On 19 September 1961 Literaturnaya Gazeta published Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar, devoted to the massacre of Kiev’s Jews by the Hitlerites. It might seem that there was nothing reprehensible in that, but Yevtushenko had ‘dared’ to mention our own home-grown anti-Semites as well. Their response was not long in coming. The editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta had decided to publish this poem only after some hesitation, expecting some unpleasantness. Their fear was justified, as often happens in such cases. Babi Yar produced a storm of indignation in the ruling class, and among those who took offence was Khrushchev himself. ‘There is no Jewish question in our country,’ he declared, ‘and those who invent it are slavishly repeating what other people say.’92 According to Khrushchev, ‘the poem reveals that its author… was ignorant of historical facts.’93 In reality, of course, it was Khrushchev who showed himself to be ‘ignorant of historical facts’ when he alleged that even in Tsarist Russia there had been no discrimination against the Jews, and the Jewish poor simply ‘shared the plight of the Russian, Ukrainian and other workers.’94 He even tried to avoid recalling the policy of complete extermination of the Jews which the Hitlerites had carried out in the occupied territories. His line enabled the anti-Semites to lift their heads. Literaturnaya Zhizn' wrote, ironically:
Standing on the brink of Babi Yar a young Soviet writer found there only a subject for verses about anti-Semitism! And, thinking today about the people who were killed — ‘the old man shot’, ‘the child shot’ — he could think only about the fact that they were Jews. That was what seemed to him most important, the main thing, the most stirring aspect!.. 95
The newspaper omitted to mention, of course, that these old men and children were shot precisely because they had the misfortune to be born Jewish. It is important that Yevtushenko did not write about Soviet anti-Semites but merely referred to the pre-revolutionary Black Hundreds. However, as they say, an uneasy conscience betrays itself. Those who launched the campaign against Yevtushenko gave their own game away.
Although the moral victory fell to the Lefts, the Babi Yar affair showed that there were definite limits beyond which the liberalism of the rulers would not go. In general the question of anti-Semitism is not in itself of central importance either ideologically or politically, especially since the official line of the authorities repudiates the anti-Semites. But Yevtushenko had trodden on the prejudices of the ruling class and had ‘received the rebuff he deserved’, even though he had not attacked the foundations of the system.96 At times the limits of liberalization proved extremely narrow.
These limits were also seen in the matter of Stalin’s role in the history of the USSR. A Western scholar has written that Khrushchev was a ‘reforming despot’ of the sort encountered only in Russia.97 Perhaps he was even a liberator-despot. His entire activity, together with his contradictions, can be expressed in that contradictory definition. His policy imposed new rules of the game upon the intelligentsia: ‘Thus it was the state which not only initiated dissent but established the framework within which, at least at the beginning, that dissent was to find expression.’98 Moreover, Shatz continues,
by and large, unofficial criticism of Stalin accepted the limits Khrushchev had imposed on the subject. For the next ten years, until the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial of 1966, the voices of dissent evoked by Khrushchev’s speech confined themselves largely to the moral plane, calling for a change in the character and attitudes of the people running the Soviet system while exempting the system itself from direct criticism or serious analysis.99
