Fatal Half Measures: The Culture of Democracy in the Soviet Union

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In essays and poetry, the author reveals the growth of his own intellectual and artistic development, and that of his contemporaries and the cultural and social pressures they continually confronted. He defends his theory that perestroika has been quietly underway since the death of Stalin.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316968838
• ISBN13: 9780316968836
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 357 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

View of Russian culture from the top

This book starts with a poem, "Half Measures," which pictures Russian society in 1989:"on the brink of precipices,because we can't jump halfway across.Blind is the one / who only half sees / the chasm." (p. v).The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was involved in the cultural struggles in the Soviet Union primarily in the defense of other writers who had offended the government's sense of order. "Aggressive anti-intellectualism most often comes from those who are not quite intellectuals." (p. 171). His belated defense of Osip Mandelstam's poem about Stalin was that "He simply could not resist crying out like a child." (p. 265). The Prologue starts with a telegram to Comrade Brezhnev in August 1968, when Yevtushenko was 35 and had written the poem, "Do the Russians Want War?" which became a popular antiwar ballad. As an author maintaining his belief in his work, he wanted Brezhnev to know that the Soviet tanks which rolled into Prague on August 21, 1968 had created a moral duty for him to express an opinion based on his personal reactions. "For me, this is also a personal tragedy because I have many friends in Czechoslovakia and I do not know how I will be able to look them in the eye, how I will ever dare to face them again." (p. 3). Short, as most telegrams are, it is followed by "Speech at the First Congress of People's Deputies (June 1989)" (pp. 5-11), which shows Yevtushenko as a representative from Kharkov, a university city in Ukraine, "where there is an intelligent working class and a truly working intelligentsia" (p. 8), trying to amend the Constitution to state:"Citizens of the USSR, independent of their party, state, or social position, have only equal rights with all the other workers in the sphere of consumer services and health care. The existence in open or hidden form of privileged special stores, pharmacies, and hospitals should be considered an anticonstitutional violation of the principles of socialist equality." (p. 8).Trying to convince the Party members that their exercise of power had been far too self-serving, he told them that they represented only "close to twenty million Party members in our country. But we have close to one hundred million adults who are not Party members!" (p. 9). Insisting that the Party's majority in the Congress of People's Deputies was far too proud of itself, Yevtushenko told them:"Wasn't there that haughtiness, comrades, that Party self-congratulation and self-glorification, when the portraits of leaders, and the slogans "Glory to the CPSU" and so on contrasted with the killing of millions of workers, with personal corruption, with the collapse of the economy, with the death of our boys in Afghanistan?" (p. 9).War is not the major topic in this book, but it has been a factor in the transformation of some individuals. I like the post-Chernobyl repudiation of "The criminal amateurishness of overblown authorities, who united in a mafialike conspiracy," (p. 68), like recent attempts to i