At the same time it must be borne in mind that it was precisely the radical youth who made up the bulk of the audience of the critical writers. There were no frontiers between radicalism and liberalism. Broadly speaking, the differences between them were not so much in ideology as in mood. Members of the ‘liberal’ intelligentsia of the fifties and sixties were not at all disposed to wait passively for democratization to occur. They strove to promote it and clashed with the authorities, even though they did not regard the latter as fundamentally vicious. All the same, their protest was not political but cultural and moral. The journal Der Spiegel wrote that ‘the revolt of the writers, especially the Russians among them, is philosophical rather than political.’83 The same logic of ideological development which impelled the students to form secret societies impelled them to struggle openly for purity of ideas. Roy Medvedev wrote:
In those years, the literature on Stalinism never posed the problem of the regime’s power in direct terms; indirectly, however, it brought up questions in people’s minds: How could such things have happened? Was the system somehow defective?84
But primarily — and this was natural for writers — they exposed not the organizational but the moral and psychological defects of the system, while trying to counterpose to it their own moral ideal,' their own beliefs.
Of greatest interest for an analysis of the Khrushchev era is, perhaps, the figure of Yevtushenko. The period of the Twentieth Congress engendered a new poetry and new poets. ‘This “public” poet par excellence’, an American observer remarked later, ‘symbolized the anti-Stalinist rebellion of the 1950s and early 1960s.’85 Yevtushenko symbolized the new poetry. In his Political Diary for 1966 Medvedev wrote that he embodied ‘all the merits and all the shortcomings’ of the new poets who became the idols of youth after 1956.86 ‘His popularity’, said an American writer, with surprise, ‘is comparable to that of a movie star in the West.’87
Yevtushenko’s attitude to the system is a mixture of protest with admiration for leaders who made up their minds to expose Stalin. ‘Criticising’, he said in those days, ‘does not mean getting angry, it means loving ardently. And how can I repudiate Soviet reality? Soviet life is my life!’88 Like the rebels of the fifties, he came to the conclusion that ‘we must fight to the death against those who preach Communism in theory while in practice discrediting it. I guessed’, he emphasized, ‘that this fight would be protracted and complex. Persons who look on Communism as almost their monopoly, usually say that anyone who attacks the distortion of Lenin’s ideas is attacking the fundamentals of Leninism.’89 On their part, the Left radicals and liberals of the sixties considered themselves the true bearers of Lenin’s ideas. The intellectuals were convinced that they, and not the ruling bureaucracy, gave authentic expression to Communist principles, and this was partly true. Doubt was not cast upon the actual principles of Bolshevism. Furthermore, the opposition did not yet perceive the fundamental contradiction between its principles and aims and those of the government. After the Twentieth Congress illusions and hopes were so strong that neither Khrushchev’s waverings nor the suppression of the 1956 revolution in Hungary could shake them. De-Stalinization seemed not only irreversible but also irrepressible. Yevtushenko wrote:
I don’t agree with the use of the word ‘thaw’ taken over from Ehrenburg to describe this process. I have objected to it several times in the press and should like to object again. There can be a thaw in winter, but the present season is the spring — a difficult spring with late frosts and cold winds; a spring which takes a step to the left, a step to the right and a step back, but which then takes two or three steps forward all the same.90
Yevtushenko’s autobiography, in which he tried to formulate his views, was published in the West, where it struck many readers as extremely naïve, although Deutscher, for example, stressed that, from a man brought up in Stalinist society ‘his occasional naïvetés are hardly surprising.’91 It is important to realize, though, that in this respect Yevtushenko was not alone. Others thought just as he did. Nevertheless, the democratic intelligentsia discovered very soon that liberalization had limits that were sharply drawn by the rulers. True, as we shall see later, these limits shifted, albeit not without pressure from the opposition. All the same, limits there were, and that was a reality one had to reckon with. One of the questions where these limits made themselves apparent was anti-Semitism.
On 19 September 1961 Literaturnaya Gazeta published Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar, devoted to the massacre of Kiev’s Jews by the Hitlerites. It might seem that there was nothing reprehensible in that, but Yevtushenko had ‘dared’ to mention our own home-grown anti-Semites as well. Their response was not long in coming. The editors of Literaturnaya Gazeta had decided to publish this poem only after some hesitation, expecting some unpleasantness. Their fear was justified, as often happens in such cases. Babi Yar produced a storm of indignation in the ruling class, and among those who took offence was Khrushchev himself. ‘There is no Jewish question in our country,’ he declared, ‘and those who invent it are slavishly repeating what other people say.’92 According to Khrushchev, ‘the poem reveals that its author… was ignorant of historical facts.’93 In reality, of course, it was Khrushchev who showed himself to be ‘ignorant of historical facts’ when he alleged that even in Tsarist Russia there had been no discrimination against the Jews, and the Jewish poor simply ‘shared the plight of the Russian, Ukrainian and other workers.’94 He even tried to avoid recalling the policy of complete extermination of the Jews which the Hitlerites had carried out in the occupied territories. His line enabled the anti-Semites to lift their heads. Literaturnaya Zhizn' wrote, ironically:
Standing on the brink of Babi Yar a young Soviet writer found there only a subject for verses about anti-Semitism! And, thinking today about the people who were killed — ‘the old man shot’, ‘the child shot’ — he could think only about the fact that they were Jews. That was what seemed to him most important, the main thing, the most stirring aspect!.. 95
The newspaper omitted to mention, of course, that these old men and children were shot precisely because they had the misfortune to be born Jewish. It is important that Yevtushenko did not write about Soviet anti-Semites but merely referred to the pre-revolutionary Black Hundreds. However, as they say, an uneasy conscience betrays itself. Those who launched the campaign against Yevtushenko gave their own game away.
Although the moral victory fell to the Lefts, the Babi Yar affair showed that there were definite limits beyond which the liberalism of the rulers would not go. In general the question of anti-Semitism is not in itself of central importance either ideologically or politically, especially since the official line of the authorities repudiates the anti-Semites. But Yevtushenko had trodden on the prejudices of the ruling class and had ‘received the rebuff he deserved’, even though he had not attacked the foundations of the system.96 At times the limits of liberalization proved extremely narrow.