A Poet's View of Glasnost

Yevgeni Yevtushenko, 53, has for three decades been the most famous poet in the Soviet Union, a country where poets often become national heroes. A young rebel in the late 1950s, he flourished during the cultural thaw of the Khrushchev years. After Brezhnev came to power in 1964, Yevtushenko adapted to more conservative times, becoming a supporter of the government and writing verse acceptable to the Kremlin. In this article written for TIME, he gives his views of the changes under Gorbachev:

In the winter of 1986 I passed through La Guardia Airport while on a hectic recital tour of the U.S. In the waiting area was a table loaded with anti- Soviet literature, a sort of monument to the cold war. Above the table was a sign: IF YOU ARE AGAINST THE ARMS RACE, YOU HAD BETTER STUDY RUSSIAN. I decided to have a chat with the two cheerful gentlemen who sat sipping soft drinks at the table. I wanted to find out why an American should study the language of Pushkin and Pasternak only if he felt threatened by a Soviet invasion.

I dropped my carry-on bag and started to talk with these two cold warriors. I had no evil intention, if that is possible for a representative of the evil empire. But at that point something unexpected happened. There came an ominous buzzing from my carry-on bag. The two warriors, eyes popping, ran from the waiting area. Others heard it and did the same. I saw a policeman dive under a bench, and the room was suddenly empty except for me and my bag.

I knew, of course, that there was no bomb in the bag, but I couldn't imagine what was making the noise. I opened it and discovered that my electric razor had turned on when I dropped the bag. I laughed and showed the buzzing razor to the terrified people, who were peering cautiously from the corridor. The policeman crawled from under the bench, and the two warriors returned to their table. We all laughed together.

Funny, perhaps, but sad too. The fear of terror in the skies and on the earth is so great that a self-starting shaver can be taken for a bomb. And that is how it is in relations between the Soviet Union and the U.S. We see warheads jutting from each other's baggage, and we live in mutual fear.

Maybe it is time to open our bags, to stop taking the fatal risk of mistrust. We do not know each other well enough, and this is our common misfortune. The Iron Curtain is in ruins, but enough of its remnants remain standing to block our vision. We see each other through newspapers, which unfortunately are not transparent.

What do we carry in our Russian baggage? Well, we have two new words: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). Some in the West mock these words as nothing but lofty sounding political deception. But are they? I have some experience with bitter disappointments in the past, and at first I withheld judgment about glasnost and perestroika. I hesitated to predict a rosy future. But facts are facts, and they are stubborn as a mule.

What is glasnost? One could describe glasnost metaphorically as the air above and the national economy as the earth below. It is easier and faster to refresh the air than it is to turn and fertilize the earth, yet purified air is necessary before healthy changes can be made in the earth. So it is too early for us to speak of economic triumphs, and unlike the old days, nobody is making any messianic promises. We must wait for the earth to absorb the air, and be enriched.

Meanwhile there are injustices in our lives. There is violation of the law. The rights provided under our constitution are being infringed. There are corruption, bureaucratic stagnation and endless shortages. We are fighting these things, fighting against the cowardly phrase "What if . . . ?" that wallows in our minds and hinders us. Yet there is progress.

In a surprisingly short time the chemistry of our country's air has undergone important, refreshing changes. Only a blind man could fail to see it or call it a political fraud. Glasnost is not a deception. It is an evolution. Gorbachev did not invent it, nor did he impose it from above, as those in the West sometimes believe. In his desire to accelerate the development of openness and the economy, he is reflecting the historical imperatives that have emerged from our people themselves.

Consider Chernobyl. Had this misfortune occurred in the Stalin era, I am sure that our press would have immediately hinted at the possibility of an American conspiracy. That was the case in the early postwar years when a poor harvest in the Ukraine was blamed on Americans who supposedly conspired to put Colorado beetles into the fields. But our press did not make a secret of Chernobyl. Those responsible for the tragedy have been identified. Chernobyl has been opened to foreigners, including the American Dr. Robert Gale.

In the Soviet media we are seeing a complex but expanding process of "de- tabooization." High officials are openly criticized, including government ministers and regional party first secretaries, some of whom are members of the Central Committee. This criticism is not always followed by dismissals, as would have happened in the past, which means that criticism now is a standard for behavior and not a tool of punishment. There have been cases when sycophantic bosses, to curry favor, punished underlings who objected to some aspect of the campaign for restructuring our economy -- and those bosses were in turn severely chastised for attempting to silence dissent.

Another example of what is happening: during the congress of Soviet filmmakers last May, Gorbachev interrupted a speaker who in keeping with past practice had begun paying elaborate compliments to the new General Secretary. In all my 53 years I had never seen anything like that. Brownnosing is out of style.

In the past, an increase in international tension was always accompanied by increases in editorial censorship. Just after Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Mo., in 1946, Andrei Zhdanov issued his notorious edict subjecting Poet Anna Akhmatova and Writer Mikhail Zoshchenko to insulting criticism. Two years later Dmitri Shostakovich's music was denounced as unpatriotic.

