This talk at the San Diego State College Convocation on October 7, 1963, is one of a number of times Sargent Shriver discussed the Russian poet Yevtushenko’s challenging book, A Precocious Autobiography.
I AM HAPPY to be in “the Peace Corps state.” California has produced more than 700 of the 5,500 Volunteers now at work overseas. And California colleges have trained more of our Volunteers than any other state. This is the kind of response we hoped to produce when we printed our first information poster with the question: “What in the World Are You Doing?”
To appreciate the need for this American response, you should listen to the ideas of one of Russia’s foremost poets, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He is thirty years old. His message has already stirred millions of young Russians. He speaks words you do not expect to hear from a Communist. They represent the beginning of a profound revolution within Communism a revolution far more disturbing to the West, because it challenges our grand assumption that we and we alone are champions of the human spirit and defenders of human value, that we alone have plumbed the nature of man and understood his most urgent yearnings.
Listen to Yevtushenko: It is the more fortunate nations, those favored by their geographical position and historical circumstances, that today show a grosser spirit and a weaker hold on moral principles. Nor would I call those nations happy, despite all the signs of their prosperity. Never has the Biblical saying, “Man does not live by bread alone,” had such a ring of truth as it does today.
Man has a need to dream. However prosperous, a man will always be dissatisfied if he has no high ideal. And whatever devices he may use to conceal his dissatisfaction even from himself, these will only make him feel more dissatisfied. But even if the rich feel burdened by the lack of an ideal, to those who suffer real deprivation an ideal is a first necessity of life. Where there is plenty of bread and a shortage of ideals, bread is no substitute for an ideal. But where bread is short, ideals are bread. Yevtushenko’s idealism refutes the dogmatists in America who argue that Communist ideals are empty. They say the march of Soviet power conceals the bankruptcy of their ideology.
They say that the Soviets are moved by power, not by poetry. But this year fourteen thousand Russians filled the Moscow Sports Palace to hear Yevtushenko recite his poetry. And twenty thousand wrote in praise when one poem came off the presses-a response yet to be accorded any single work of an American writer.
Yevtushenko has something to say about his people’s idealism: We have paid for ideals with so much blood and torment that the cost itself has endeared it and made it more precious to us, as a child born in pain is more precious to its mother. You may say, “But doesn’t it occur to you that Communism itself may be a false ideal?” If the reader believes in God, I will ask him, “Can you equate the substance of the Christian religion with the swindlers who used to make a handsome profit by selling indulgences, with the inquisitors, the priests who got rich at their parishioners’ expense, or parishioners who pray piously in church and double-deal outside its walls?” Neither can I, a believing Communist, equate the essence of my religion with the crooks who climb on its bandwagon, with its inquisitors, its crafty, avaricious priests, or its double-dealing, double-faced parishioners.
For me, a Communist is not merely someone who belongs to the organization and pays his dues. A Communist is a man who puts the people’s interests above his own.Do we see the significance of what he is saying? And the significance of the freedom he has today to say these things? For years, Communism has been its own worst enemy. The very inhumanity of Communist practice repelled the humanity its ideology was trying to win. No matter how poorly practiced, western ideals stood out in sharp contrast to the fundamental indifference of Communism to human values.
But now, if Yevtushenko is right, Communism is undergoing a revolution. And as it does, a far greater gauntlet will be flung at the West than the specter of Soviet missiles and nuclear submarines: the gauntlet of Communist ideas. He is trying to get his fellow Communists to see that the decisive weapon in an era of nuclear stalemate is not a nation’s sword but its spirit.
Russia may not be ready for Yevtushenko. Already he has been censured by Khrushchev himself. But so long as Yevtushenko continues to challenge his own country he will be a challenge to us. In calling for the “purification” of Communism, he is saying that Western society is empty, stripped of ideas, an aimless wasteland.
The Soviet Union is not withdrawing from its vision of a new world order dominated by one political system: Communism. But, if Yevtushenko’s generation prevails, that system will be given a spiritual content with the power to draw humanity to its cause. We have our vision, too, of a world of liberty under law, of an open society for all men. Are we committed to making that vision a reality?
