MOSCOW.- Soviet Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died on Saturday at the age of 84, was feted at home and abroad for non-conformism during the post-Stalinist thaw, but dismayed many by later becoming a pillar of the Soviet regime.

His narrative poems "Zima Junction" (1956) and above all "Babi Yar" (1961), both published before he was 30, propelled Yevtushenko to hero status among Soviet liberals basking in the brief period of artistic openness permitted by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev.

His attacks on Stalinism and Soviet bureaucracy, culminating in "The Heirs of Stalin" (1962), together with his demands for greater artistic freedom, were tacitly sanctioned by the Communist Party and he was allowed to travel widely abroad, where he read to enthusiastic audiences.

With his boyish good looks and message of revolt against the burden of the past, Yevtushenko appeared an emblematic figure for the decade.

His work was translated into several languages and sold millions of volumes around the world.

One of his own lines formulated his credo that "a poet in Russia is more than a poet," carrying expectations of expressing a national idea and symbolising an era.

'Sellout' claims
But his dissident fire dimmed somewhat after Khrushchev's removal from office in 1963, and by the 1970s he was being regularly accused of selling out to Soviet orthodoxy.

Yevtushenko was born at Zima, near Irkutsk, in 1933, a fourth-generation descendant of Ukrainian exiles.

He moved to Moscow in 1944, and in 1949-50 accompanied his father on geological expeditions to Kazakhstan and the Altai region.

He studied literature from 1951 to 1954 at the Gorky Institute in Moscow, and began turning out lyric verse clearly influenced by the revolutionary writer Vladimir Mayakovsky.

"Babi Yar", his impassioned account of the massacre of Ukrainian Jews in a ravine outside Kiev in September 1941 that condemned not just German but also Soviet anti-Semitism, brought Yevtushenko to an international audience.

He recited the poem on tours of the Soviet Union, often in crowded football stadiums, and the words were set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich as part of his Thirteenth Symphony.

Under Leonid Brezhnev's neo-Stalinist regime, Yevtushenko continued to speak out, notably defending the beleaguered Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but did so increasingly sporadically.

To the dismay of his admirers, he fell gradually into line with Soviet orthodoxy, singing the praises of hydroelectric dams and truck plants in what his peers dismissed as "rhymed reportage."

He also criticised dissident writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky who were jailed in the mid-1960s for anti-Soviet propaganda.

While remaining a privileged member of Moscow's cultural elite, he occasionally nourished his rebel-at-heart image with private indications of dissenting ideals, and began to diversify his creative abilities.

He took up photography and acting, starring in "Ascent", a 1978 film about the rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Drawing largely on his own past, he wrote a novel, "Wild Berries", and a play, and directed two films, notably "Kindergarten", which he described as his "Amarcord", a reference to Federico Fellini's 1973 autobiographical fantasy.

In 1983 in an interview with French media he said that there were no political prisoners under Brezhnev's regime.

Mikhail Gorbachev's "perestroika" -- opening up -- allowed Yevtushenko to resume his criticisms of approved targets, particularly if drawn from the Stalinist past.

But he remained well within the borders of what the authorities allowed, and steered clear of direct attacks on the Communist party.

He himself wrote in a poem: "People tell me you are a brave man. Not true. I have never been brave. I just considered it undignified to lower myself to the cowardice of my colleagues."

Victims of Stalin
After the fall of Communism he helped organise the setting up of a memorial to the victims of Stalinism opposite the Lubyanka, headquarters of the KGB.

Like many Soviet-era writers he fell out of fashion in the post-communist world of untrammelled market forces, but continued writing and compiling poetry, notably a collected edition of his own work and a volume of 20th century Russian poetry.

He also wrote a novel, "Don't Die Before You're Dead", about the abortive 1991 coup against Gorbachev.

He moved to the US in the early 1990s and taught film and poetry at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In 2010, he was presented with Russia's prestigious state prize for developing culture by then-president Dmitry Medvedev at the Kremlin. He continued to visit Russia and read at literary events, most recently on Red Square in 2016.

He suffered poor health in recent years and had a leg amputated in 2013.

Yevtushenko was married four times and had five sons. His first wife, Bella Akhmadulina, who died in 2010, was also a renowned poet.


© Agence France-Presse