Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (10 page)

Nor is the market easy even for those whose exhibitions don’t get shuttered. The proliferation of museums in Moscow notwithstanding, affluent, glamour-besotted Russians generally prefer flashier, more prestigious contemporary Western art to what is produced by their countrymen. Although global prices for Russian contemporary art have stabilized somewhat, the domestic art market has suffered a deep recession. Moscow’s three best-established galleries—Aydan Gallery, Marat Guelman Gallery, and XL Gallery—have had to reinvent themselves as nonprofits. Vladimir Ovcharenko, director of the Regina Gallery, said, “Most artists are working in their kitchens as they did in Soviet times.” It is not clear whether, as in Soviet times, they are working with moral purpose.

New York Times Magazine
, September 29, 1991

My first book was about artists in the Soviet Union. They were my subjects, but they also became friends, and I was eager to return to Moscow following publication so that I could spend time with them without interviewing them. I had anticipated a relaxing time, visiting friends in their dachas and talking and drinking into the night, so the dramatic events recounted here came as an ambush. It had been my persistent hope, but hardly my belief, that art and literature were purposeful, and that honing the ability to express difficult truths was a tool in the permanent project of fixing a broken world—that the pen or the paintbrush was indeed mightier than the sword. During those three days in Moscow I came to understand that—at certain times and in certain places—my hope might be true.

M
onday, August 19: At eight in the morning, a phone call from Viktoria Ivleva, a photographer, wakes me. “I’m sorry to call so early,” she says, “but I think I’m going to have to cancel dinner tonight. You see, Gorbachev has just resigned, and I don’t think I’m going to make it to the market, and I have no vegetables in the house.”

My mind is fogged. “Gorbachev has resigned?” I repeat vaguely.

“Apparently yes. That’s all I know about it.”

I am recovering from a party that went on until the small hours of the morning, a typical gathering of Moscow’s avant-garde artists. “All right, Vika, I’ll talk to you later,” I say, and go back to sleep. The mood in Moscow in mid-August is so powerfully positive, the attitude toward Gorbachev so nonchalantly dismissive, that his resignation strikes my bleary mind as only another meaningless step in the restructuring of Soviet politics. For more than two years, people have been saying that Gorbachev’s time has passed, that he has to step aside for more vigorous reformers. His decision at last to do so is not worth much fuss.

When I do get up, I turn on CNN, one of the benefits of a few top hotels in Moscow, which is reporting confusingly on his disappearance. The word
coup
is mentioned. I look out the window. All the usual vendors are along Rozhdestvenka Street, and the usual crowd is pouring out of the Kuznetsky Most metro station to buy things.

I phone the building at Furmanny Lane that Moscow’s vanguard artists have turned into studio space. I have been working and living with these artists for more than three years, communicating in English, French, and my minimal Russian, and have just published a book about our adventures together. Larisa Zvezdochetova, a conceptual artist, answers the phone. “Have you heard what’s happened?” I ask.

“So it’s true? This morning, at eight, Anton Olshvang called me with this terrible news, and I said to him, ‘Anton, I am getting very tired of your sense of humor,’ and I went back to sleep.” At eleven, Larisa received another call, reporting that a friend had seen tanks approaching the Russian Parliament. Concluding that these were just ordinary maneuvers, Larisa went back to sleep again. “But when I got up a little while ago, I put on my television, and I saw only Tchaikovsky ballet on every channel, and then I began to be very afraid.” Tchaikovsky ballets had played on every channel when Stalin died—it was the surest sign that something so extreme had happened that there was nothing else to broadcast.

I head for the decrepit building that houses the studios; eight artists are gathered in the small room on the top floor where we go late at night to drink and talk. The birthday of Larisa’s artist husband,
Kostya Zvezdochetov, was two weeks ago, and his sometime collaborator Andrei Filippov made “the biggest Russian flag in the world” for him, because their work deals with the tension between Russian spirit and Soviet bureaucracy. This ten-foot length of tricolored fabric has been in the corner of the studio for days, and now Kostya wraps it around his shoulders like a shawl.

