"Again a meeting..."*

Again a meeting, noisy, dying,
                              half colloquium,
                                              half co-lying.
Obedient hands
              raised to vote,
is there no sob of sentiment
                            in your throat
when making
           a charming deal
to dismember friends
                    on the wheel?
What kind of minority
                     honestly stands?
Only two hands,
               only two hands.
A minority has courage,
                       the majority reeks.
They are not Bolsheviks,
                        just bullshitviks.
They are not soldiers
                     of revolutions.
Just soldiers
             of resolutions.
You, my friends,
                are silent with reason.
But cowardly silence
                    also is treason.
Oh, majority, majority,
                       creators and victims of fraud,
so many times you’ve
                    tortured, corrupted,
you have no right
                 to be our god.
The nonruling minority
                      has no authority.
On so many cowards I see
                        an invisible life vest.
But how powerless is the dishonest assent
                                         of the majority.
And how powerful is
                   minority’s honest protest.

1957
Translated by Albert C. Todd with the author

*The notorious meeting of the Writers’ Union in Moscow in 1957, when Vladimir Dudintsev was criticized for his novel Not by Bread Alone, which, following Ilia Ehrenburg’s novelette The Thaw, became the second signal for change in the immediate post-Stalin era.