Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the modern Russian poet the West knows best, is not only delighted about glasnost; he takes some personal credit for it. Those now trying to push through reforms, he thinks, are probably the same people who went to his poetry readings in the late 1950s and early 1960s in clubs and factories and theatres round the country; the new openness is "an echo of our poetry." And it is poetry, in Mr Yevtushenko's eyes, that will have to drive glasnost on.

He is playing his part with his usual fierceness. Last June, after a meeting with the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik leader executed by Stalin in 1938, he wrote "Bukharin's Widow", a poem intended to push forward the campaign to rehabilitate Bukharin and demolish Stalin; later last year, in "Monuments not yet Erected", he called for a public memorial to the victims of Stalins's purges. Both poems have just reached the West. When "Monuments" was published in Moscow, in November, it inspired furious letters to Izvestia; one suggested that Mr Yevtushenko should be sent "in good Stalinist fashion" to Siberia—from which he comes, and which has been the subject of much of his most lyrical poetry.

"Bukharin's Widow" has caused an even greater uproar. Although it was submitted to a magazine, Ogonyek, last summer on the understanding that it would appear at once, it has not yet been published. Mr Yevtushenko read it aloud at the end of October at a meeting organised by Ogonyek with the editor on the platform; the editor implied then that he would publish it if Bukharin turned out to have official approval. In November Mr Mikhail Gorbachev mentioned Bukharin in a speech, and there have been several long articles about Bukharin since; but because he is not yet wholly rehabilitated, "Bukharin's Widow" has not yet appeared. This makes Mr Yevtushenko bitter. He was bold enough to write about Bukharin before the others, without any official nod, and he is now in danger of looking like a camp follower.

Neither "Bukharin's Widow" nor "Monuments" are new themes for him. His most famous poem of protest, "Babiy Yar" (1961), described, as "Monuments" does, the shamefulness of victims buried in mass graves with no memorial; in "Babiy Yar", the victims were Jews. (For Mr Yevtushenko, the son of a geologist, the strongest image is often that of digging down through the earth and forcing bodies, like unpleasant facts, to the surface.) Another theme is anonymity: the official namelessness to which people may be subjected, after death, in the hope that they will go unremembered. For Mr Yevtushenko, the present cannot be addressed until the past has been faced honestly. In "Bukharin's Widow" it is Bukharin himself, the nonperson, who must be faced:

     I saw that picture not in our country, but abroad:
     a Norodnik-type beard, a driver's cap on his brow,
     the black prophetically funereal sheen of
     his Bolshevik leather coat,
     and the gaze, used to surveillance …

It is not that Mr Yevtushenko distrusts Mr Gorbachev; but he does not know quite how devoted an anti-Stalinist he is, and he is worried about the inertia he has to deal with. He wants to nudge him on a bit. Mr Yevtushenko is quite shrewd about choosing his moments to push. This is how he has survived, "skilfully and professionally evading the toro's horns", as he puts it, while other poets such as Mr Joseph Brodsky—who won the Nobel Prize for literature last year—are gored and go into exile. There have been moments when Mr Yevtushenko has appeared, probably unfairly, to be a lapdog, and when his work has looked subservient. He is now struggling to consolidate his role within glasnost. As the bold scout ahead of the pack, he suddenly finds himself being overtaken by other writers eager to be noticed.

Mr Yevtushenko's claim that poetry has given birth to glasnost is not universally shared, however, even among writers. Poets and novelists have often played the role of holy fools in Russia; being half-mad, they are allowed to be at least half-honest. But Mr Mikhail Shatrov, the principal political playwright in the Soviet Union, thinks that "blows from literature" are not enough. Only facts, he says, will convince the powers that be (if they can be convinced at all) to change their attitude. Mr Shatrov writes his plays as historical dissertations, using actual documents and minutes from party meetings. His latest, Onward, Onward, Onward!, has just been published in a literary monthly and is about to go into production in Moscow and Leningrad. It contends that Stalin was a murderer, a traitor to the Revolution and not Lenin's heir. Mr Shatrov tries to say, as an historian (and thus, in Russia, as near the establishment as a writer can get), precisely what Mr Yevtushenko is shouting on the other side of the street.

Both men have lived too long in Russia, under regimes of varying tolerance and callousness, to be over-optimistic about the future. They doubt whether Stalin's ghost can ever be successfully exorcised. At the end of Onward comes a poignant stage direction: "Everybody wants Stalin to leave … but he remains on the stage." As for free expression, that fragile hope, it still seems not much nearer than the nightingale in Mr Yevtushenko's "Zima Junction":

     Unbroken forest round,
     no way to him at all
     not walking and not riding,
     not walking and not riding,
     and not flying,
     and not flying.