ABSTRACT
Andrei Voznesenskii, one of the Soviet Union's leading poets, talked about the past, present, and future of Soviet literature in another interview with Radio Liberty. Voznesenskii also spoke of "the revolution by culture," a concept he coined. He said fresh ideas and new views were needed to change the economy and democratize Soviet society. When Russian nationalists viciously attacked writers of the "thaw" generation of the nineteen-sixties such as Evgenii Evtushenko, Voznesenskii, Bulat Okudzhava, and Andrei Bitov, nobody answered them back. One instance of an opportunity missed, according to Vasilii Seliunin, was the institution of "War Communism" by Lenin in 1918, which aborted the nascent progressive trends in the development of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. Seliunin's article gave a detailed analysis of Russian history before the Revolution. Seliunin made it clear that he believed the October Revolution had arrested progressive developments at the time and exacerbated the trend toward authoritarianism in Russia.
