Ana­toly Kuznetsov was born in Kyiv in 1929. Dur­ing World War II, he endured the Nazi occu­pa­tion of the city, and lat­er described his expe­ri­ences in the doc­u­men­tary nov­el Babi Yar, which appeared in a Sovi­et mag­a­zine in 1966 and was lat­er pub­lished abroad. He defect­ed to Great Britain in 1969, and an uncen­sored ver­sion of Babi Yar was pub­lished in the Unit­ed States in 1970 under the pseu­do­nym A. Ana­toli. He died in Lon­don in 1979.