"Although the USA eventually overtook the [[w:Soviet_space_programme|Soviet [space] programme]], the early feats were widely remembered. Gagarin had the looks and affability of a film star and toured the world as his country’s semiofficial ambassador. He gave a human face to the communist order. Others did the same. Yevgeni Yevtushenko, an overrated poet but a larger-than-life personality and an advocate of de-Stalinisation, gave public readings in North America and Europe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the world’s main languages in 1963; its withering critique of the labour-camp system in the 1940s was taken as proof that the USSR was starting to look at its past with honest eyes. Soccer goalkeeper Lev Yashin was widely renowned. Soviet athletics teams had regular success at the Olympic games and brought glamour to the USSR."

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Academics from RussiaNovelists from RussiaPoets from RussiaFilm directors from RussiaScreenwriters from Russia
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Sources

Robert Service, Comrades: A History of World Communism (2009)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Yevtushenko

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Academics from RussiaNovelists from RussiaPoets from RussiaFilm directors from RussiaScreenwriters from Russia

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (18 July 1933 - 1 April 2017) is a controversial Russian poet and film director. During the Soviet era he spoke out publicly against Stalinism and rejected socialist realism, but was himself criticised by many Soviet dissidents.

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