On November 1st 2010, at 17.00 at the Sakharov Centre a round table will take place on the theme: “People of the 1960s and the present day. On the 10th anniversary of the death of Yuri Burtin”

Invited: G.A. Yavlinsky, L.M. Batkin, I.M. Klyamkin, G.G. Vodolazov and all interested.

Yelena Burtina:

“My father, Yury Grigor'evich Burtin, died on October 20, 2000. I don’t know if this name speaks to people today. But in the second half of the 1980s and in the 1990s many knew him. He was a publicist and literary critic of those known as the “Sixties people”. Leonid Parfenov called them “Children of the 20th Congress” and shot a film of them by the same name: papa was one of the heroes together with Yegor Yakovlev and Len Karpinsky. And still they call them with a note of irony “foremaster of perestroika”.
In one of his lastest essays of “Confessions of Sixties people” papa wrote that he felt guilt – both his own and his generation’s – that the in the event, “perestroika” and “true socialism” gave birth to a new monster, which my father and his friend Grigory Vodolazov called “Nomenklatura Capitalism”.
I am very bitter, that my father, who experienced before his death terrible physical suffering, was also plagued by the thought that “the sixties people” had been mistaken, had lost.
I am not only bitter about the fact that my father terribly regretted this, but also about its unfairness: with the last of his strength he fought to prevent this new birth. He fought singularly with everything available to him, an invalid of the highest degree whose only weapon was words.
And so, ten years had gone by. What has become of our society in that time? It’s possible, that the monster has become civilised and consumes people no more; or has it merely begun to use a knife and a fork to eat them with? Is it clipped and shaven, like Ramzan Kadyrov, and has turned from a bandit into an academic? But it is possible that these were the hallucinations of a tired, ill man; that there is no monster, but something different, and the past ten years showed, that my father was not right.

Let us speak about this and about how real the thoughts and writings of the “sixties people” became”.

October 26, 2010


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Human Rights Center Memorial, 127051, Russia, Moscow, Maly Karetny, 12
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