Over Babiy Yar there are no memorials. The steep hillside like a rough inscription. I am frightened. Today I am as old as the Jewish race. - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence.

Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!

Although the USA eventually overtook the Soviet [space] programme, the early feats were widely remembered. Gagarin had the looks and affability of a film star and toured the world as his country’s semiofficial ambassador. He gave a human face to the communist order. Others did the same. Yevgeni Yevtushenko, an overrated poet but a larger-than-life personality and an advocate of de-Stalinisation, gave public readings in North America and Europe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the world’s main languages in 1963; its withering critique of the labour-camp system in the 1940s was taken as proof that the USSR was starting to look at its past with honest eyes. Soccer goalkeeper Lev Yashin was widely renowned. Soviet athletics teams had regular success at the Olympic games and brought glamour to the USSR.