Word: yar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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FIFTY YEARS AGO, thousands of Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis in a ravine in the Ukraine at a place called Babi Yar. Until last week, there was no commemoration of their deaths and no marking of their mass grave. After decades of being ignored by the Soviet government, the newly independent Ukraine erected a memorial to those who were murdered at Babi Yar...
UNDER Soviet rule, the only recognition of the deaths at Babi Yar was a memorial erected in 1974 to Soviet resistance fighters that is a mile away from the ravine where the Jews were killed. The Soviet government refused to admit what happened at Babi Yar because it didn't fit into its state-mandated history...
Communist ideology did not recognize the existence of religious groups, and suppressed religious history. Because Jews were the only victims at Babi Yar, the event was ex-cluded from Soviet history books. So those who died at Babi Yar were symbolized by a non-specific Soviet resistance fighter in the distant memorial...
...government still pays a pension of about $11,000 a year to the widow of the country's deputy Nazi leader during the German Occupation, and that she unrepentantly spends part of the money to distribute neo-Nazi propaganda. Or that the monument the Soviets reluctantly built at Babi Yar is actually half a mile away from the ravine where thousands of Jews were slaughtered, and that in the process of building the monument the Soviets bulldozed Kiev's main Jewish cemetery...