A Protest Signed Evtushenko

"I don't know how to sleep. I don't know how to continue living. All I know is that I have a moral duty to express to you the feelings that over power me. I am deeply concerned that our action in Czechoslovakia is a tragic mistake and a bitter blow against Soviet-Czech friendship and the world Communist movement."

So began a passionate telegram of protest that, reported the London Sunday Times in a copyrighted story last week, had been sent by Soviet Poet Evgeny Evtushenko to Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin on Aug. 22, the day after Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia. If Evtushenko was indeed the author, it was a bold and surprising act. Once the daring young man of Russia's liberals, in recent years the poet has become a kind of safe Establishment rebel. He wielded a careful pen, which earned him gaudy trips around the world, reading his works as a representative of the nation's arts. There was some suspicion that his protest telegram might be a forgery, possibly committed by the Soviet Secret Service, which has been known to use this method when it wants to incriminate an intellectual for some reason. But many Sovietologists believe that the message may be authentic. Certainly, it rang with a poet's anguish, as it lamented the invasion.

"It lowers our prestige in the world and in our own eyes.

"It is a setback for all progressive forces--for peace in the world and for humanity's dreams of future brotherhood.

"Also, it is a personal tragedy for me because I have many personal friends in Czechoslovakia and I don't know how I will be able to look into their eyes if I should ever meet them again.

"And it seems to me that it is a great gift for all reactionary forces in the world and so we cannot foresee the consequences of this action.

"I love my country and my people, and I am a modest inheritor of the traditions of Russian literature, of such writers as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. These traditions have taught me that silence is sometimes a disgrace.

"Please place on record my opinion about this action as the opinion of an honest son of his country and of the poet who once wrote the song, 'Do the Russians Want War?' "

When he was telephoned by a U.S. newsman in Moscow, Evtushenko angrily denied having "sent them the letter." Presumably Evtushenko was referring to the editors of the Sunday Times, not the rulers of Russia. It was a crucial distinction. Under Russian law, he is free to write such criticism privately to officials. But sending such a letter or telegram outside the Soviet Union could constitute distributing "anti-Soviet propaganda," and make him liable to imprisonment for seven years.

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