Then we had our famous but short-lived thaw. It came to an end when Khrushchev, unnerved by the Cuban missile crisis, scornfully attacked a number of writers and artists. Later, during his retirement, Khrushchev asked me to convey his belated apologies to some of them. So, always in the past, when the international climate cooled, the ideological screws were tightened.

Not today. Despite a painfully difficult dialogue with the American Administration and despite the unfortunate failure in mutual understanding at Reykjavik -- and even though a West European leader let slip a shocking comparison of our leader with Goebbels -- glasnost is expanding and gaining in strength. True, it is sometimes sabotaged by those creaky armchair warriors who feel their comfortable seats being pulled from under them. But they will not succeed.

Back in 1958 I witnessed the expulsion of Boris Pasternak from the Writers' ( Union. Some even demanded that he be thrown out of the country. They called him a "pig rooting in our Soviet garden." Today Historian Dmitri Likhachev in a Literaturnaya Gazeta article unequivocally demands that Doctor Zhivago be published. Today our literary journals are preparing important books for publication: Vladimir Dudintsev writing about Stalin's suppression of genetics; Anatoli Pristavkin on the forced resettlement of ethnic Chechens from the Caucasus; Anatoli Rybakov on the assassination of Sergei Kirov. All these subjects were banned in the past.

Already published is Chingiz Aitmatov's The Executioner's Scaffold, which removed the taboo from the subject of drug addiction in our country. Poet Andrei Voznesensky published his powerful The Ditch, a piece about thieves who robbed the graves of Nazi victims. Mikhail Shatrov's antidictatorship play Dictatorship of Conscience is being performed.

A recent official exhibit of young artists in Moscow included various artistic approaches: realism, surrealism, hyper realism, pop art, abstract art. Barriers have been removed from the development of jazz and rock music.

Soviet filmmakers, whose professional union is now headed by a former black sheep, have released a number of great films that had been banned. Recently Moscow television showed a 90-minute film about the late Poet-Singer Vladimir Vysotsky, who, when alive, never held in his hands a single album of his songs except those made in the West. For the first time in years, Soviet television is presenting live, unrehearsed broadcasts.

The illustrated weekly Ogonyok, which formerly was tedious fodder for waiting-room tables, is now headed by an energetic managing editor who has transformed it into a sharply contentious publication. Znamya magazine has just published Andrei Platonov's Juvenile Sea, which had been sitting in the archives for 52 years.

We are beginning to show political maturity. We are beginning to gather together our spiritual heritage. This must be acknowledged by even the most severe critics of our country. I believe that Soviet art is at a stage of pre- Renaissance, and that the whole society is following in the same direction. The first sign of a society's maturity is tolerance.

I do not idealize what is happening, and I know from my own experience that there remains much for which we will have to fight. But Soviet writers know how to fight for glasnost, for the right to one's own opinion. We do not take - it as a gift. Glasnost is us. We fought for it for many years past. The words of writers have been listened to in this country in the past, and they are heeded now more than ever.

But sometimes it seems that in the West, and especially in the U.S., there is also room for opening and restructuring. Armchair warriors exist not only in our socialist world but in the capitalist one. The difference is that ours build their careers on uncritical pro-Sovietism and yours build their careers on blind anti-Sovietism. John F. Kennedy was right when he said that the real borders are not the ones that divide countries, but the ones that divide people. Your hard-liners do not want international tensions to diminish. They do not want glasnost and freedom to develop in the U.S.S.R. because they need an unfree Soviet Union as a bogeyman to frighten their voters and to prevent more talented, democratic and tolerant people from gaining control of the country's destiny.

I began with an instructive story. I will end with another. In 1966 the Soviet Union experienced its first great dissident event of the post-Stalin era -- the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, writers whose books were published in the West under the pen names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak. Somebody had revealed their real names, and they were immediately arrested on orders of then KGB Chief Vladimir Semichastny. I was one of the Soviet writers who protested that trial.

It happened that soon after the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in 1966 I went on a tour of the U.S., and while in New York City I was the guest of Senator Robert Kennedy in his Manhattan apartment. To my surprise, he invited me into his bathroom, turned on the shower, and in a lowered voice he said, "I would like you to tell your government that the names of Sinyavsky and Daniel were given to your agents by our agents." I was amazed, and I asked him why they would have done that. He smiled at my naivete and said, "Because our people wanted to take advantage of the situation, and your people took the bait. Because of Viet Nam, our standing has begun to diminish both at home and abroad. We needed a propaganda counterweight." The cynical logic of this was shattering. There is more to this story, but the time has not come to tell it. I am parting the curtain on this episode for the first time in 21 years.

So when we have emptied our baggage on the table of history, humanity will learn many interesting and cautionary truths. Meanwhile, we should not always ; suspect each other's bags contain bombs, even if strange buzzing sounds come from them.