COLUMN ONE : In Russia, a Bitter Fall From Grace : Artists hailed as the young lions of the ‘60s are decried by today’s activists as tools of the Soviet state. A generation gap sparks angry debate about the legacy of poet Yevtushenko and others.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry challenging the Soviet regime so inspired Russia’s youth in the 1960s that his readings here filled the 100,000-seat Lenin Stadium to capacity. When the Voice of America reported his suicide one day, the Moscow police pleaded with him to appear on his balcony to calm a restive mob.

How things have changed. Today, Yevtushenko is a visiting professor at New York University, while liberal magazines at home ridicule his “loud and tasteless clothing” and accuse him of having been an informer for the KGB.

Lenin Stadium was most recently the venue of a Michael Jackson concert.

“If Yevtushenko had a book coming out here now,” says Benedict Sarnov, a Moscow literary critic, “no one would buy it. He doesn’t have anything new to propose.”

Yevtushenko’s transformation in Russia from literary lion to reputed has-been is emblematic of the bitter experience shared by many of his generation. The shestidesyatniki --Russian for “the men of the sixties,” when they came to prominence--have for 30 years awaited the rebirth of literary and political freedom that they tasted briefly during the “thaw” under Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev.

But now that it has come, what may have been one of the greatest generations of writers, artists, and activists Russia has produced in this century finds its own legacy being challenged and scorned by much younger activists. The question of whether the shestis-- to use an anglicized contraction--were pioneering fighters of Soviet totalitarianism or tools of the Soviet state has become one of the hottest topics of intellectual debate.

Television talk shows and newspaper symposiums endlessly argue their influence and record. Even among themselves, members of the ‘60s movement quarrel about who deserved the label of shestidesyatnik, and who defiled it.

Many shestis are proud of having been, as Yevtushenko puts it, “pioneers of freedom” under the Soviets. It is an article of faith among them that the reforms of former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin built on the spirit of anti-totalitarianism they established in their youth.

“It was the generation of the shestis that laid the foundation for today’s movement toward democracy,” says Yuri Afanasiev, a politician and historian. “Our generation played a great role in freeing the people from their blinkers, from the habit of thinking in cliches.”

But that claim is questioned by younger activists.

“The shestidesyatniks don’t at all deserve to appropriate the glory of the destroyers of communism,” says Andrei Malgin, 34, a social critic and editor who has spearheaded the attack on the shestis’ record. “They thought themselves nonconformists, but they weren’t. By closing their eyes to much that they knew, they even strengthened the regime.”

In a sensational exchange in the magazine Stolitsa (The Capital) this summer with Yegor Yakovlev, a leading shesti newspaper editor, Malgin leveled the most damaging charges against the older generation: As power worshipers they associated themselves with the regime; they provided communism with a human face by giving artistic exhibitions in the West, and they timidly settled for working within the system, rather than agitating for its overthrow.

He also raised the familiar objection that the shestis were oriented toward the West; that many exiles among them to this day have, in fact, resisted returning home does not help their image.

A furious Yakovlev replied by invoking the complexities of life under Soviet censorship: “How can one presume to judge the shestidesyatniks without having lived through that time?”

The debate is compelling because of the worldwide stature of many of its targets. The shestis were the first liberal Soviet intellectuals in decades to reach their own compatriots--usually through officially sanctioned channels--and the first to win renown in the West.

Their numbers included Yevtushenko, writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and poet Joseph Brodsky, both now Nobel laureates, and poet Andrei Voznesensky; musician and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, and filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky.

Lines like the famous opening of Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar,” devoted to the site of a Nazi massacre of Jews--”There are no gravestones over Babi Yar”--became catch phrases among the young as only rock lyrics can today.

Some figures are immune to questions of behavior and complicity: No one doubts the courage and commitment of Solzhenitsyn or Rostropovich, to name two. The shestis, in general, are fighting a battle possibly as frustrating as the struggle for freedom of expression under Khrushchev and the demoralizing reimposition of repression in 1964 under Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev: a battle to save their reputation.

Their fate is even more poignant given the relative position of their contemporaries in the United States. In America, the activist generation that came of age in the ‘60s is reaching the peak of influence--Vietnam War protester Bill Clinton the most obvious example.

In contrast, many shestis are experiencing a crisis of disillusionment. The ideals of freedom and self-expression for which they fought have been overtaken by events in Russia.

Some have capitulated to the new mores. Famed director Yuri Lyubimov, a charter-member shesti, ordered his progressive Taganka Theater shut down this summer after steering it for 30 years through the shoals of Soviet censorship and harassment. The reason had less to do with politics than with a dispute with a former protege over who retained the rights to privatize the popular theater.

But for others the disaffection with the new order goes deeper.

“Something happened to us after the August (1991) coup,” says Fedor Burlatsky, a historian and former editor of the Literary Gazette. “In came a new wave of political activists under very radical slogans. They were more radical than we were in terms of market reforms, more nationalistic--in my generation, we didn’t at all support Russian chauvinism.”

Afanasiev, 59, a former Young Turk of the Communist Party who says he has withdrawn from politics after a lifetime of fighting to liberalize the old regime, observes: “The distinctive trait of the shestis was that they were idealists and romantics. For us, moral laws were unshakable--don’t steal, don’t take bribes.”

But the latest generation of politicians, he says, “are the same kind of corruptioneers as the others. How can one join in such a struggle?”

One reason for their ambiguous position in public life today may be the distinction between shestis and dissidents, who are seen by later generations as having truly sacrificed their careers or lives to fight the Soviet regime.

