The Magical Chorus

The poet was required to write an explanation, in which, describing himself later as a “clever and rather nimble Mowgli of the Soviet jungles,” he declared: “During my trips abroad with the goal of propagandizing the ideas of our Homeland, I sometimes feel myself ideologically unarmed in the struggle with our enemies, for I am not familiar with the primary sources on which they base their shameless hatred. It is impossible to get many of these primary sources in the USSR, even in the special archives of the Lenin Library. That is why I brought in these books—not for distribution but in order to raise my ideological vigilance.”¹⁷

Amazingly, after such a demarche and after an audience with General Filipp Bobkov, head of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, in charge of cultural exchange with the West, the poet got back almost all of the confiscated books.

The KGB was harder on less famous and less connected Soviet intellectuals. The Criminal Code had, in Solzhenitsyn’s sarcastic definition, “the majestic, mighty, fruitful, multibranched, variegated, all-encompassing article Fifty-Eight,” which threatened harsh punishment for so-called “counterrevolutionary, anti-Soviet activity.” Paragraph 10 of this article called for severe punishment for “propaganda or agitation containing a call for the overthrow, undermining, or weakening of the Soviet regime…and equally for the distribution or preparation or possession of literature of such content.”

This paragraph was interpreted extremely expansively: according to Solzhenitsyn, almost any idea, spoken or written, could in the Soviet years fall under the notorious article 58. Everyone knew of some person or other who ended up in the camps for books and manuscripts of an “anti-Soviet” content found during a search. Tragic curiosities abounded. In Riga, in the early 1950s, a friend of my father’s was sent to seven years in the camps for possession of the books The Turbulent Life of Lazik Roitshvanets and In Protochny Alley, published in the 1920s. The sentence described both books as anti-Soviet, but did not name the author, with good reason: he was Ilya Ehrenburg, winner of two Stalin Prizes, who at that time represented Riga as deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

During all the years of the Soviet regime, even under Gorbachev, a book of suspicious content, especially if published in the West, found during a search could ruin a person’s life. That is why people who lent each other tamizdat and samizdat literature (often these books were borrowed overnight and read by the whole family and close friends as well) had to use conspiracy methods, often quite clumsy, like the following telephone conversation: “Have you eaten the pie I gave you yesterday?” “Yes.” “And your wife, too?” “Yes, she has.” “Well then, pass the pie to Nikolai, he wants to taste it, too.”

That the Soviet secret police took stopping the flow of undesirable books from the West seriously and how widely it opened its nets to do so can be seen from a recently declassified report from Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, to Leonid Brezhnev on May 6, 1968, where he proudly reported that in a year “in the international mail channels more than 114 thousand letters and packages with anti-Soviet and politically harmful literature were confiscated.”¹⁸

That enormous flow of “politically harmful” materials included quite a few copies of the secret speech made by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956. The speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” was the first expose of Stalin’s crimes coming from the ruling party, and therefore it was a sensational event both in the Soviet Union and in the West, reported by The New York Times and other newspapers. Inside the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech was read to party members at first, then classified until 1989.

Stocky, round-headed, and bald, Khrushchev was a politician to the core, hard to pin down, sly, stubborn, and most importantly, inordinately energetic. Compared to Lenin and Stalin, he was uneducated.¹⁹ Khrushchev’s numerous and often very long speeches were chaotic improvisations, as he would get carried away. Like a poet, he was borne on the wings of his own eloquence. At the end of his life, Khrushchev dictated memoirs that were meant to fix the author’s progressive image in the minds of posterity. (Later the poet Andrei Voznesensky would note dryly: “Khrushchev delights me as a stylist.”)²⁰

The peak of Khrushchev’s career was his anti-Stalin speech, prepared as usual by a group of advisors. But there are quite a few vivid details in that oration that were obviously introduced by Khrushchev himself. It was Khrushchev who first quoted some of Stalin’s memorable phrases, for example, Stalin’s statement on how he would deal with the rebellious leader of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito: “Here, I wiggle my pinky and there is no Tito.” In his “secret” speech, Khrushchev sarcastically added: “Those ‘pinky wiggles’ cost us a lot.”²¹

Khrushchev generated some truly poetic ideas. On his orders, Stalin’s mummy was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square, the virgin soil in Kazakhstan was plowed up, and the first man was sent into space. Khrushchev’s political slogans were also of a literary bent, straight out of science fiction: “Today’s generation of Soviet people will live under Communism!” “Catch up to and surpass the U.S.A. in production of meat, butter, and milk per capita!” and the infamous remark addressed to the Unites States—“We will bury you.”

No contemporary writer could ever compete with such proclamations, which literally made the world freeze in fear. But a group of young Russian poets nevertheless managed to rise above the political clutter. Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, and Bulat Okudzhava became widely popular.

The most famous of them was the tall, rangy, loud, and inexhaustible Yevtushenko; according to his own calculations, he has appeared in ninety-four countries, and his poetry has been translated into seventy-two languages. People everywhere—in Russia, France, the United States, Israel—knew that in 1961 Yevtushenko published the poem “Babi Yar,” about Jews killed by the Nazis in Ukraine during World War II. This poem was also perceived as a condemnation of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Yevtushenko became the poetic chronicler of political change in the Soviet Union, sometimes running ahead (which would make the government crack down on him, inevitably leading to a surge in his popularity at home and in the West), sometimes falling behind (which made just the opposite happen). Khrushchev was an unpredictable captain, and on his ship people were thrown left and then right, their heads spinning. Yevtushenko had the gift for simple, accessible, and effective poetic slogans expressing the essence of the bewildering changes.

Voznesensky once said that Yevtushenko had created a special genre—“poetic journalism.”²² Thousands of people attended his readings, and with his comrades Yevtushenko filled enormous soccer stadiums with standing-room crowds of admirers. The old Bolshevik and Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan said in amazement that it was the first time he ever saw people standing in line not for meat or sugar but for poetry.

Alexander Tvardovsky often said that real poems were ones memorized by people who were not interested in poetry. If we accept Tvardovsky’s criterion, then any anthology of twentieth-century Russian poetry, however selective, will include a dozen or so poems by Yevtushenko and Voznesensky.

Voznesensky was the more experimental, resembling his idol Pasternak and also the early Mayakovsky, with striking, often shocking imagery and elaborate rhyme schemes. He became the most easily translatable modern Russian poet because his poetic approach was largely visual, with a strong surrealistic bent, and thus more accessible to Western intellectuals.

Yevtushenko’s self-fashioning followed the long Russian literary tradition from Blok through Esenin and Mayakovsky down to Akhmatova, the great master of self-creation. In the very first line of his official Soviet biography—“Yevgeny Yevtushenko was born July 18, 1933, at Zima Junction, Irkutsk Region”²³—there are at least three deviations from the facts. Yevtushenko’s father’s surname was Gangnus, he was born a year earlier, in 1932, and not at Zima Junction, but at