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

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

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.
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