The Thinking Reed полностью

But primarily — and this was natural for writers — they exposed not the organizational but the moral and psychological defects of the system, while trying to counterpose to it their own moral ideal,' their own beliefs.

Of greatest interest for an analysis of the Khrushchev era is, perhaps, the figure of Yevtushenko. The period of the Twentieth Congress engendered a new poetry and new poets. ‘This “public” poet par excellence’, an American observer remarked later, ‘symbolized the anti-Stalinist rebellion of the 1950s and early 1960s.’85 Yevtushenko symbolized the new poetry. In his Political Diary for 1966 Medvedev wrote that he embodied ‘all the merits and all the shortcomings’ of the new poets who became the idols of youth after 1956.86 ‘His popularity’, said an American writer, with surprise, ‘is comparable to that of a movie star in the West.’87

Yevtushenko’s attitude to the system is a mixture of protest with admiration for leaders who made up their minds to expose Stalin. ‘Criticising’, he said in those days, ‘does not mean getting angry, it means loving ardently. And how can I repudiate Soviet reality? Soviet life is my life!’88 Like the rebels of the fifties, he came to the conclusion that ‘we must fight to the death against those who preach Communism in theory while in practice discrediting it. I guessed’, he emphasized, ‘that this fight would be protracted and complex. Persons who look on Communism as almost their monopoly, usually say that anyone who attacks the distortion of Lenin’s ideas is attacking the fundamentals of Leninism.’89 On their part, the Left radicals and liberals of the sixties considered themselves the true bearers of Lenin’s ideas. The intellectuals were convinced that they, and not the ruling bureaucracy, gave authentic expression to Communist principles, and this was partly true. Doubt was not cast upon the actual principles of Bolshevism. Furthermore, the opposition did not yet perceive the fundamental contradiction between its principles and aims and those of the government. After the Twentieth Congress illusions and hopes were so strong that neither Khrushchev’s waverings nor the suppression of the 1956 revolution in Hungary could shake them. De-Stalinization seemed not only irreversible but also irrepressible. Yevtushenko wrote:

Yevtushenko’s autobiography, in which he tried to formulate his views, was published in the West, where it struck many readers as extremely naïve, although Deutscher, for example, stressed that, from a man brought up in Stalinist society ‘his occasional naïvetés are hardly surprising.’91 It is important to realize, though, that in this respect Yevtushenko was not alone. Others thought just as he did. Nevertheless, the democratic intelligentsia discovered very soon that liberalization had limits that were sharply drawn by the rulers. True, as we shall see later, these limits shifted, albeit not without pressure from the opposition. All the same, limits there were, and that was a reality one had to reckon with. One of the questions where these limits made themselves apparent was anti-Semitism.