"We Humiliate Ourselves"

By Yevgeny Yevtushenko Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

With the flowering of glasnost, some extraordinary things have begun appearing in the Soviet press. Among the more remarkable is this essay by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko, 54, published last month in the journal Literaturnaya Gazeta. Excerpts:

I can't remember the first time I heard that profoundly Russian, tragically all-embracing word priterpelost ((servile patience)). But it came to mind of late.

"Forgive the present, Yevgeny Alexandrovich, but it's a precious thing nowadays," said a distant relative as she put a sack of sugar, almost impossible to find, on our May Day holiday table. This was in the 71st year of Soviet power, over 40 years after the war! And suddenly I caught myself happy with the small domestic predatory joy of obtaining, which for so many of us substitutes for any real joy of existence. The woman sighed and said, "Look what we've come to . . . And it's all the fault of our damned priterpelost . . ."

I couldn't put it any better. The word expresses respect for patience. There ^ is patience and tolerance worthy of respect -- the patience of a woman suffering in labor, the patience of real creators at work, the patience of people under torture who will not name their friends. But there is also useless, humiliating patience. How can we respect ourselves if we allow such disrespect for ourselves every day? Every queue, every shortage shows our society's disrespect for itself.

We're used to blaming others, in particular the government, for shortages and other problems. Now, thank goodness, we have begun speaking not only of Stalin's personal guilt, but of the guilt of his entourage for crimes against the people. Let's be honest and admit that it was not only the ruling clique that was guilty, but the people as well, who allowed the clique to do whatever it wanted. Permitting crimes is a form of participating in them, and historically, we are used to permitting them. That is priterpelost. It is time to stop blaming everything on the bureaucracy. If we put up with it, then we deserve it.

Let's take a seeming "trifle," the disappearance of sugar. Whose fault is it? The Central Committee's? The Council of Ministers'? Of course, they are at fault. But aren't you and I too? We have come to tolerate the disappearance of one item and then another. How can we be surprised at tolerating the disappearance of such relatively minor things when just yesterday we put up with the disappearance of so many people?

Let us get down to the causes of why sugar is a pathetically precious gift on the day of international solidarity of workers. Our new leaders took a fearless look into the eyes of statistical truth about alcoholism and its consequences. They gasped. A harsh, radical decision was taken. But the emotion, quite justified, was not supported, unfortunately, by a long-range, well-worked-out plan. An appearance of discussion was organized -- in the old way, by fishing for supporting voices.

Sometimes I think bitterly: What if the April Fool issue of Pravda published a party and government resolution calling for a campaign against sobriety? I'm sure that "faithful soldiers of the party" would immediately organize "large meetings of the workers" in support of this "historic decision." Brave highway patrolmen would enthusiastically start taking away the driver's licenses of all drivers who did not reek of vodka. I can imagine the show trials of nondrinkers, the denunciations of party members observed amorally drinking mineral water in restaurants.

The first method of slowing down perestroika is sabotage in the guise of support. The second is stifling with embrace. The idea of fighting alcoholism, correct in principle, has been stifled by delighted embrace and ruined by distorted, hypocritical enthusiasm. A bottle of white lightning can poison a man. A bottle of good wine can be a good dinner companion. But our wine production was automatically curtailed; precious vineyards were ruthlessly chopped down. Alcoholism is a socially dangerous condition that must be treated punitively, but who has the right to take away from a man who is not an alcoholic his right to a mug of beer after work, his glass of natural wine or champagne?

Why did the entire nation become suspected of being alcoholics and, after waiting in other humiliating queues, have to queue up for even more hours? The reason is our tolerance of mindless execution of all decisions. Not only time and mental health are destroyed in queues: people are destroyed. The first harsh anti-alcoholism measures came as positive shock therapy. But you can't have daily social shock therapy; the society's nervous system will collapse, revealing many unexpected ulcers.

The campaign against alcoholism has been turned into a campaign against legal vodka, legal wine, legal beer. State vodka and wine, whose quality has dropped in recent years but still must meet government standards, have yielded to moonshine made out of the devil knows what, including lotions and callus removers. I admit that, chilled to the bone one night in Kamchatka, I had a shot of the local moonshine made from tomato paste. The next day my feet were swollen with arthritis so painfully I wanted to howl. The doctor who gave me an injection made an accurate diagnosis: "Our famous tomato brew."

How can we be surprised that sugar is suddenly scarce? It was bound to disappear. And shouldn't society as a whole, you and I, and not just the government, have foreseen this? Society needs not just farseeing people but also foreseeing people. The only democratic society is the one that feels it governs from bottom to top -- and is not governed by the top, awaiting its commands and then blaming it for all mistakes. Passivity's capitulating slogan is "I'm just a little person; what can I do?" But if you justify your cowardice by saying you can't do anything, then you can't complain and you can't whine either. We are killing perestroika with civic temerity, waiting by the sidelines to see which side wins.

