World Notes SOVIET UNION

"The stars of death stood over us./ And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed/ under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." So wrote Anna Akhmatova, perhaps Russia's finest woman poet, in Requiem, a moving testimony to those who kept vigils outside prison gates for loved ones swept away in the Stalinist reign of terror. Written between 1935 and 1940, the poem was not officially published in full until last year.

Akhmatova, whose former husband was executed by the Bolsheviks, was denounced by Soviet authorities and only received some recognition in the years before her death in 1966. So there was a touch of poetic justice last week when Pravda announced that an asteroid discovered by Soviet astronomers will be named Akhmatova in honor of the centennial of her birth next year.

It wasn't exactly what Akhmatova had in mind. In the Epilogue to Requiem, she wrote: "And if my country ever should assent/ to casting in my name a monument,/ I should be proud to have my memory graced,/ but only if the monument be placed/ . . . here, where I endured three hundred hours/ in line before the implacable iron bars."