Mr. Yevtushenko wrote thousands of poems, including some shallow ones that he dashed off, he admitted, just to mark an occasion. Some critics questioned the literary quality of his work. Some writers resented his flamboyance, sartorial and otherwise, and his success. But his foes as well as his friends agreed that a select few of his poems have entered the annals of Russian literature as masterpieces of insight and conscience.

Written and read to crowds at critical moments, Yevtushenko poems like “Stalin’s Heirs” caught the spirit of a nation at a crossroads. In Russia, writers could be more influential at times than politicians. But they could also be severely rebuffed if they offended, as Pasternak did with his novel “Doctor Zhivago,” and as Solzhenitsyn did with “The Gulag Archipelago” and other works.

Combating Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism lingered in the Kremlin after Stalin’s death. In one instance, nervous officials thwarted efforts to raise a monument at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine, where thousands of Jews were machine-gunned and buried in a mass grave in 1941 by the invading Germans.

The reason the Kremlin said it resisted a memorial was that the Germans had shot other people there, too, not only Jews. Mr. Yevtushenko tackled the issue in 1961 in blunt verse that stunned many Russians and earned him acclaim around the world. The poem “Babi Yar,” composed after a haunting visit to the ravine, included these lines:

There are no monuments over Babi Yar.

But the sheer cliff is like a rough tombstone.

It horrifies me.

Today, I am as old

As the Jewish people.

It seems to me now,

That I, too, am a Jew.

Alluding to the pogroms that erupted at intervals over the centuries, Mr. Yevtushenko went on:

It seems to me,

I am a boy in Byelostok.

Blood is flowing,

Spreading across the floors.

The leaders of the tavern mob are raging

And they stink of vodka and onions.

Kicked aside by a boot, I lie helpless.

In vain I plead with the brutes

As voices roar:

“Kill the Jews! Save Russia!”

In a country ruled by Marxist myth, ostensibly free of bigotry, “Babi Yar” touched nerves in the leadership, and it was amended to meet official objections. Even so, it moved audiences. Whenever Mr. Yevtushenko recited the poem at public rallies, it was met with stunned silence and then thunderous ovations. He wrote once that he had received 20,000 letters hailing “Babi Yar.” Dmitri Shostakovich composed his Thirteenth Symphony on lines from that and other Yevtushenko poems.

But Mr. Yevtushenko was not allowed to give a public reading of the poem in Ukraine until the 1980s.

“Stalin’s Heirs,” published in 1962, also stirred Russians, appearing at a time when they feared that Stalinist-style repression might return to the country. It was published only after Nikita S. Khrushchev, the semi-liberal party leader who was then involved in a power struggle with conservatives, intervened as he pushed his cultural “thaw.” Stalin had been condemned anew the year before as having been a mad tyrant. The poem appeared in Pravda, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, and caused a sensation.