Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - December 28, 1986, Winnipeg, Manitoba Winnipeg free press december Page 7 issues by Yevgeny Yevtushenko York times the soviet people Are often identified in the Western press with the this Blanket treatment places the blame for the crimes committed against innocent people in stains time on a population of 270 million and helps to whip up artificially created fear evoked by the word soviet As they More often Call us in the fear creates distrust creates missiles and mis Siles create it is a vicious we should pay due tribute to those who perished innocently and not forget those who were to blame for their but today More than half the soviet population were either children or nonexistent Dur ing those tragic and cannot be dishonest or can one cast on these the Black Shadow of responsibility for the gulag it is we do not Lay the responsibility for Maidanek or Auschwitz on Ger mans who were born after do we were the Young germans who restored the damage caused to Westminster Abbey by their fathers and grandfathers bombs to blame for that destruction even less guilty but they shouldered part of the moral responsibility for the and this makes them even less Are the children of Ameri cans to blame for what was done by the committee on Una Merican activities in Hollywood during the Mccarthy period of course but they will be to blame if they refuse to remember the shedding of Many taboos has become possible in thanks to a new psychology that is not burdened by guilt for past the astonishing persistence and patience of our Side in the search for nuclear agreement is one characteristic of this new Way of old old new new May be the sceptics derisive what can be said in reply Only the dead make no but the question is the scale of the mistakes and ones attitude toward for it has been honestly and openly acknowledged that chernobyl was a tragic but in the old Days it would have been interpreted As enemy Sabo another characteristic of the new thinking is its attention to other which Are incorporated in the opinion of the Nowa when timid editors adopt the old practice of sending controversial articles or literary works up they Are usually de cide for that what you Are at your desk decide some of them cant get used to it they Are scared of de but what about those Between 16 and the most Youthful of the unstained generation they Are Dif of there Are Young but scepticism in youth is often a defensive a desire to show off ones imagined super which conceals there Are also Young potential by no walk around with an statesmanlike today Young people Are More pragmatic than our generation they believe in logic More than they dont follow fanatical which often Degener ates into dogmatic they have one important feature Abhorrence of falsehood and empty they seem to be allergic to our television program Ming has finally begun to include live and in youth pro Grams Many of the Young people interviewed have surprised me by the boldness and Sharpness of their judgments and their encyclopedic no moralizing they dont like adults to stuff them with moralizing preferring to use their own brains to get to the Bottom of sometimes they dont know enough but is that their fault or ours if they go wrong in their assessment of historical events through Lack of they Are amazingly Quick to pick up info absorb it and change their attitudes not because they Are forced but out of sheer desire to learn and they have a far better knowledge of foreign languages than our at one time we had no Hope that a foreign language would become useful we were the children of the cold it is not unusual to see a russian teenager in the subway Reading an English or French Book in the an act that in our Day would cause they rapidly master computer but our generation grew up at a time in the dictionary of Cybernetics was described As a Bourgeois they Are aware of the latest trends in Western jazz and Rock n but during the 1940s and 1950s we danced to the strains of the 1930s foxtrot Rio at their age we had a More thorough knowledge of literature after they Are the children of in our generation boy girl relationships were not Normal the effect of separate we were inquisitively hostile toward in my schooldays it was considered indecent to be friends with a in today generation boy girl relations Are simple and and Young people Start kissing about five years earlier than we a few years ago our teenagers were fascinated by clothes with foreign labels now that trend is dying and it is the in thing at school to dress in a democratic our Young people love their but Are embarrassed by booming phrases about that National ism is uncharacteristic of they want to know the rest of the and often in Conversa Tion with me they have complained that we have scarcely any Exchange with schoolchildren in other they want to make friends with their contemporaries in Europe and North they Are not afraid to mix with honest people most of them Are honest in word and i like arguing with them and Reading poetry to in i love them and Hope they will see a better world than a world without either nuclear or a world with its frontiers open and no frontiers be tween Peoples it is to help build such a world for them that i work As a it seems to me that they after see that Dis armed world perhaps in their perhaps in old but they will see and i Hope they will be spiritually and intellectually pre pared for such a More pre pared than but to that end they must avoid becoming Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a so Viet poet and commentator who has often criticized the soviet sys real test is yet to come by Nicholas Daniloff los Angeles times the West is right to applaud soviet Leader Mikhail Gor Baches decision to allow dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov and his Yelena to return to Moscow from internal but we should not cheer too lustily we should never forget How and Why Sakharov was he was picked up by the Kab As he drove to work in Moscow in Jan he was arrested without warrant and exiled without he was punished because he continually used his prestigious Posi Tion of academician to criticize Kremlin positions on a wide Range of As Bonner has described in her Book alone the conditions of exile were so harsh As to amount to cruel and unusual Pun Sakharov return to Moscow does not necessarily mean that such practices have been banished highly political although Sakharov has been freed from his Gorky what will Gorbachev do for the hundreds perhaps thousands of other soviet citizens who have been imprisoned under the highly Politi Cal articles of the soviet criminal such As ant soviet agitation and propaganda although less Well Many of those citizens Are no less Brave and worthy than Sakharov for honestly expressing their Hopes for More demo cratic ways in soviet at this stage an outside observer has every right to suspect that Gorbachev took his decision on Sakharov