After the war, specifically Jewish and Roma commemoration efforts encountered difficulty because of the Soviet Union's emphasis on secular remembrances honoring all nationalities of the Soviet Union, so memorials (including at Babi Yar) would generally refer to "peaceful victims of fascism." Memorials were not explicitly forbidden, but successive Soviet leaders preferred instead to emphasise the wide-ranging origins of those murdered at the site. This meant that both Jewish and Roma peoples were not specifically memorialised at the Babi Yar site until the Soviet Union collapsed. Indeed, Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 poem on Babi Yar begins "Над Бабьим Яром памятников нет/Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("Over Babi Yar there are no monuments"); it is also the first line of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13.
After the war, specifically Jewish and Roma commemoration efforts encountered difficulty because of the Soviet Union's emphasis on secular remembrances honoring all nationalities of the Soviet Union, so memorials (including at Babi Yar) would generally refer to "peaceful victims of fascism." Memorials were not explicitly forbidden, but successive Soviet leaders preferred instead to emphasise the wide-ranging origins of those murdered at the site. This meant that both Jewish and Roma peoples were not specifically memorialised at the Babi Yar site until the Soviet Union collapsed. Indeed Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 1961 poem on Babi Yar begins "Над Бабьим Яром памятников нет/Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("Over Babi Yar there are no monuments"); it is also the first line of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13.