A Precocious Autobiography

"Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a poet and the equivalent of a rock star in the 1960s in the Soviet Union. When Khrushchev made his qualified denunciation of Stalin in 1956, it was a bit like perestroika decades later, a moment of very excited discussion about ‘What kind of society are we?’, ‘Where should we be going?’ And, specifically, ‘Let’s purify communism.’ In other words, communism is still a great idea, but there have been failures of implementation. We’re ashamed about that, and we want to make it better. Yevtushenko is of the generation that wants to make it better. He’s from a curious background. He was born in Siberia, but brought to Moscow as a child. His parents separated. His mother went off to the war, and he describes himself as an eight year old living on his own in Moscow. So he grew up very rough and tumble. He was always like that, but he had this passionate wish to be a poet, which, in Western terms, is a little bit strange. But in Russian terms, a poet is a tremendously attractive thing to be. Yevtushenko was the kind of poet who read out poems calling for people to be truthful and sincere. He read them with great emotion, and big crowds started to gather. He ended up reading his poetry in football stadiums. It was in this context of being a rock-star poet that he wrote his autobiography at a very young age. It gives fascinating details about his life, which is not quite what you would have expected it to be. But it’s also a manifesto in favor of what would later be called ‘socialism with a human face.’ There are a lot of statements in the book saying, ‘I will never hide the wrong things that have gone on here, but I’m still an absolute patriot of the Soviet Union, and I believe in the socialist future’—as no doubt at the time, and perhaps always, he did. The memoir is a kind of monument to a particular way of thinking that didn’t survive the Khrushchev period. When Khrushchev was overthrown, and you get into the Brezhnev period, there’s a backing off from that. It’s not a repudiation of the reform impulse, but more of a ‘Let’s not get too excited about this thing.’ He was born in the 1930s, and it was published in the early 60s—so he gets to what was then the present. Yes. What is so striking is the conviction with which he believes that it can all be reformed, and the excitement. There is this “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” feeling which was characteristic of that period of the thaw, the Khrushchev thaw. It was also a characteristic of perestroika, and had there been a perestroika memoir of similar power, I could have chosen that. But I couldn’t think of one that fitted—perhaps it will show up at some future time. Well, they took it so seriously. The intelligentsia, of course, took it seriously, but the regime took it seriously as well. In general, the regime was very wedded to high culture. The aspect of that we most often notice is that they want to control it, so they would discipline people when they stepped out of line. But the other part of it is they really wanted to bring high culture to the masses, and they did that relentlessly for 70 years. Literature is the very quintessence of high culture in the Russian approach. That’s why you can have a street kid like Yevtushenko, who thinks it would be a great thing to be a poet. Yes, Khrushchev had been pushed out. I decided I had to go there because some people said the Soviet Union was like this, and other people said it was like that. I thought, ‘If I’m going to work on it, I have to go and see for myself.’ I wrote about this in my memoir, A Spy in the Archives . It was not easy because of the Iron Curtain. But I finally got myself on a British exchange, and I had the great good fortune to become friendly with people in the circle of the in-system reform journal I referred to, Novy Mir, from which I learned an enormous amount. But the atmosphere that I arrived in was not that atmosphere of hope. It was 5-7 years after that, and everybody remembered that they had had that feeling of hope and excitement, and they didn’t have it anymore. They were probably prone to excessive pessimism about how far Brezhnev was going to go back to Stalinism. He wasn’t really going to go back to Stalinism, but they had the feeling he was. So the air had really been let out of that balloon before I arrived. But it was totally fascinating to be there. Before I went, I had read the Western, Sovietological accounts, which basically said, ‘This is a very bad, tyrannical, totalitarian state.’ Then there was the other line that went, ‘No, this is a socialist state in the making.’ When I arrived, I remember my first reaction was, ‘This is the Third World.’ In other words, it’s neither of those things. It’s a backward place trying to become more modern. They didn’t have plastics yet: when you bought something in a shop, they just put it on a piece of butcher paper, and you took it away in your string bag. In many ways, what came across was an aspiration that hadn’t been realized. Things were getting better materially in the Soviet Union, but they were coming from a very low base, and my goodness, they had a long way to go. The other fascinating thing was that we had been told that as British students, nobody would speak to us because they thought we were spies. We were told we would have to accept that we were going to have a lonely year. Nobody had a lonely year. Everybody made really close friends in the Russian manner. Russian friends support each other totally. Almost all of us found a group and had a lovely time. That, of course, had nothing to do with the regime or approval of the regime, but had to do with the way Russians conduct their social lives. Yes, I lived in the big Moscow University dormitory. It’s one of those wedding cake buildings in Moscow near the river. Travel was difficult. We were not allowed to go more than 40 kilometers out of the center of Moscow. You could apply for what was called the ‘ komandirovka’—a work trip to somewhere. I went to Leningrad, for example. But Moscow was my world. Later, in the 1980s, yes, but the first 15 years I was there, it was difficult to go to dachas. Many of the close friends we had did have dachas. But to actually take us there was iffy. Most people didn’t have cars yet. When they invited us over, it was to their crowded, sometimes communal apartments in Moscow."