As part of a policy of disposing of High profile human rights the foreign pressures on Gorbachev Are Well Many foreign scientists have boycotted the soviet Union As a result of the Sakharov affair and have refused to participate in cooperative Ven Sakharov was 1 on the list of dissidents whose Freedom the United states sought in negotiating a successful conclusion to my own arrest this last summer in to Sakharov freed the return of Sakharov will also alleviate the opprobrium that the soviet Union is currently suffering As a result of the totally unexplained death in prison of another valiant soviet political Ana Toly less Well is that Sakharov has also been an important Issue within the soviet intellectual i remember Well one conversation that i had with a Moscow scientist who until Gorbachev deals fairly and decently with none of us will really believe that Gorbachev is an honest the Touchstone of his credibility will be to free Sakharov and to withdraw soviet troops from perilous situation it is in that Light that the Sakharov decision should be Gorbachev shows every sign of realizing what a serious and perilous situation the soviet Union is in today soviet goods do not compete in the worlds High tech corruption and personal opportunism have penetrated deep into the soviet political and soviet Public health is in a desperate Situ Gorbachev has evidently come to the conclusion that to Rescue the nation from if not per technological inferiority he must rally the Best and the brightest to his he is trying to do this by projecting the image of an enlightened besides Al lowing Sakharov to return he is easing literary reducing promising to pub Lish forbidden works like Boris Pasternak Zhivago and Sig Naling to russian intellectuals who have fled abroad that they will be welcomed How successful this policy will be remains to be the arrival of dissident poet Ess Irina a Kushinskaya in London suggests that All is not Well a Kushinskaya travelled to London on a three month medical visa but announced that she would not re turn to the soviet Union until it is seriously Reform system what the West should look for now is whether there is any deeper inclination on Gorbachev part to seek a More just society and to Reform the inequities of the soviet Juc Unal system and criminal in recent weeks there have been some intriguing signs in the soviet Legal for Nave hinted at the need to return to something like a jury system and to allow a defendant a lawyer at the Start of a criminal rather than at its this is an idea that i would heartily in based on my own personal experience in a Kab interrogation this last these Are major changes that will probably take years to bring a and step would be to rescind the highly political articles 70 and 190 in the criminal code that make it unlawful to espouse ant soviet in Gorba chess much touted Era of or All critical ideas should be in my View it is a contradiction to hold that some critical ideas Are too hot to handle and should be branded As Antis Viet let Gorbachev now move to repeal those primitive and retrograde articles which Are so reminiscent of our own Mccarthy and let him spread the Bene fits of the Sakharov Bonner Deci Sion to other soviet citizens imprisoned for their critical Nicholas Daniloff was a correspondent in the soviet Union from 1981 until this past Triumph of human spirit by Richard Gwyn special to the free press i will live and survive and be asked How they slammed my head against a How i had to freeze at nights How my hair started to turn Grey i will and will crack some and Brush away the encroach ing Irina 1985 London when she wrote Irina a Kushinskaya was in a so Viet labor her head had been slammed against an Iron she had Frozen at night and during the she had been she had been she was by 120 Days in solitary for the same reason she was sent to prison for writing incandescent her poetry is impassioned and perhaps her Best known lines Are shall write of All the wretched people who have been left on the Shore of those who have been sentenced to silence i shall also for writing these kinds of anti soviet a Kushinskaya was sentenced to seven years in a strict regime Camp to be followed by five years of now that she is to Praise the same soviet authorities for releasing her and then allowing her to travel to the and equally for releasing the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov from internal exile in would be what has happened int a Triumph for the new liberalism of soviet Leader Mikhail it May Well be the Case that Gorba chess liberalism really is taking if this is of profound importance politically because it Means the vital Factor of Trust can now be added to the Complex of East West the Triumph that has happened is something More More More fundamental it is the Triumph of the human a Kushinskaya and Sakharov have shown us that while the human spirit can be caged and it cannot ultimately be this is True today in the soviet it is no less True in South it was As True years ago during the life of the dissident religious Leader whose birthday we celebrated last better known of the Sakharov is by far the better Hes a scientific Genius once the youngest Ever Mem Ber of the soviet Academy of sciences at the age of 32 the father of the soviet Hydrogen bomb a Nobel in the Sakharov became convinced that unless Mankind established a new it would be obliterated by a nuclear he became the titular Leader of the Helsinki watch headed by another Yuri Orlov also jailed also recently released that monitored the state of human rights in the soviet for these ant soviet activities Sakharov was exiled in deprived of his scientific Force fed when he went on hunger he is a heroic and to All who know him saintly yet in a certain Matushin Kayas Story May Tell us More about the imperil ability of the human Spir when she was sentenced in 1983 she was an unknown she faced 12 years of separation from her at the age of she faced the risk of never being Able to have yet she wrote and wrote and until the authorities caged inside her Cage she continued to write on scraps of paper until these were taken away then on bars of soap with charred match and when these ran in her where she carries j50 prison devout Christian two of the sources of her courage can be guessed at Shes a devout Christian her parentage is mixed polish and but the Well Spring of her courage is her charac and this we wont and will Only begin to after she has been in the West the human spirit can of course be killed such As the dissident Ana Toly Marchenko who died in a so Viet jail this but the words created by that spirit cannot be a Kushinskaya was Only a begin rough and when she went to jail three years her spirit transformed her suffer Ings into what is today perhaps the finest of contemporary soviet to and How shall we you and in such a land to forget to curse to make the sign of the Cross her words embody the True spirit of its and Sak gift to ;