A Poet's Praise for a "Czar"

By ANDREI VOZNESENSKY Translated by Antonina W. Bouis

One of Russia's best-known poets, Andrei Voznesensky is also an artist and a songwriter. He wrote this essay while visiting New York City for an exhibition of his work at the Sperone Westwater Gallery.

What feelings did I experience watching the Soviet flag being lowered over the Kremlin?

Was it gloating over the demise of the flag that waved over the Gulag and over the tanks crushing Prague, Afghanistan and Moscow itself -- the flag in whose name the recent putschists ordered 250,000 handcuffs to be ready?

Or anguish for the single country, forged over a millennium, beautiful, horrible, yet spiritual and poetic, created and lived in by my forefathers, grandfather, father and mother?

Or horror at the possible death of a culture, as fragile as the ozone layer, the culture of Dostoyevsky and Pasternak? Damn the totalitarian empire, but will this be the end of the only country in the world where millions of people recite poetry by heart, like a prayer, where they listen to poetry readings in stadiums, where a book of verse can still sell 250,000 copies?

Where will the centrifugal disintegration end? Will the Crimea separate itself the way The Nose did in Gogol's story? Will the nuclear button be divided too? Instead of just one -- four, or a whole keyboard? And then what about nuclear civil war?

Will the rise of nationalism lead to anti-Semitism and racism? Yes, but standing at the funeral for three victims of the coup last August (one of whom was Jewish), I saw a crowd of 100,000 listen to the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer of mourning. Just last winter, the reading of my translation of Bernstein's Kaddish at the Moscow conservatory seemed extraordinary. But what about the demons of democracy who sell anti-Semitic literature like Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in Moscow underpasses?

How will democracy continue without Gorbachev? As a supporter of his changes, I never praised him while he was in office -- a poet must not praise a czar, even a good one. But now I will say that this great man, one of the men of the century, turned around global consciousness, broke the back of totalitarianism and gave us glasnost.

I wrote only two letters to him in my life: once to get permission for an exhibition of paintings by the banned Marc Chagall, and the second time for the rehabilitation of the novelist Boris Pasternak and the creation of a museum in his honor. Gorbachev helped both times. I never mentioned this before, so as not to damage his standing with the conservative wing. And when demonstrators call for "Gorbachev on trial!," this is also a victory for him. He was the first Russian ruler to allow himself to be mocked. Why was there never a demonstration calling for trials of Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev in their lifetimes?

My economic dream is post-capitalism -- a market economy plus civic responsibility, and a safety net plus spiritual contentedness. But what salvation will the free market bring to our elderly neighbor in Moscow, whose annual pension now equals a few dollars? What is freedom to travel if the lifting of price controls (as planned for the new year) raises the cost of a ticket to New York to more than twice Gorbachev's annual retirement pension?

With today's pace, there is no time for lamenting and weeping. We must build the new structure of Russia before chaos overtakes us. Intellectuals have to build spiritual hopes for hopeless people. I believe in the new Russians. I mean people like the eye surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov and the other Fyodorov, who opened the first private restaurant in Moscow and the first Muscovite restaurant in New York. I mean Mstislav Rostropovich, the great cellist who, mingling with the pro-democracy crowds in Moscow, was like a new Orpheus descended in the hell of the coup. I mean the 10- and 12-year-old boys, Muscovites of the 21st century, who are earning their first money by wiping windshields of cars stopped at red lights.

The best minds are on Yeltsin's team now, and his courage saved democracy during the coup. People have to forget their quarrels in facing the coming chaos. And of course the commonwealth is now the only way to save the economy and to unite countries. The future depends on economics, not politics.

Going back to Moscow, I don't know what the new year will bring. Interested in numerology, I note that the sum of the figures in 1992 add up to 21, the winning number in the American card game blackjack and the Russian card game * ochko. I doubt that we will be lucky in the new year, but I wish you luck in yours. Maybe we'll both be lucky?