In the summer of 1958 a statue of Mayakovsky was unveiled. At the official opening ceremony a number of official Soviet poets read their poems, and when the ceremony was over, volunteers from the crowd started reading theirs as well. Such an unexpected and unplanned turn of events pleased everybody, and it was agreed that the poets would meet here regularly. At first the authorities saw no particular danger in this, and one Moscow paper even published an article about the gatherings, giving the time when they took place and inviting all poetry lovers to come along. Young people, mostly students, assembled almost every evening to read the poems of forgotten or repressed writers, and also their own work, and sometimes there were discussions of art and literature. A kind of open-air club came into being. But the authorities could not tolerate the danger of these spontaneous performances for long, and eventually stopped the gatherings.81
However, in 1960 Bukovsky and his friends managed to revive the ‘readings at Mayakovsky’s statue’, giving them an even more openly political character.
The youth movement was still very broad. Even among Komsomol functionaries, Bukovsky recalls, ‘we had a lot of sympathizers’.82 In April 1961 a real battle with the militia took place in Mayakovsky Square. In October of that year, however, on the eve of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, the authorities finally succeeded in suppressing open youth demonstrations. It is noteworthy that this task had taken five years to accomplish.
The defeat suffered by the student opposition and its disappearance from the scene on the eve of the Twenty-Second Congress explains the fact that for some time thereafter the legal opposition within the system, the mouthpiece of which was
At the same time it must be borne in mind that it was precisely the radical youth who made up the bulk of the audience of the critical writers. There were no frontiers between radicalism and liberalism. Broadly speaking, the differences between them were not so much in ideology as in mood. Members of the ‘liberal’ intelligentsia of the fifties and sixties were not at all disposed to wait passively for democratization to occur. They strove to promote it and clashed with the authorities, even though they did not regard the latter as fundamentally vicious. All the same, their protest was not political but cultural and moral. The journal
