More than fifty years have passed since Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko penned his poignant tribute to Babi Yar (alternatively spelled in Ukrainian Babyn Yar). At the time of his writing, this rumination was provocative for more than just its underlying accusation. Kyiv—site of the Nazi murder of some thirty-four thousand Jews—was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and still firmly embedded within the Soviet Union. Any discussion of Ukraine's largest mass gravesite was one of the many forbidden topics of the day. In the wake of the Babi Yar executions, Soviet leaders followed a familiar pattern of repression, scrubbing references to the singling out of Jews—who prior to the German occupation in June 1941 had comprised approximately 20 percent of Kyiv's population— in the official documentation of these events. When Yevtushenko was moved to write the above poem in 1961 after observing city officials dumping garbage into the ravine where victims’ remains were interred, Soviet Union premier Nikita Khrushchev personally condemned his poem as historically erroneous and immature. This same year, however, marked yet another tragedy that would have lasting consequences for the legacy of Babi Yar: a burst dam claimed the lives of nearly one hundred fifty people and washed World War II–era human remains into Kyiv's residential areas.