May 20, 2022

https://youtu.be/d-fQFMO7654Back in March, as the war in Ukraine gathered pace, I became obsessed with the memory of a poem I'd studied as a sixth-former, by the Soviet poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Ostensibly about child-rearing, the poem describes the way the communist state seeks to infantilise the masses. "You shouldn't tell untruths to little children."But when I tried to track the poem…