Babi Yar is one of the most extraordinary documentary novels to emerge from the Soviet twentieth century. (I do have a soft spot for Soviet literature, but this is particularly incredible).

Written by Anatoli Kuznetsov, who grew up in Kyiv during the Second World War, the book recounts the Nazi occupation of the city and the mass execution of tens of thousands of Jews at the ravine known as Babi Yar. Rather than a conventional historical narrative, Kuznetsov reconstructs the period through personal memory, witness accounts, and documentary fragments.

The result is part memoir, part testimony, part suppressed history. The original Soviet publication was heavily censored, with passages removed that described both Nazi atrocities and the brutality of Soviet rule. When Kuznetsov defected to the West in 1969, he smuggled the complete manuscript out on microfilm and published the full uncensored version.

Bleak, precise, and unsentimental, Babi Yar stands as one of the most powerful literary records of life under occupation and the machinery of twentieth-century totalitarianism.