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Red Squares. Most conspicuous symptom of youthful unrest is a bumper crop of hooligans and delinquents. A recent "anti-parasite" law has thinned out the sharply dressed young stilyagi (Teddy boys) who loiter on Brod-vay, as they call Moscow's Gorky Street. Prosperous "beeznismen" still supply customers with every black market commodity from call girls to non-Red lipstick (Soviet lipstick is seldom available in any shade but dark red). They get their stocks mostly from tourists — often in exchange for "ancient" ikons fresh from the ikon factory — but can get almost any item through a smuggling network centered in Odessa.
Since Nikita Khrushchev substituted peaceful coercion for Stalin's rule of terror, he has stripped the police of many of their former powers. The Komsomol, which helps keep youth in line, now shares routine police duties with the officious Druzhinniki, the neighborhood civilian deputies, who wear red armbands on patrol. Komsomol zealots break up cafe brawls, keep a sour eye out for stilyagi and other "nonconformists." Last fall they broke up open-air poetry sessions in Mayakovsky Square, the haunt of Moscow's poetry buffs, charged that young bards were declaiming "slanderous" verse.
Not even the children of the Soviet rich and powerful can afford to defy the Komsomol. If a student skips its pep talks or evades spare-time labor on farms and construction sites, he risks an unfavorable kharakteristika, a report-card-cum-loyalty-rating, which can lead to his dismissal from a university and, most likely, a disciplinary spell in the unpopular Asian virgin lands. If a Russian gets fired from his job, he is in deep trouble, since he can only be hired by the same employer — the state. Westerners are often perplexed by the abruptness with which young Russians can by turns be warmly outspoken or gruffly uncommunicative, as resentment of regimentation battles with fear of the ever present fist of the government.
Some of Evgeny Evtushenko's most quoted verses are allegorical thrusts at Komsomol squares. He declares: "I simply laugh at phonies and fakes." In a 1957 poem called "The Nihilist." Evtushenko described a tight-trousered student who read Hemingway, preferred Picasso to Stalin's pet painter Alexander Gerasimov. and was unfairly condemned for his "un-Russian tastes" by narrow-minded parents. After the youth dies while saving a friend's life, the poem relates, his diaries show that he was no nihilist but "clean and straight." Evtushenko himself was drummed out of the Komsomol as a nihilist the same year. Though readmitted in 1959, he still draws heavy fire from rabid, right-wing party pundits who react to many of his poems as if they were financed by the CIA.
Pygmy Spittle. Evtushenko's most provocative poem to date, written last year, is a pointed, poignant outcry against the anti-Semitism that to his generation symbolizes Khrushchev's most sinister legacy from the czars' and Stalin's reigns of terror. Named "Babi Yar," for the ravine outside Kiev where the Nazis massacred 96.000 Jews, the poem taunts anti-Semites:
I am as hateful to them as a Jew,