Among the many mass atrocities in what was once the Soviet Union, the Babyn Yar massacre stands out. According to contemporary Nazi reporting, a total of 33,771 Jewish victims were murdered on September 29–30, 1941, making this ravine in Kyiv the site of the largest single execution of Jews that took place anywhere in the USSR. The Babyn Yar crime scene would go on to represent Soviet malfeasance as well, with the lack of commemoration and an avoidable mudslide that killed another 145 people in 1961 making this location a symbol of the official neglect that ultimately brought down the USSR. It is difficult to imagine anyone better qualified to untangle the multiple meanings of Babyn Yar than Martin C. Dean. A historical consultant, he has worked for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Australian Special Investigations Unit, and the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit in London. In this new volume, Dean seeks not only to reconstruct the chains of events that produced such immense bloodshed at Babyn Yar but to make sense of the ways this site has been understood, especially now that war has returned to Ukrainian territory.

There is much to admire about this book. Through more than two dozen compact chapters, Dean chronicles discrete aspects of the history of Babyn Yar, from the possessions Jews were forced to surrender on their ways to the ravine to the significance of nearby Nazi camps as well as the heroic, if mostly unsuccessful efforts of Jews to escape the shootings. Dean’s emphases on photographic evidence and situating events in specific geographic locations are particularly valuable. With a source list that includes archives in Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Russia, and the US along with numerous digital resources, this study is well-positioned to endure as the definitive treatment of Babyn Yar.

At the same time, there are elements of Dean’s study that are distinctly unsatisfying. His laser focus on the details that make up the Babyn Yar crime scene comes at the expense of analysis that would have broader relevance for the histories of Nazi Germany and the USSR. For instance, Dean engages in comparative discussion only rarely and devotes little attention to situating the massacre and its legacies in more expansive chronologies that would be necessary to yield new insights about cause and effect. Such isolation of the Babyn Yar case is especially frustrating given that Dean’s previous monographs about collaboration and robbery during the Holocaust, as well as his role as co-editor for the volume of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos that addresses eastern Europe, indicate that he undoubtedly could have painted a bigger picture in this text if that had been his goal.

Similarly underwhelming is Dean’s repeated endorsement of the received wisdom that Soviet leaders systematically obscured the Jewish identities of victims, a Cold War trope that more than a decade of careful scholarship has shown was not the case. Indeed, Dean’s own heavy reliance on Soviet war crimes documentation spanning the period 1943–80 demonstrates the value of Soviet efforts to preserve evidence of the Babyn Yar massacre. For example, Dean warns his readers about a testimony “which was recorded by the KGB in 1980 and therefore uses the term ‘innocent Soviet citizens’ instead of Jews” (165n11). But elsewhere Dean quotes this same testimony openly referring to the targeting of Jewish victims, and unquoted portions of the complete statement available in Kyiv are even more explicit (46, 68, 158).

As Dean himself acknowledges upfront, the problem for study of the Jewish massacre at Babyn Yar is “not too little information but rather too much” (4). He identifies the work of Patrick Desbois and the Yahad-In Unum team as inspiration for his study (6). Yet the power of Desbois’ contribution is the light he sheds on understudied atrocities. In contrast, the major characteristics of the Babyn Yar crime scene have been known for many years. As a result, the correctives Dean offers to the existing literature are fine points, such as the exact route that Jews walked through Kyiv to the ravine (110). To whom much is given, much is required. Although Dean accomplishes the narrow objectives he set for himself, discerning readers may be left wishing for something more. Such limitations notwithstanding, this book should prove useful particularly for non-specialists as well as in the classroom, both for the history it recounts and as a starting point for discussions of how historians should operate.