Moscow support for poem criticising Stalin

Press, 5 March 1987, Page 12

Moscow support for poem criticising Stalin

NZPA-Reuter Moscow A Moscow journal has published with clear official support an impassioned plea for the Soviet Union to face the truth about the "rampage of evil” under the rule of Josef Stalin.

The appeal was the central theme of a longsuppressed work by a top Soviet poet and editor drawing a bitter portrait of the Stalinist terror which brought ordinary people to “behave like beasts” and betray parents and friends.

The autobiographical poem was written in the late 1960 s by Alexander Tvardovsky, one of the literary champions of deStalinisation, at a time when the Soviet leadership, under Leonid Brezhnev, had barred discussion of the Stalin period. Appearance of the poem, “By Right of Memory,” in the monthly “Znamya” coincides with the public release of a surrealistic film, “Repentance,” also dealing with Stalin’s brutal rule and its legacy in the Soviet Union today.

But while the film’s director, Tengiz Abuladze, declines to say publicly that it is a portrayal of the old dictator, the Tvardovsky poem deals directly with Stalin and the spiritual slavery in which people lived under him.

Soviet officials say the move towards frank treatment of Stalin, who ruled from 1924 until his death in 1953, is part of Kremlin chief Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of "glasnost” or

openness in discussing the country’s past and present.

Foreign analysts say it is also certainly part of Mr Gorbachev’s struggle with what are officially described as “conservative forces” opposing his drive to set the country on a new path. In a speech to the Communist Party Central Committee Mr Gorbachev clearly linked these forces with officials remaining from Mr Brezhnev’s rule when the debate over Stalin’s role was effectively suppressed. Supporters of Mr Gorbachev among the intelligentsia are arguing strongly that one of the obstacles to reform is the continuing fear among Soviet people left over from the Stalin period, of voicing independent views.

“Tvardovsky’s poem could well become a rallying cry for all of us who feel we can only start anew if we shake off the shackles of the past. And we can only do that if we know about it,” one Soviet literary figure said. In his poem, Tvardovsky, who died in 1971, recalls how millions meekly joined in praise of Stalin as “the father of the nations” even when they and their families had been victims of his terror.

“Fear, which that wicked age put by all our beds, taught us to keep silent while evil was on the rampage,” he wrote.

The poem, published by emigres in the West in 1969, recounts how Tvar-

dovsky himself renounced his own father, a peasant despatched to a Siberian labour camp at the time of the collectivisation of agriculture in the late 19205.

And it touches on many of the themes — the purge trials, packed prison wagons heading for Siberia, freezing labour camp barracks, the death of prisoners, exile of entire nations — that had become taboo under Mr Brezhnev’s ideological watchdogs. Only four years before he began work on the poem, Tvardovsky had published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s labour camp novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the literary journal “Novy Mir” that he edited.

But after then, Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev, who launched de-Stalini-sation in 1956, was ousted by Mr Brezhnev in 1964, and Tvardovsky came under mounting pressure to make his journal conform to the new official line.

Soviet literary sources said he was prevented by censors from publishing “By Right of Memory” in “Novy Mir” and other journals refused it.

In a reference to the period, when there were strong indications in Moscow that a formal rehabilitation of Stalin was planned, Tvardovsky warns that any resurrection of the dictator’s spirit could be fatal. And he condemns official arguments that the past should be forgot-

ten, used throughout the Brezhnev period and until Mr Gorbachev came to power in 1985, to bar books, plays and films — like “Repentance” — touching on the Stalin theme.

“They order us to forget, and ask us kindly not to remember — memory is under lock and key... so as not to upset those who are not in the know. (They want us) to forget the mothers and the wives and the children tom from them... “Who decides that grown-up people cannot read certain pages (of our history)? . . . Whoever hides the past so carefully can hardly be in step with the future,” he wrote.