The View from Lenin Hills

About a month ago, soon after Nikita Khrushchev touched off a general crackdown on modern art (TIME, Dec. 14), several hundred Soviet artists and writers were abruptly summoned to the modern, glass-walled reception palace at Lenin Hills, on the outskirts of Moscow. Khrushchev himself, it seemed, wanted to hear what poets and painters thought of the party line on avant-garde art. The argument raged for five hours, far into the night, and included several remarkably frank exchanges with the Soviet ruler.

One of the first to speak up was aging Journalist-Propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg, 71. Defending a Cezanne-like blue and purple canvas called Female Nude, done by Russian Painter Robert Falk in 1922, which Art Critic Khrushchev had derided, Ehrenburg said: "You and I, Nikita Sergeevich, are getting on and haven't got much time left. But Falk's painting will live as long as there are lovers of beauty." Next, Abstract Sculptor Ernst Neizvesnty, whose work also had been attacked by Nikita, took the floor. "You may not like my work, Comrade Khrushchev," the sculptor said, "but it has the warm admiration of such eminent Soviet scientists as Kapitsa and Landau." Retorted Khrushchev scornfully: "That's not why we admire Kapitsa and Landau."

Neizvesnty fell silent, but Official Kremlin Poet Evgeny Evtushenko rose to his friend's defense. "He came back from the war with 14 bullets in his body," said Evtushenko, "and I hope he will live many more years and produce many more fine works of art." "As people say," shot back Nikita brutally, "only the grave corrects a hunchback." Evtushenko managed a brave reply: "I hope, Comrade Khrushchev, we have outlived the time when the grave was used as a means of correction." The audience was stunned, then burst into applause; even Khrushchev sheepishly joined in.

Evtushenko's display of courage did not last long. Two weeks after the Lenin Hills meeting, the party's ideological boss, Leonid Ilyichev, called in the poet and a number of other young intellectuals for an attitude talk. Ilyichev was especially angry over Evtushenko's poem Babi Yar, which condemned Soviet anti-Semitism and which had just been enthusiastically received in a new symphonic setting by Composer Dmitry Shostakovich. Cultural commissars quickly canceled further performances of the symphony. As for the poem, said Ilyichev, it should be changed to include an attack on West Germany. After a sleepless night, Evtushenko agreed to "improve" Babi Yar.

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