That Strange Time

I am not retreating one damned step.

It is good to be angry at untruth.

So. in the full flush of destalinization, wrote Evgeny Evtushenko. 29. the Russian poet whose honest rage at the cant and callousness of Soviet society has made him the idol of his generation. For a while, in fact, it seemed as if Evtushenko (TIME cover. April 13. 1962) had become a semiofficial Angry Young Marxist, whose occasional excesses were tolerated by the regime because they made it appear as if Khrushchev's Communism could actually accept criticism. If so, Evtushenko pushed his luck too far.

Vain Apologies. During a swing through France and West Germany early this year, the dashing young poet was lionized at parties (including a masquerade ball during Munich's annual Carnival) by pleasure-loving bourgeois intellectuals. He even held a series of freewheeling press conferences. Heaping scorn on the party fossils whose hackwork wins the Stalin Prize each year, Evtushenko actually blamed Stalin's reign of terror on the dictator's "close associates"--of whom, though he did not say so, Nikita Khrushchev is the dean emeritus. The poet's most audacious gesture of independence was to give the editors of France's L'Express his autobiography for publication, knowing well that no Soviet writer is permitted to publish abroad without first getting clearance from the censors.

Cued by Khrushchev himself, who recently rapped Evtushenko for "cheap sensationalism." a three-day meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers last month addressed itself almost exclusively to destroying the cult of Evtushenko. In all, close to 40 tame authors trooped monotonously forward to denounce Evtushenko and other liberal young writers for offenses ranging from bad rhymes to "sacrilegious statements" about the Revolution. Though Evtushenko made abject apologies for his "irrevocable mistake.'' the drumfire of criticism only grew louder and more insistent.

Mutter in Minsk. Last week the Soviet press fumed that Evtushenko and other young writers should not be allowed to travel abroad until they "mature politically." When a West German girl was detained at the Soviet border on charges of smuggling caviar, Izvestia brought Evtushenko into it by charging that she had met Evtushenko in Germany and from him had learned all about "fashionable Moscow youth." In Minsk, where Dmitry Shostakovich's new 13th Symphony was performed for the first time outside Moscow, a critic castigated the composer for basing part of his score on Evtushenko's famed poem. Babi Yar, a savage indictment of Soviet anti-Semitism that the literary commissars have already made Evtushenko revise.

Though Khrushchev was plainly out to make Evtushenko the scapegoat, the campaign against the poet was only part of a new. systematic attempt to clamp strict party controls on the theater, music, art, book publishing, industrial design, and every other field in which young Communists might be tempted to voice independent thoughts. It was once more that "strange time." as Evtushenko wrote in 1960. "when common integrity could be called courage."

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