BABI YAR

The term shestidesiatniki—plural for shestidesiatnik, a derivative from the Russian shest’desiat, meaning “sixty”—is one of the keywords of the period under our discussion. In fact, the name of Evgeni Evtushenko, the protagonist of this chapter, is also a keyword for the time around 1961, when the events under analysis took place. As a signifier of Soviet intellectuals of “the 1960s generation,” shestidesiatniki first appeared in a 1960 essay by the literary and film critic Stanislav Rassadin, who wrote about a reborn intelligentsia distinguished by its “ability and desire to think, to reflect about life and its complexities.”¹ Rassadin