Examines Soviet attempts since World War II to suppress awareness of the Holocaust and Jewish martyrdom up to and including the 1980s. This policy produced distortions in school textbooks, suppression of essential works on the subject, the attempted equation of Nazism with Zionism, and the expunging of the Jewish component from the records of the 1941 Babi Yar massacre. Mikhail Gorbachev significantly reduced this tendency after 1985, but as of 1987 no major breakthrough in this area had occurred.