(I apologize - this one’s a
mess. Vehemence is no excuse for poor craftsmanship.)
Lawrence Hall
Yevtushenko and
Ukraine
Upon returning home from a boomer-privileged visit to Viet-Nam
I bought at the San Francisco airport a copy of the Penguin edition of Yevtushenko:
Selected Poems. That little paperback, which cost me 75 cents in 1970, is
on the desk beside me as I type.
A new copy of that book is now $16.00. In 1970 a cup of airport
coffee was maybe 25 cents and now would be most of a tenner, so the book is
about the same price in terms of purchasing power.
Upon recently hearing the name Yevtushenko in connection
with Ukraine I looked on the InterGossip and learned that it is a common
Ukrainian name although Yevgeny was from Siberia. His family was part of a
forced resettlement generations ago and so Yevtushenko identified as a Russian.
He annoyed his fellow Russians as a Russian, not as a Ukrainian, but, hey, good
enough.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a poet, a biggie in his time, and
had he been born ten years earlier Stalin would have had him shot for his
criticism of Communist policies and of Russian anti-Semitism.
Yevtushenko’s best-known poem, “Babi Yar,” is the one that
would have won him a literary prize made of lead in the basement shooting range
of the Lubyanka.
Babi Yar is a huge ravine that in in 1941 was outside Kiev /
Kyiv and is now inside the city limits. In two days, 29-30 September 1941, the
Nazis murdered approximately 30,000 area Jews there, and over the next two
years murdered more Jews as well as Poles, Gypsies / Roma, partisans, Red Army and
Soviet Navy prisoners, writers, artists, musicians, psychiatric patients, nationalist
Ukrainians, and others.
After the war there was no monument in honor of any of the
victims. Given that the Jews were a substantial number, maybe half, of all the
dead at that one site the USSR wanted no memory of Babi Yar at all. Yevtushenko’s
poem, memorializing the massacres of Jews and other prisoners, somehow bypassed
the censors (no one did cancel culture like the Soviets, although it’s becoming
a fashion here), greatly annoying the regime but by then Yevtushenko was so
famous that killing him was not an option.
The USSR finally put up a vaguely-worded monument to all the
Russian dead but, given the anti-Semitism embedded in both Czarist and Soviet
times, any mention of Jews was pointedly avoided. Upon independence Ukraine
remedied this and there are numerous memorials to all the peoples massacred at
Babi Yar.
Yevtushenko, whose ego was even greater than his skill,
still managed to make much of the “Babi Yar” about himself, anticipating the
me-me-me-ness of what now passes for poetry in our culture of artlessness,
ideology and incessant self-pity, but it’s good anyway. And we should always
remember that Yevtushenko while writing had to consider the possibility of a
ten-year prison sentence or even of being “disappeared” for it.
Babi Yar is only one instance of the terror Ukraine suffered
in the 20th century. That land, the size of Texas, was a giant
battlefield among the armies of the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire, local
militias, and Bolsheviks. After the revolution the Bolsheviks inflicted
genocide on Ukraine, transplanting some of the population to Siberia and
starving millions more to death in the Holodomor of 1932-1933.
During the Second World War the Nazis occupied Ukraine and
murdered more millions, and after the war the Communists returned to continue
their accustomed mass murders despite the reality that Ukrainians had served in
the Red Army in their thousands.
And then the Russians built poorly-designed nuclear power
plants in Ukraine and staffed them with good comrades instead of real engineers,
dumped wrecked nuclear submarines on the coast, and in general made a further
mess of things.
Let’s not do the gallant-little-Belgium thing here:
Ukrainians are sometimes a mess themselves, and the nation has had lots of
problems transforming itself from a Soviet penal colony to a free nation.
Still, Ukraine is a sovereign nation recognized by the otherwise useless Merovingians
in the United Nations and shouldn’t be subject to the sustained terror of a
neo-Soviet invasion ordered by Dobby-the-House-Elf and his harem of silent,
terrified fly-girls. Further, Ukraine is one of the few food-exporting nations,
and the war has already affected supply and costs here and everywhere else.
Ukraine also exports iron and oil and gas, and is an east-west pipeline
corridor for the transfer of energy.
I am the only man in America without a plan for the Ukraine.
I do not know what we should do or can do. This nation abandoned some of its
own citizens in Afghanistan as well as tanks, artillery, airplane, radar
systems, small arms, drones, bombs, fuel, transport vehicles and other weapons in
great quantities that could have been more than enough to provide Ukraine the
power to repel the Russian invasion.
And yet little help is being offered to Ukraine.
We’re paying for those bad choices with cash and Ukrainians
are paying with their blood. Our well-fed and well-protected generals in their
tailor-made pinks and greens are pleased to appear at government functions in
D. C. while Ukrainian children are either terrified refugees or rotting
fragments of flesh in bombed-out streets.
We need to do some serious thinking. Those in power in this
nation need to get off the golf course and do even more thinking and then
accomplish some of that metaphorical heavy lifting.
What will some future Yevtushenko write about how we responded
when millions of suffering people - hungry, cold, bombed-out, blown-out, constantly
under fire, standing to their posts in the snow against the cruel Russian army,
air force, and navy - asked us for help?
-30-
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