[1]: 172 Among the young poets who read their own work to huge crowds in Mayakovsky Square were Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, who walked a thin line between being able to publish in the Soviet Union and representing a spirit of youthful protest.
... Это - я, призывающий к правде и бунту, не желающий больше служить, рву ваши черные путы, сотканные из лжи!
They were organized by biology student Vladimir Bukovsky with a small circle of university friends, but gathered momentum quickly and were soon taking place regularly.
[2][4]: 272 This included an oppositionist student movement which had already begun to develop immediately out of the shock of Khrushchev's 1956 report on Stalin's purges.
At last, when [Anatoly] Shchukin started reading, they let out a howl and made a dash through the crowd in the direction of the statue... A gigantic fist-fight broke out.
It coincided with a holiday to celebrate Yuri Gagarin's space flight, and the square was filled with bystanders, many of whom joined the crowd around Mayakovsky's statue out of curiosity.
Vladimir Osipov, Eduard Kuznetsov and Ilya Bokshteyn were soon after convicted under article 70 “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” for allegedly attempting to create an underground organization.
[5]: 60 By the autumn of 1961, news of the readings in Mayakovsky Square had begun to filter out to the foreign press, and an open campaign began to crush them.
After a final gathering on the opening day of the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October of the same year, the readings were officially banned.
The SMOGists expressed a trend of 1964-65 toward greater organization among literary dissidents, as compared to the more unstructured and spontaneous readings of the early sixties.
For them, concerns for literary freedom were mixed with a political interest in the Russian revolutionary tradition from the Decembrists to Lenin, and in other leaders who had opposed Stalin, such as Trotsky and Bukharin.
[2][8] Despite the introduction of new articles in the Criminal Code in the wake of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, directed against "group actions which violate public order", a last SMOGist demonstration took place on September 28.
[8] On 25 September 2022, 33-year-old poet Artyom Kamardin recited a poem opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in what was now called Triumfalnaya Square for which in the following year he, attendee Yegor Shtovba and another participant, Nikolai Dayneko, were given severe prison sentences.