Anatoly Kuznetsov — author with roots in the USSR
He was born in Kyiv in 1929 and was twelve when the German army occupied the city in September 1941. He lived near a ravine on the northern edge of town called Babi Yar, where over two days at the end of that month more than thirty-three thousand of the city's Jews were killed, and where the killing continued afterwards with Roma, prisoners of war and others. He kept a diary through the occupation. He was fourteen when it ended - the age at which the occupying authorities began deporting boys to Germany.
He trained at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow and years later combined those notebooks with the testimony of other survivors into a book he called a document in the form of a novel. It appeared in the magazine Yunost in 1966 and made him famous. It had also been cut by about a quarter, and passages had been added that he had not written. The account of the massacre that reached Soviet readers was the one the censors permitted.
He went on writing and went on being edited. Some manuscripts he never submitted at all; he buried them in tin cans in a forest near Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate. When Soviet forces entered Czechoslovakia in 1968 he decided to leave, and set about it with considerable nerve. He photographed everything he had written - the unpublished books and the uncensored originals of the published ones - onto 35mm film. The KGB refused him travel and pressed him to become an informer; he agreed, and filed a fabricated report on Yevtushenko and other writers to establish his usefulness. He then applied to spend a fortnight in London researching a book about Lenin's time in Britain. Permission came through.
He landed on 24 July 1969 with the films sewn into the lining of his coat and a minder at his side. He shook the man off by saying he was going to find a prostitute, walked into the nearest British government office, and was put on the telephone to David Floyd, a Russian-speaking correspondent of the Daily Telegraph who became his translator. He asked for asylum.
He also gave up his name. Declaring his former self a cowardly and conformist writer, he published everything afterwards as A. Anatoli. The full text of Babi Yar came out in 1970 in a form that is unusual in publishing: the version the Soviet censors had passed set in ordinary type, the passages they had removed in heavier type, and the material he had written since in brackets. The reader can see exactly what was taken out.
In the Soviet Union he was erased from the press after a short period of denunciation, and the complete Russian text did not appear at home until after the state that censored it had ended - some twenty years after Western readers had it. He died in London in 1979, aged forty-nine, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery in an unmarked grave.
"Defected in London, July 1969; remained in Britain"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kyiv (Ukraine)
He defected in London on 24 July 1969 with 35mm films of his uncensored manuscripts sewn into the lining of his coat, and afterwards published under the name A. Anatoli. The complete Russian text of Babi Yar appeared in Russia only after the end of the Soviet Union.
Born in Kyiv in 1929 and twelve years old when the German army occupied the city. He lived near the Babi Yar ravine and kept a diary through the occupation, which became the basis of his best-known book.
Kyiv (Ukraine). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.