The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who gained international fame with ‘Babi Yar’, a poem that told of the slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews by the Nazis in Ukraine, has died at the age of 84.

Yevtushenko said he wrote the poem in 1961 after visiting the site of the mass killings in Kiev. He searched for some kind of historical marker but found nothing. In the poem he denounced the Soviet distortion of historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre in September 1941, and the anti-semitism still widespread in the Soviet Union. At the height of his fame, he read in football stadiums and arenas, including to a crowd of 200,000 in 1991, during the failed coup attempt in Russia.

Yevtushenko was born in Siberia in the town of Zima, and rose to prominence during Khrushchev’s rule. His poetry was outspoken, although some said he was only a showpiece dissident whose public views never went beyond the limits of what officials would permit.

In 1965, Yevtushenko signed a letter of protest against the trial of Joseph Brodsky as a result of the court case against him initiated by the Soviet authorities. He subsequently co-signed a letter against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, Brodsky later said of Yevtushenko that he “throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved”. Brodsky resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was made an honorary member.

In recent years Yevtushenko divided his time between Russia and the US, teaching Russian and European poetry and the history of world cinema at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and at Queens College of the City University of New York. He was married four times.