Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (also spelled Es-enin) born in 1895 in Konstantinovo, a farm village in the Riazan province, where he attended school. He came to prominence in Petrograd in 1915 as part of a group of “Peasant Poets.” His early work was noted for its elegiac portrayal of rural life and religious themes.
Yesenin was an ambivalent supporter of the October Revolution and the Soviet state. He tried to write on revolutionary themes, but his explorations of intimate relationships, urban street life, and the disappearance of old rural Russia were more popular. Yesenin was also known for his charisma, heavy drinking, and scandalous behavior. He was married three times, once to the American dancer Isadora Duncan. Yesenin committed suicide in December 1925, shortly after writing his final poem, “Good-bye, My Friend, Good-bye,” in his own blood.
Yesenin’s popularity continued after his death, as readers were drawn to his unconventional lifestyle and introspective poetry. This concerned the Communist leadership, who believed that Yesenin had both reflected and encouraged a growing sense of disaffection and “hooliganism” among Soviet youth. Numerous attacks on “Yeseninism” appeared in the Soviet press in 1926 and 1927. He was also criticized by the so-called proletarian writers for his anti-urban bias and individualism. As a result, official policy toward Yesenin’s works was ambivalent, and no new editions of his work were published between 1927 and 1948.
There was increased interest in Yesenin’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. His influence was evident on the rising generation of bard-singers, such as Vladimir Vysotsky, and also on the emerging “Village Prose” movement. One of Yesenin’s illegitimate sons, Alexander Volpin-Yesenin, was an early dissident and human rights advocate. Major collections of Esenin’s work include Radunitsa (1916), The Hooligan’s Confession (1921), and Selected Works (1922).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McVay, Gordon. (1976). Esenin: A Life. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis. Slonim, Marc. (1977). Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1977, 2nd rev. ed. London and New York: Oxford University Press.
(b. 1932), Russian poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, photographer, film actor; member of Congress of People’s Deputies, 1989-1991.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was brought up in Siberia by his mother; when she moved with him to Moscow in 1944 she registered his date of birth as 1933. He published his first poem in 1949 and his first book in 1952. Yevtushenko studied at the Union of Writers’ training school, the Gorky Literary Institute, Moscow, in the early 1950s. He emerged after 1956 as one of the leading lights of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, in many ways epitomizing its values and aspirations, and has remained a public figure ever since. His personal lyrics expressed a new and liberating sense of passionate individuality, and his poems on public themes called for and declared a fresh commitment to revolutionary idealism, in the spirit of Mayakovsky. His attitudes were underpinned by a frequently asserted commitment to the supremacy of Russia as a fountainhead of positive human values, notwithstanding Russia’s own dark history and the blandishments of Western civilization.
Yevtushenko declaimed his poetry in a histrionic manner that has reminded some Americans of U.S. fundamentalist preachers. In the early 1960s Yevtushenko became hugely popular in Russia, and his recitals (often in the company of his then wife Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bulat Okudzhava) attracted large crowds to the stadiums in which they were characteristically held. Yev-tushenko’s national and international reputation was established by two poems in particular, “Baby Yar” (published September 1961) and “The Heirs of Stalin” (published in Pravda, October 1962), which call respectively for unrelenting vigilance against anti-Semitism and the recurrence of Stalinism in Russia.
Yevtushenko soon began travelling abroad, a proclivity that has eventually taken him by his own count to ninety-five different countries. More than any other aspect of his activities, his freedom and frequency of travel led others to question the fundamental nature of his relationship with the Soviet authorities. His own protestations about how he was continually censored, rebuked, and restricted, and how he persistently used his position to plead for others in more parlous situations, have increasingly been interpreted as part and parcel of his conniving in being used as a licensed dissident
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whose fundamental adherence to the Soviet system and willingness to accommodate himself to it never wavered. His outstanding poetic mastery has never been in doubt, but beginning in the 1970s, the rise of poets who rejected Yevtushenko’s flamboyant style, public posturing, and acceptance of privilege led to a growing view of him as a figure of the hopelessly compromised past. Partly in response, Yevtushenko branched out into other areas of creativity. During the later 1980s he demonstratively led the way in publishing Russian poetry that had been censored during the Soviet period. Since the collapse of the USSR he has lived mainly in the United States, regularly traveling back to Russia for public appearances, and has continued to publish prolifically in a variety of genres and argue his case in media interviews. See also: MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; OKUDZHAVA, BULAT SHALOVICH; THAW, THE
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. (1991). The Collected Poems, 1952-1990, ed. Albert C. Todd. New York: Holt. Yevtushenko, Yevgeny. (1995). Don’t Die Before You’re Dead. New York: Random House.
GERALD SMITH
(1895-1940), USSR State Security chief (1936-1938); organizer of the Great Terror of 1937-1938.
Of humble origins and scant education, Nikolai Yezhov rose from tailor to industrial worker, soldier, and Red Army and Communist Party functionary. Since the early 1920s he was a provincial party secretary in Krasnokokshaisk (Mari province), Semipalatinsk, Orenburg, and Kzyl-Orda (Kazakh republic). In 1927 he was transferred to Moscow to become involved in personnel policy for the party Central Committee and the USSR People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. In 1930 he was promoted to chief of the Personnel Department of the Central Committee. In 1934 he was included in the Central Committee and appointed chief of the party Control Commission.
From 1935 on, as Secretary of the Central Committee, he was in the top echelon of the party. He was charged with supervising the USSR People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), or state
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security service, and its investigation of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov’s murder, as well as with organizing major purge operations in the party in order to curb the party apparatus, which Josef Stalin deemed too independent. From 1936 on he organized major show trials against Stalin’s rivals in the party. On September 25, 1936, Stalin appointed him People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. This was followed by a large purge operation in the NKVD involving the liquidation of his predecessor Genrikh Yagoda and his supporters, as well as mass arrests within the party.
On July 30, 1937, by order of Stalin and the Party Politburo, Yezhov issued NKVD Order 00447, “Concerning the Operation Aimed at the Subjecting to Repression of Former Kulaks, Criminals, and Other Anti-Soviet Elements.” The operation was to involve the arrest of almost 270,000 people, some 76,000 of whom were immediately to be shot. Their cases were to be considered by “troikas,” or bodies of the party chief, NKVD chief, and procurator of each USSR province, who were given quotas of arrests and executions. In return, the regional authorities requested even higher quotas, with the encouragement of the central leadership.
Another mass operation was directed against foreigners living in the USSR, especially those belonging to the nationalities of neighboring countries (e.g., Poles, Germans, Finns). The Great Terror was intended to liquidate elements thought insufficiently loyal, as well as alleged “spies.” All in all, from August 1937 through November 1938, more than 1.5 million people were arrested for counterrevolutionary and other crimes against the state, and nearly 700,000 of them were shot; the rest were sent to Gulag concentration camps. By order of Yezhov, and with
