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Doubt's Dark Seed. To many of his contemporaries, truth means any once perilous indulgence, from a rock 'n' roll session to pinning a sardonic verse on a university bulletin board. To most, it symbolizes a degree of freedom that is incompatible with Communism. Nina, a stylish, 21-year-old Moscow University geology student, sees truth as the duty to "speak and act always according to your own beliefs and ideals." To Marusia, another 21-year-old student, truth is whatever contradicts the party line. Says she: "I don't believe in God, but I am anti-antireligious. I refuse to be an atheist because propaganda orders me to be one." Many young Russians openly question what they read in Pravda—which itself means truth. Evtushenko suggests that there is no absolute truth in Russia because there is "no faith, and faith means love, and there is no love." Doubt's dark seed is his generation's suspicion that its fathers were deeply compromised by Stalin's crimes, that the full story has yet to be revealed. Writes Evtushenko: Behind the speeches Some murky game is being played.
We talk and talk about things we didn't mention yesterday.
We say nothing about the things we did ourselves.
Soviet youth's dominant characteristic, and often the best concealed, is this profound skepticism. It may not yet deeply affect those millions of young Russians on farms and assembly lines who know no other possible way of life, but it influences those who have been given an education to prepare them for a technological society. Within well-defined limits, the schooled young have been encouraged somewhat to think for themselves, and inevitably have come to question those limits. The more the propagandists chide Soviet youth for what Khrushchev calls its "unhealthy attitudes," the more it shies from slogans and ideologies. Like the U.S. housewife who switches off a TV commercial, Evtushenko's generation is a victim of what Madison Avenue calls "oversell." Observers consider the generation thoroughly loyal to Russia, and, in general, loyal to the only political system it knows.
It is full of misinformation about the rest of the world, and U.S. tourists in Russia are sometimes startled by the xenophobic assurance with which young Russians, though critical of their regime, in the next breath say they will someday match the Western comforts of cars and housing without embracing capitalism's corrupting faults.
The questioning of the present regime is most intense among the young educated Russians, who as tomorrow's intelligentsia will influence their society out of all proportion to their numbers.
"Not, Goddamit, Dull." To hear them talk, the young crave a more graceful, abundant life, and chafe at the frustrations of Khrushchev's state. Their "characteristic feature." says Russian youth's favorite playwright, Victor Rozov, is "intolerance of everything that is strident, bureaucratic and soulless." Soviet youth resents the regime's nagging, niggling demands on its private life. Why, grumbled a correspondent in the youth paper Komsomolskaya Pravda, should "the striving for personal happiness" conflict with the common good? Said he: "We are not building Communism to sleep on nails."