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

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Author), Antonina Bouis (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1991

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This astonishingly rich collection of essays, articles, manifestos and speeches gets off to a slow start, with many incidental pieces addressed to a Soviet audience, and with poet Yevtushenko's self-serving analysis of the poetry of his generation as "the cradle of glasnost ." But Yevtushenko, now a congressman from the city of Kharkov, proves himself a tireless, outspoken exponent of democratic reforms, as well as a world citizen. He links the "mass psychosis" of Stalinism to its present-day residue, "fear of glasnost ." He rails against chauvinism, racism and anti-Semitism, and deems superpower "a disgusting term" because it places "two nations above all other countries." Along with a discussion of the unequal status of Soviet women and travel pieces on Alaska/Siberia ("unjustly divided twins"), Thailand and Moscow, there are encounters with Robert Kennedy, Pasternak and Picasso, and uncanny appreciations of Tolstoy, Shostakovich, poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetayeva.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Yevtushenko, one of the USSR's leading poets, has participated in and observed the ferment racking Gorbachev's Soviet Union. In these selections from his telegrams to Kremlin leaders, speeches, letters, reminiscences, and other writings not clearly identified, Western readers can share his personal vision of perestroika as he pleads the causes of liberalization, openness, and human dignity while decrying Stalin's betrayal of revolution and people, the forces of reaction, and racism. The translation transmits much of the poet's eloquent spirit and often touches a universal conscience, but some extracts seem too piecemeal and others somewhat disconnected. Most public and academic libraries should consider this collection, although demand will likely remain light.
- James R. Kuhl man, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co (T); 1st edition (March 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316968838
• ISBN-13: 978-0316968836
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,600,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars View of Russian culture from the top, November 6, 2003

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fatal Half Measures: The Culture of Democracy in the Soviet Union (Hardcover)

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 impose some lawful control seem to dominate most political thinking about that part of the world so far in this century. There are ten pages of Index for this book, and only 12 lines in the index are devoted to topics between walruses and the Warsaw Pact. My interest in his views on the Vietnam war are subordinate to his understanding that "Part of our youth does not believe the adults -- and we deserve that. The insufficient participation of young people in today's revolution is also our fault." (p. 28). I would blame it on a society which only instills entertainment values, so that any person who is not pleased with a present activity is expected to opt to do something else. "Some young people leave in the middle of the movie `Repentance.' As if to say, what does it have to do with us? But real culture requires a people to accept all its country's history, all its guilt. . . . The best segments of American society created a public outcry at home so that their troops had to get out of Vietnam." (pp. 28-29). This praises free world ethics, not our economics. There is a real danger of being overly hyper and having a fit, if too sensitive to incriminating outrageousness. "Many young people are embarrassed to show their feelings. They are afraid of being accused of sentimentality. . . . We hear more and more frequently about the inexplicable pathological cruelty of adolescents." (p. 29). The army is the perfect example of where any kid might want to escape from Yevtushenko's logic.

"Here's my hypothesis: if our self-genocide had not destroyed so many thinkers and harvesters, there might not have been the Chernobyl apocalypse, or the accident with the Nakhimov, or the explosions in the Arzama, or in Sverdlovsk, or the train fire near Bologoi, or the destruction of the Aral Sea. All this destruction was caused by the destruction of professionalism." (p. 68).

It is extremely difficult to believe how careless people become when they are responsible for doing things 24 hours a day while most of the world has far too little to do. The great part of this book is about the Russian cultural heritage. Tolstoy is described as hopelessly the same as his character Anna Karenina. "The deeply religious Tolstoy became anticlerical and he was excommunicated from the church for `heresy.' The religious Anna is choking on disgust for religious hypocrisy." (p. 270).

"Tolstoy had elevated the concept of `family' to a personal moral church, but became disillusioned in it, too, because under the scenery of so-called mutual respect he saw the death of love. . . . Almost all the faces that pass before her eyes irritate Anna before her suicide: `Why are they talking, why are they laughing? It's not true, it's all a lie, all deceit.'" (p. 271). "Tolstoy's rebellion began apparently right after the Crimean War, which transformed him." (p. 271).