Some twenty years ago, a young Russian poet named Yevgeny Yevtushenko went to one of the terrible places of the world, a ravine near Kiev called Babi Yar, where the Nazis, in September 1941, had massacred at least 34,000 Ukrainian Jews in two days, and according to some over 100,000. He was shocked to find that in a land brimming with memorials to the millions of victims of Nazi terror, the Communists, his fellow Russians, had done nothing to mark this major site of Nazi terror against Jews. He wrote a memorable poem with a memorable line: There is no monument at Babi Yar.

He excoriated the complicitous indifference to the mass murder of Jews and the continuing antisemitism of the Communists and most of the Russian people, so contrary to all of their highest ideals. He touched the heart even of the then dictator Khrushchev, who allowed the publication of...