“The shestis were not dissidents,” acknowledges Afanasiev. “We imagined the future of the Soviet Union in the framework of the existing system of socialism. We didn’t think that we should get rid of socialism.”

Yevtushenko argues that today’s critics are armed with ammunition the shestis had no access to--but which became public through their efforts. A popular image for writers of that generation was of a heroic V. I. Lenin, designed as an idealistic counterweight to Josef Stalin and as an invitation to return to the egalitarian principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. (“Lenin answers all questions,” Voznesensky wrote in his 1963 poem “Longjumeau.”)

Now that the archives show Lenin to have been almost as ruthless a murderer as Stalin, the juxtaposition no longer goes over very well.

“It’s very paradoxical,” Yevtushenko said in a telephone interview. “The new generation is already brought up on the contents of the archives that we fought to open. Now they criticize us for lack of knowledge.”

The view of Afanasiev and Yevtushenko itself provokes disagreement within the ranks of their own contemporaries, many of whom became dissidents and exiles.

One was Vasily Aksyonov, a writer whose view of the Soviet system was formed not at a Moscow university but in the Siberian labor camp where he grew up with his exiled parents.

“I didn’t see much difference between communism and fascism,” says Aksyonov, exiled in 1980 and now teaching literature at George Mason University in Virginia. “To me, to work in the Komsomol (the Communist youth organization) was the same as working in the Hitler Youth.”

Aksyonov himself does not consider people like Afanasiev legitimate members of the Sixties movement. “They were people fulfilling their party tasks,” he says dismissively.

The key to understanding the controversial role of the shestis is the history of the Khrushchev “thaw”--the relaxation of censorship--and its aftermath.

To help dismantle Stalin’s cult of personality, Khrushchev in the 1950s and early sixties broadened the limits of what could be published, especially if it helped him undermine Stalin’s positive image. The most famous literary work of the period, Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” in 1962 exposed Soviet readers to the reality of life in Stalin’s labor camps.

Young writers took the bit in their teeth, examining aspects of society long closed to literature, and, perhaps more important, exploring new styles. New institutions arose in the arts, including the literary magazine Novy Mir (New World), which published Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov and Yevtushenko, and the Taganka and Sovremennik (Contemporary) theaters, which staged daringly political productions of Russian classics and gave new playwrights an audience.

Not all of this was overtly political.

“Andrei Voznesensky wasn’t much interested in politics, but in avant-garde forms,” says literary critic Sarnov of one of the great Sixties poets. “But any poetry in those days had a political meaning. You needed political courage to violate Stalinist stereotypes of life, and you had to touch on forbidden themes, on not only aesthetic but political taboos.”

No career illustrates the web of compromises and accommodations demanded of members of the Sixties movement like that of Yevtushenko.

Born in Siberia in 1933, he had already emerged as one of the golden boys of Russian letters when the 1961 publication of his poem “Babi Yar,” in the official Literary Gazette, kindled a long-suppressed public discussion about Soviet state anti-Semitism.

The next year, perhaps the peak of the “thaw,” saw publication of his poem “Stalin’s Heirs,” which warned that the late dictator’s legacy lived on among his former henchmen.

Yevtushenko’s career oscillated between official favor and scorn. His poetry was often the lightning rod for reactionary elements in the Communist Party, not least when his book “A Precocious Autobiography,” written at age 28, was published in France without Moscow’s permission.

Yet Yevtushenko on his frequent government-sanctioned trips abroad often seemed to be on an official mission of giving the Communist regime a human face (even if he was always closely watched by Soviet security). He was not above rewriting a poem to make it more palatable to authorities.

His privileged lifestyle allowed the Soviet regime to show that not every outspoken writer ended up harassed like Solzhenitsyn or sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda like Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, victims of Brezhnev-era repression.

To the current generation, such ambiguous relations with the authorities exemplify the pact with the devil reached by many in the Sixties generation.

“Our creative beau monde without a twinge of conscience paid their visits to party, and even KGB, bigwigs,” says Malgin. “And they would even be proud of it! Later generations never did this.”

Yevtushenko observes today: “Perhaps we were politically naive. Probably we didn’t do enough (to fight the regime). But we thought we could improve socialism--that was our common dream.”

He resents the suggestion that he collaborated with authorities. He often wrote to Communist bosses, he notes, protesting the harassment of other writers and such Soviet actions as the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. “These are very stupid accusations,” he says.

For all that, many shestis interviewed recall the days of the “thaw” far more positively than they view the current atmosphere. “The mood then was optimistic,” says Aksyonov. “It seemed to us that we would overcome.”

Afanasiev says, “We escaped the intellectual and moral prison that we had lived in. This is not a little thing. But we have failed to see Russia become what we wanted it to be, genuinely free and genuinely democratic.

“Our time has not come yet,” he concludes.

Then, recognizing that many of the Sixties people in Russia have begun celebrating their 60th birthdays, he adds: “But when it comes, none of us will be left.”

Russia’s ‘60s Generation

In Russia, the revisionism about some of them and their reputation is running rampant. But there is little doubt that the shestidesyatniki --literally, in Russian, “the men of the sixties”--are part of a remarkable generation. Here’s a few:

* Yevgeny Yevtuchenko: Poet, once feted like a Western rock star

* Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Author, Nobel Prize laureate

* Joseph Brodsky: Poet, Nobel Prize laureate

* Mstislav Rostropovich: Cellist and conductor

* Andrei Konchalovsky: Filmmaker