Events of the last few weeks have made me recall my own travels in Kyiv, then spelled Kiev, and what I saw there in 1970 as a 15 year old girl. What comes to mind most clearly is our visit to Babi Yar and the official denial that it was even there at all.

I was traveling through the Soviet Union with my parents, in our own car, heading to visit the tiny Carpathian town where my father had been born. We started in Finland and spent a month driving through what was then the U.S.S.R.

In Kyiv, as in every other place, we were provided an official Communist Party member guide who took us to all the...