He has managed to tune in Radio Liberty, the American propaganda and information channel, but the sound comes and goes. We are only half listening; now, as in the days of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, irony is the only way to deal with fear and crisis, so the conversation is quick, the witticisms as sharp and brittle as the news. The artists found out long ago that the way to combat a government that presents lies as if they were the truth is to tell the truth as if it were a joke. Humor became a means of encoded communication, and so long as they made jokes they could be vocal and invulnerable. But today, behind the banter, the artists are building up the courage they will need for whatever is to follow. Soon they will have to drop their habitual obliqueness; this calamity will call for real and palpable action.

Hungry for information, we set off together for the Kremlin and are astonished to find Red Square closed off, its vast acreage empty, tanks and officers guarding the entrance. We press into the crowds and get copies of the written statements that are being distributed by the resistance.

In Manezh Square, just below Red Square, a rally is beginning. Here, too, the center has been closed to pedestrians. People are gathering to listen to extemporaneous speeches. “You know as much as we do,” one of the soldiers says to us. “We were just told this morning to come here. We’ve had no further orders.” Vladimir Mironenko, a painter, replies, “It’s great that you’ve surrounded the Kremlin, but your guns are in the wrong direction. All you’ve got to do is turn them around so that they point toward the Kremlin and away from us, and everything will be fine.” The soldiers laugh.

One speaker says that a resistance movement is building around the Russian Parliament and that Boris Yeltsin is leading the fight against the new junta. “Elected!” the speaker keeps repeating. “Yeltsin we have elected!”

The artists shake their heads. “Yeltsin is a troublemaker, a political animal, and no member of the intelligentsia likes him very much,” one of them says. “But we may all have to stand behind him in this moment of crisis.”

As we head up Tverskaya, the central boulevard, we stop to photograph one another beside tanks or talking to soldiers. The streets, cleared of cars and mobbed with people, seem almost as though they have been swept clean for a parade.

We run into a friend who says that there is more action at the Parliament. We take the metro to Barrikadnaya station, so called because it is on the spot where barricades were built during the first Russian Revolution—a redundancy that everyone loves. The ordinarily sullen old woman who sweeps the station has taken it upon herself to confront anyone who seems to pause even for a moment. “Go!” she says. “Go at once to the demonstration!” Then she moves on to the next lot of people. “Go! Go quickly!”

We join the flood of humanity spilling down toward the Parliament. It never strikes us, as we listen to speeches delivered from the balcony, that we are swelling the ranks the press will record as protesters. We are all horrified by the emerging picture of the coup and the dangerous profiles of the members of the junta, but we have not gone to the Parliament to protest. We have gone to investigate.

The speakers warn us that the place is to be stormed at 4:00 a.m. and urge us to form human barricades to defend it. “Will you do that?” I ask my friends.

“If it’s necessary, then of course we must” is the answer.

We head toward the river, where there are more tanks, and talk to soldiers. The artists’ technique is to engage them in conversation. “So,” someone will ask, “you’ve been in the army a long time? Where do you come from? Ah, my grandmother came from near there. Have you been in Moscow before?” At the end of such a friendly chat—often accompanied by a gift of sausage, chocolate, or bread bought nearby—they suddenly bring the conversation around. “Listen, you don’t know what your orders tonight will be,” one of the artists says, “and I certainly don’t know, but I want to tell you that I and all my friends will be defending this building. We’ll be sitting outside it. Don’t shoot us.”

The soldiers are mostly nervously noncommittal. “We hope not,” they say.

“No, that’s not enough. Don’t shoot us. If you have problems, if you need to go into hiding from your generals, we will hide you.” Names and telephone numbers are readily exchanged, often scribbled on the back of the Yeltsin statements carried from the Parliament building.

In 1988, when I started to write about Soviet artists, the people I met would ask me not to telephone them from my hotel lest I arouse the suspicion of the KGB, not to use their names in describing certain activities. But now there is no question of anonymity. I say that I may publish something about the resistance and ask whether I should try to disguise identities. “You must tell everyone in the West, everyone in the world, that I have gone to this fight,” says Yuri Leidermann, an artist. “You should shout our names from the rooftops.”

At the end of the afternoon, we help build the barricades.

“It is usually the nuisance of Moscow that everything is under construction,” Kostya says. “But now it will be our salvation: What popular movement has ever had such good materials so readily available? Today, in this place, we will make a real communal work of art.”

