The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who gained international acclaim with a 1961 poem about slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, has died aged 84.

Mr Yevtushenko focused on war atrocities and tyrannical dictators, and sought to combat the antisemitism that had spread throughout the Soviet Union.

The poem about the Ukraine massacre, titled Babi Yar, kick-started an international search for the truth about what had happened in a ravine outside Kiev in 1941.

Mr Yevtushenko said he wrote the poem after visiting the ravine and searching for something to memorialise what had happened there – a sign, a tombstone, some kind of historical marker – but finding nothing.

“I was absolutely shocked when I saw it, that people didn’t keep a memory about it,” he said.

It took him two hours to write the poem that begins: “No monument stands over Babi Yar. A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. I am afraid.”