from a Paris correspondent
Yevtushenko, the so-called "angry young man" of the Soviet Union, reveals himself to be a left-wing critic of Stalinism in at least 3 important passages in his recently publisned memoirs.
(1) Yevtushenko explains that his maternal grandfather was a leading partisan fighter in the Urals during the Civil War who was latcr sent to the Military Academy while Trotsky was still Commissar for Defence, eventually becoming a general of the Red Army.s Yevtushenko's grandfather was arrested and killed in the Stalin purge of 1938. The evening before his arrest he went to sec his gradchild and spent the night singing revolutionary songs to him. This moving scene, as described by Yevtushenko, becoues almost symbolic in character, the spirit of the October Revolut= ion being transmitted by the old fighter to the young generation over the heads of the "lost generation" which matured under Stalin.
(2) Yevtushenko tells the story of Stalin's funeral where dozens of people were crushed to death as a result of the GPU blocking the strects with trucks. <A great crowd prosséd against this barrier, trampling down those who happened to be in front. The poet tells how he suddenly felt cold fury at secing this waste of human life in consequence of blind police obedience to sense=less discipline that required then not to nove the trucks. At that monent, Yevtushenko relates, he started to hate Stalin as the incarnation of that inhuman attitude towards people.
(3) Yevtushenko tells the story of how his fanous poen Baby Yar, denouncing anti-sonitism got printed. He had brought it to a literary magazine, whose editor hesitated a long tine. But a delegation of the printshop workers came to tell hin that everybody in the shop had read the poem and enthusiastically approved it. Ycevtushenke describes the rousing ovation he got when he first read this poem in public. When the session was over, he continues, an old man with a cane eame to sce him. He was very moved. "I have beon a member of the Party since 1905. I've spent 15 years in «a foreed labour camp, but this evening I know that notwithstanding all the betrayals Bolshevism is alive again."