It has started to rain, and a woman in high heels asks each of us, “Excuse me, but do you know how to drive a steam shovel or a bulldozer?” Someone has managed to jump-start the construction equipment, and in the end it has to be maneuvered by men who have clearly never before driven anything more challenging than a car. The machines push and drag, and we all line up and push and drag, and the barricades begin to take shape. The self-appointed overseer is another woman, with a shrill but commanding voice. Mud-spattered, wet, cold, she stands hands on her hips and shrieks instructions into the fray. T-shirts with Western writing—the words don’t matter—are fashionable in Moscow; across this woman’s generous figure is stretched
I’D RATHER BE PLAYING TENNIS
.

We agree to meet at the studios later in the evening. By nine thirty, most of the artists I know best are there, perhaps forty in all. The fun-fair atmosphere has given way to something more purposeful. Andrei takes the tongue-in-cheek flag he made for Kostya and tells us that,
should we become separated, we can meet beneath it. As we head for the Parliament, we are upbeat. “This is the end of the suspense,” Josif Bahkstein, a critic, says to me. “If we win now, reform has triumphed. If we lose now, we have truly lost.”

We discuss the general strike. “My refusal to go to the philosophy department of the university,” comments Viktor Zagarev, “is unlikely to frighten our junta. Today, for the first time, I wish I were an auto worker.” Someone else says, “If I close my art gallery, it will leave only four people unemployed.”

When, just before midnight, we hear the sound of the barricade being pulled apart, our hearts sink; we go running to the spot and find dozens of people struggling to open a gap in our fortification. “Come on,” they say. “Troops loyal to Yeltsin!” We eventually understand that a battalion has defected to our side and rush to join the demolition effort.

It is only a handful of tanks, but we leap on the fronts of them and ride to the Parliament, Andrei waving Kostya’s flag, the painter Serioja Mironenko, Vladimir’s twin brother, recording the whole thing on video. The soldiers in the tanks say, “We’ve come to join you.” Their arrival heightens our uneasiness: this could be the start of civil war. Nonetheless, the joy as they come through is surpassing. The demonstrations have seemed largely symbolic until now, a gesture no more meaningful than a work of politicized art. Suddenly, the force of physical power is with us.

It is cold and starting to rain; I and my group go up to stand in the sheltered plaza outside the Parliament. Some of us have been separated, and we mass again under Andrei’s flag. A hundred people loosely associated with the intelligentsia must be here, including some I have never met. “People complain that there is no nightlife in this city,” one artist says. “But tonight, every interesting person in Moscow is here, and we’ll probably all stay for hours.” Lena Kurlyandtseva, a critic, comes rushing over and says, “Andrew, you do not know Artyom Troitsky. Artyom, you have never met Andrew. But you have each read the other’s book, and I think you must have many questions to ask each other.” We stand in the rain and chat. “Private and public energy are fused by Soviet underground rock musicians, and that’s something Western readers have trouble grasping,” Artyom speculates. “They’re
more willing to accept such simultaneity in the work of visual artists.” We might as well be at a cocktail party.

Olga Sviblova has been filming the Moscow art scene for almost four years and is a fixture at every party and exhibition, with her semifunctional camera and her semicompetent technicians. Late Monday night, she suddenly makes an entrance, elaborately made up and turned out in a black silk miniskirt. She borrows Serioja’s video camera and films each artist. Since there is almost no light, she asks us to hold cigarette lighters around the faces of those she is shooting. “Two years ago,” she says, “I asked every one of these people whether they thought glasnost might fail, and I asked what they would do if it did. Tonight, I want only to record that they are here, and the attitudes of their faces. It will be the perfect ending for my film—if, of course, the new authorities don’t destroy it.”

By 2:00 a.m., we are getting cold and tired and bored, and we agree that some of us should go home so that we can return, refreshed, tomorrow. “We can’t all just live here for the next six months,” Larisa remarks. As we walk toward the barricade where we parked four hours ago, we are accosted by a striking woman with blonde hair and a pale gray coat. She explains that she is helping to inflate a helium balloon to fly over the Parliament and that she wants to attach to its cord the banners of resistance. “You have the biggest Russian flag I have ever seen,” she says. “If you will give me your flag, then all the people of Russia will be able to see it and take hope from it.”