Stalin, and had an international profile he was willing to leverage. To the rest of the word, he *was* Soviet music. He knew the Soviets couldn’t cancel the premiere of a Shostakovich symphony outright without having to explain why, and he knew the Soviets couldn’t say “we canceled it because it was too friendly to the Jews.”
So the apparatchiks tried to find points of pressure, to make it look like the premiere had been canceled for any reason other than Soviet diktat. The pressure was intense. And not everyone in the music world had the leverage Shostakovich had.
The apparatchiks started working on the conductor — Yevgeny Mravinsky, who had premiered half the Shostakovich symphonies to date, and to whom Shostakovich dedicated his Eighth Symphony. And, sadly, Mravinsky folded, which ended his friendship with Shostakovich.
Enter the conductor Kirill Kondrashin. A friend.
They also began working on the bass soloist. The bass soloist folded.
His replacement studied up the work, preparing for the premiere. Then, at the last minute, he folded.
The third possibility, Vitaly Gromadsky, didn’t fold, even though he saw the score for the first time the day of the premiere.
Here is Kondrashin, from “Shostakovich: A Life Remembered” by Elizabeth Wilson, describing the last rehearsal:
After we had played through the first movement, the orchestra manager appeared on the stage, saying, ‘Kirill Petrovich, you are wanted on the telephone.’
I interrupted the rehearsal and proceeded to the artists’ room where the telephone was. It was Georgi Popov, the Minister of Culture of the Russian Republic [and therefore one of the dozen or so most powerful men in the entire USSR].
‘Kirill Petrovich, how is your health?’
This apparent polite concern of concern for my health was nothing more than the usual trick of your bureaucrats. First they inquire about something irrelevant — your health or the weather.
‘Very well,’ I said.
Then a menacing note was introduced.
‘Is there anything that might prevent you from conducting tonight?’
‘No, I’m in splendid form.’
Although I realized at once what he was driving at, I carried on as if I hadn’t a clue about anything. A silence followed.
Then he said: ‘Do you have any political doubts concerning “Babi Yar”?’
I answered, ‘No, I don’t have any. I think that it’s very timely and very relevant.’
SIlence again. Then he said, ‘Tell me your expert opinion, can the Symphony be performed without the first movement?’
I said, ‘That is completely out of the question. First of all it would distort the form of the Symphony; and secondly everyone knows already that the first movement is a setting of “Babi Yar”. If we miss it out, it will cause a most undesirable reaction.’
Silence again.
Then he said, ‘Well, do as you see fit.’
What he saw fit to do was lead the premiere.
The work had two performances that weekend. The Soviets then put it on (metaphorical) ice, not to be performed again. When they issued their official edition of the collected scores of Shostakovich upon the composer’s death in 1975, there simply was no 13th symphony.
-—
How do you, as a Jew, know who your friends are? When they do this. None of them had to. But they did it anyway.
Thank you, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Thank you, Dmitri Shostakovich. Thank you, Kirill Kondrashin. Thank you, Vitaly Gromadsky.