On 23 August 1968, Yevtushenko sent a telegram to the Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin lamenting the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but "when Yevtushenko was nominated for the poetry chair at Oxford in 1968, Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, and the Russian-Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely led the campaign against him, arguing that he had made life difficult for his fellow Soviet writers."