World: From the Second City

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Most Russian intellectuals listened in tight-lipped silence as word of Nikita Khrushchev's latest cultural crackdown (TIME, March 22) filtered out to the provinces. Not so the writers and artists of Leningrad, Russia's second city. When the local commissars met to give them the word, the intellectuals talked right back.

The Leningrad edition of Pravda reported acidly last week that the curator of the West European art history section of Leningrad's famed Hermitage Museum rose to defend "formalistic distortions and asserted that 'this is buoyant, creative art.' " What's more, the prominent director of the Comedy Theater, Nikolai P. Akimov, "furiously defended the right to unlimited experimentation with form." Painter Leonid A. Tkachenko not only backed up colleagues who were under attack, but "did not give a correct evaluation of criticism directed at himself."

That wasn't all. "Things even came to such a pass," said the newspaper, "that some began to feel 'shy' about speaking on Socialist Realism."

Shyest of all intellectuals in the Soviet Union was Poet Evgeny Evtushenko, usually the most outspoken of the lot. Evtushenko had been singled out* by Khrushchev for a scathing attack because of the poet's popularity in the West. After the Premier's blast, he went into seclusion with his wife in a dacha south of Moscow, and last week let word circulate that he had indefinitely "postponed" long-scheduled trips to Italy and the U.S.