Perestroika will be whatever we will be. If we are halfway, we'll have semi- perestroika. If we rebuild with rotting lumber from former labor camps, perestroika will collapse. If we all pull the blankets toward ourselves, perestroika will freeze. What is done in the name of protecting one's cushy armchair isn't ideology, it's cushiology. Between the pro-perestroikers and the anti-perestroikers, unfortunately, there is a large group I call the "oikers." They're the ones who whine constantly about the lack of sugar and other things but do not lift a finger to stop those who want to kill perestroika. It is time people understood that there are not two separate perestroikas -- one material and one political. Without defending democracy, there's no point in demanding democracy.

"Patience will crack a rock," the old folk saying goes. Three hundred years under the Tatars and 300 years under the Romanovs developed both heroic patience, which erupted into popular revolts, and servile patience, or priterpelost. Russia was the last European country to free its serfs, and plunged into socialism directly from sovereign feudalism, almost completely bypassing the experience of bourgeois democracy. The bedbugs of feudalism and servility moved inside wooden trunks from village huts into communal apartments. Many bosses behaved like "Red feudal lords," taking away not only the peasants' land but their passports too -- and that really smacked of serfdom. Stalin's forced collectivization was a crude mockery of the slogans "Land to the Peasants" and "All Power to the Soviets."

Tolerance gradually developed for many things -- repression, arbitrary taxation, forced signatures, the Iron Curtain, the humiliation of scientists, composers, writers. The best people were pruned away. It was like a nightmare in which a gang determined to kill all the Thoroughbred horses wandered through the stables at night with axes. Horses as a breed survived, but many of them turned out to be horses with the psychology of mice. We need to do much more to be able to restore our human breed, which has suffered such losses. We must not allow ourselves to tolerate our own patience. Priterpelost is the main obstacle to perestroika.

Priterpelost is capitulation before "infinite humiliations." First we humiliate ourselves to get an apartment. We humiliate ourselves hunting in the jungles of commerce for wallpaper, faucets, toilet bowls, latches. The sight of a Yugoslav lamp fixture or a Rumanian sofa bed brings fireworks to our eyes. When a child is born, we humiliate ourselves to obtain day care and kindergartens, finding nipples, crawlers, disposable diapers, carriages, sleds, playpens. We humiliate ourselves in stores, beauty parlors, tailor shops, dry cleaners, car-repair garages, restaurants, hotels, box offices and Aeroflot counters, repair shops for TVs, refrigerators and sewing machines -- stepping on our pride, moving from wheedling to arguing and back to wheedling. We spend all our time trying to get something. It's humiliating that we still can't feed ourselves, having to buy bread and butter and meat and fruit and vegetables abroad.

It is humiliating that we still can't dress ourselves well and that we chase after foreign goods. We should manufacture clothes and shoes that will not make Soviets ashamed to wear them. It is humiliating that we still don't have enough medicine to treat our people. The shortage of books is humiliating -- a betrayal of the human spirit. The shortage of computers is humiliating -- a betrayal of modern technological thought. The system of travel abroad is humiliating despite all the promises made to simplify it. The gates should be opened wide for anyone who wants to leave forever, with the exception of the few connected with security work. It is humiliating to hold people by force. You can't call those who leave enemies. And if they haven't insulted the homeland in any way, they should be able to come back to visit or for good. Why shouldn't all citizens of the U.S.S.R. be given a foreign-travel passport good for, say, three years with the right to travel on business, for tourism, or to visit relatives?

The most horrible thing is when we, humiliated by someone, start to humiliate someone else. Humiliating others is a terrible addiction.

Glasnost is a declaration of war against infinite humiliation. Glasnost is war for man's social dignity. Man has the right to like the music he wants, to dress as he likes, to wear his hair as he likes.

The anti-perestroikers are trying to interpret glasnost as discrediting the achievements of socialism. But glasnost itself is an achievement of socialism. Economic perestroika, like glasnost, is being discredited, hobbled, scared off, worn down. In economics, as in literature, there are sacred cows who pretend to be defending the national interest and are actually defending only their own. Today glasnost must help the economy. Tomorrow, if glasnost is in trouble, it will be supported by the mighty shoulder of the new economy. Without personal initiative, we will not be able to move forward in either glasnost or the economy.

The Iron Curtain between East and West for many years created an image of our country that was both attractive and frightening. The exploits of our people in the war against Hitler added an aura of heroism to that image. Khrushchev's thaw added glimmers of hope for mutual understanding. The horrible truth about Stalin's camps, the arrests of dissidents, the abuses of psychiatry, the exile of Academician Andrei Sakharov, the presence of our troops in Afghanistan -- all lined up and blown out of proportion by reactionary elements in the Western press -- worked to destroy the heroic aura, reducing our image to that of an anti-Christ "empire of evil." However, thanks to the peaceful initiatives of our country in nuclear disarmament, glasnost and democratization, the anti-Christ image has been shattered.

We don't need makeup or a mask on our face to impress foreigners or to make them like us. Of course, I would like our country to be liked by humanity -- not through lies, but because of the truth it brings to the world. But most of all, I want our country to like itself. We love it, are proud of its traditions. But not all traditions are good. And priterpelost is a bad tradition that must be rejected as being incompatible with perestroika.