A Tomb with a Telephone

Verse is not the usual medium through which Russia's masters express themselves, but last week an obvious political hint was to be found in a poem.

Some Westerners believe that things must be made "easier" for Khrushchev by the West if he is not to fall prey to neo-Stalinist reactionaries. Moscow often seems eager to encourage this view, even though officially it has pronounced Stalinism as dead as Old Joe himself. Since early this year, Poet Evgeny Evtushenko (TIME cover, April 13), most popular spokesman of Russia's restive younger generation, has recited for trusted friends an eloquent, venomous attack on Stalinism that he considered too hot to publish. For a while, the poem circulated through Russia's mysterious poetic underground, until last week it was printed in full by the party newspaper Pravda. For whatever purpose, the party evidently wanted to suggest that Stalinism still exists, and that Khrushchev is its enemy.

According to the poem, Stalin is only pretending to be dead. "Inside his grave," cries Evtushenko, "I envisage a phone" whose wires lead to Albania's Strongman Enver Hoxha. In a clear allusion to Rose-Fancier Vyacheslav Molotov, the poem says that some of Stalin's other heirs "prune roses in retirement, and secretly consider retirement only temporary." Some secret Stalinists "curse Stalin from the podium; but then, by night, they long for the old days." To foil their ambitions, Evtushenko pleads:

Double, no, treble the guard by his slab To keep Stalin from rising, and with Stalin the past.

No, Stalin has not surrendered. He thinks death can be repaired. The Communist youth paper Komsomolskaya Pravda last week gave over a page to eight additional Evtushenko poems, including another anti-Stalinist tirade. By week's end, slightly dazed Russian readers found still another Evtushenko work, this one contributed from Havana, where he is writing the scenario for a movie about Castro's revolution. Couched in the form of a Letter to America, it was a predictable tirade against the U.S. blockade of that "small but courageous island which is becoming a great country." The U.S., charged Evtushenko, first forced the Cubans to arm by threatening their independence, and then sanctimoniously accused them of having arms. Cried he:

How could you, America, Permit the shouting from tribunes high Of words that do shame to liberty?

Pravda reported that Letter to America had been phoned in by the poet from Cuba. Evidently, like Stalin in his grave, Evtushenko has a telephone--but his is securely connected with the party line.

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