Cold Shoulder

Two years ago, Soviet Poet Robert Rozhdestvensky, 32, was the idol of rebellious Communist youth. Sharing a platform with Evgeny Evtushenko and other young poets, Rozhdestvensky declaimed against the cult of Stalinism.

How could we

An atheist people

Be servants of a cult?

he cried, and the people cheered.

But Khrushchev said tut-tut to all that, and Rozhdestvensky rather readily switched his blank-verse sermonizing from anti-Stalinism to anti-Americanism. Imagining himself a U.S. Indian in wild West days, he asked:

What if . . . we should once more hear the warpath's call?

How the tomahawk would glint in the dew.

What scalps would steam in our hands.

Even steamier was a poem denouncing Russian-born U.S. specialists on the Soviet Union. Rozhdestvensky said that during World War II they joined the Nazi armies and burned villages, raped women, massacred the wounded, and

smashed the gun butts

down on the babies' cribs.

Last week, in the course of the bland functioning of machinery that exchanges Soviet and U.S. scholars, Rozhdestvensky and four other Soviet writers came to Yale University, towed by Harold Taylor, former president of Sarah Lawrence College. Just as international fellowship was beginning to ripen, a chap burst in to charge the Soviet poet with "almost pathological anti-Americanism," which he documented by quoting the poems. The rude fellow was Charles Moser, 29, assistant professor of Slavic languages at Yale, and a graduate exchange student at the University of Leningrad five years ago. He argued that "to give the Russians anything more than the most reserved of receptions is to encourage those dedicated to the repression of any sort of liberalization in Soviet life."

Moser's call for a cold shoulder was cold-shouldered by most of his Yale colleagues. Robert Jackson, a specialist in Russian literature, called Moser's statement "irresponsible," and said that the university should be hospitable to obnoxious opinions. Even Frederick Barghoorn, who spent 16 days in a Moscow jail last year as an alleged U.S. spy, gulped and endorsed Rozhdestvensky's visit as a useful dialogue that explores rival opinions.

At first Moser seemed somewhat bewildered by the uproar. But he quickly recovered his poise, renewed the argument in a face-to-face showdown with the Russians. Soviet Editor Aleksandr Chakovsky, one of the party, protested--but Moser had already ticketed Chakovsky as an ex-agent of the Russian secret police. "I decided the attitude should be on the tough side of neutral," Moser summed up.

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