Yevtushenko's defenders point to "how much he did to oppose the Stalin legacy, his animus fueled by the knowledge that both of his grandfathers had perished in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. He was expelled from his university in 1956 for joining the defense of a banned novel, Vladimir Dudintsev's "Not by Bread Alone". He refused to join in the official campaign against Boris Pasternak, the author of "Doctor Zhivago" and the recipient of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature. Yevtushenko denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; interceded with the KGB chief, Yuri V. Andropov, on behalf of another Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; and opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979."