Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (12 page)

Haas plans to open a club in the autumn. “You come in from the provinces to Moscow,” he explains. “You’re ambitious; you’re young. What do you see? Success is in the hands of these big mafiosi driving expensive cars, with pretty girls around them. It’s dark energy, evil. I want to start a club for light energy, a place for clean people with good bodies and smart minds. You can’t win people over to light energy by being a hippie: I want a club for ambitious people with success written all over them. I’m not going to have alcohol there: it makes people retreat into the fog, and our lives are foggy enough. I’m going to have the best sound system and the best music and amazing DJs. And the price will be really low. That’s democracy: it’s for everyone, for the new Russia.”

I want to see the clubs of Moscow. I mention five names to Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe, a Marilyn impersonator and hero of Russian pirate television. “Mafia, prostitutes, a few businessmen,” he says. I ask about Diskoteka Lise, the biggest in Moscow. “Oh, no,” he says. “Even in America you must have these places, full of heavy, middle-aged Georgian women with bleached hair, blue eye shadow, and Lurex tank tops, shimmying out of time to old Debbie Harry songs.”

After trying a few dreadful places—at one, three bananas and three drinks cost $95—I am in despair.

But in mid-April, I go to the painter Sveta Vickers’s new, low-budget club in the Hermitage Theater, where I find members of the
artistic-bohemian
tusovka
, with people from television, some actors, painters, conceptualists, and intellectuals. A big room in front has tables and chairs where people can drink and talk; the dance floor is in the theater itself. I run into more than a hundred people I know within my first half hour at Sveta’s; there are no strangers here. “I would be happy to come every night,” says Tanya Didenko, a musicologist and host of the voguish late-night television music-talk show
Silence Number Nine
. Arisha Grantseva, an artist, is holding court at a table in the corner. Painters come by to say hello, and MC Pavlov, a rapper, drums out time on the back of his chair. I meet a Bulgarian-Swiss performance artist and a Greek architect. I even spot Aleksei Haas on the far side of the room. The club has never advertised; everyone knows of it by word of mouth.

Sveta, at the center of it all, laughs. “You know,” she says, “I have two big advantages over these other people who are running clubs. In the first place, none of them is Jewish! And in the second place, none of them is a mother!”

The pleasure of Sveta’s club lies in something Russian that I have never encountered in a club in the West. It lies in visionary, exuberant love, which you feel all over the place, as tangible as the decoration or the music. “We know how to enjoy,” a young painter says to me. “We grew up with the image of our parents suffering together. The legacy of that communal pain of the bohemian world is strong in us, and it makes our joy palpable.”

I go with some friends to visit Petlyura for the first time. Near Pushkinskaya, on Petrovsky Boulevard, we come to what appears to be a construction site. One of our party heaves a shoulder against a hidden door, and we enter a large courtyard, dominated by a thirty-foot-high copy of Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist
Monument to the Third International
. “This is it,” someone whispers to me. This building, once the home of a nobleman, later divided into communal apartments, is now Petlyura’s squat. It is a fine example of Russian nineteenth-century architecture, a pale yellow neoclassical building, appallingly decrepit.

We go into an entryway and down a hallway painted in black with silver graffiti. We knock on a door. It flies open at once, and from within come the sounds of Tibetan monks chanting, and a heavy smell, sweet and acid, of decay and vodka and ethyl spirits. We can see six people sitting around a table and drinking. “We’ve come to see Petlyura,” we say.

One of the group, the performance artist Garik Vinogradov, agrees to show the way. We walk through a large dance hall, now empty, to a bar. The walls are covered with a giant collage that includes old Soviet models, Barbara Bush, men in trench coats smoking obscure brands of cigarettes, Audrey Hepburn, and the Sistine Madonna. At one end, a blackboard announces prices. Along the walls, instead of banquettes, are broken television sets and small tables. Lounging on one of the televisions is a man about five feet tall, with a Leninish goatee, wearing bright red trousers and a big, shapeless crimson jacket; gathered around him is a hodgepodge of young men and women.

“Come in, sit down,” Petlyura says.

Petlyura’s place has become a haven for lost souls. People who have run away from home, have had problems with drugs, are wandering in this new post-glasnost world with no sense of direction, come to Petlyura’s and find a community and a way of life. “Everyone carries on about glasnost,” says Petlyura disdainfully. “So before we were slaves to the Communists and the KGB. And now to the democrats and capitalists. It’s still a hollow sham. My place is an escape from all that.”

Thirty-four people are currently living in Petlyura’s place. He was brought up in an orphanage, and this background has served him well: everyone has assigned duties on rotating schedules. The residents must do their share of scrubbing and cooking and serving. “It’s like the military,” Moscow critics say. “More like a kibbutz,” replies Petlyura. Who can stay and for how long is decided by Petlyura alone. “They are all my rules,” he says, “and whoever doesn’t like them is free to go elsewhere.” The stalwart of his house is an ethnically Polish woman dwarf of about sixty-five called Pani Bronya, who is always in evidence; her husband, who believes that he is Lenin, stands guard outside.

The second time I go to Petlyura’s, Lenin is wandering around the courtyard in uniform. Inside, people are gathering: about a dozen are drinking at the bar. A room next door has been transformed into a “boutique,” and racks of old Soviet clothes are for sale at low prices. The people pouring into the shop are dressed in thrift-shop chic and have a slightly punky manner.

I go to Vinogradov’s part of the squat, where I listen to “experimental” music with a lot of chanting, some black light, and incense. Then I go see an exhibition of work by one of the squat’s residents who has done a series of paintings called
Untold Fairy Tales
, which show zebras and giraffes floating on icebergs in an arctic landscape. “I’d never really thought about art,” she says, “until I came here about two months ago.”

Petlyura’s is the best and most interesting of the various squats with
tusovki
and bars and dance halls—but there are many of them in town. Every Wednesday, the Third Path, on the far side of the river, has dancing; I try to go one evening, but am told that it’s closed for a few weeks because “the violence has been getting out of hand.” Violence? “Mafia hooligans,” the man at the door tells me. I look around at the destruction. “There’s nothing to steal here,” he says. “We have nothing.” And he closes the door.

The Life of the Mind

Everyone in Russia seems to be starting a magazine. Of the literally thousands of new magazines, mostly made with photocopiers (access to which was restricted under Communism), some are commercial, but most are not. They are about a particular subject—microbiology, business advice, fashion, the arts. Most have a circulation of between fifty and five hundred.

Perhaps the most impressive at the moment is
Kabinet
, the brainchild of a group of Petersburg intellectuals. Each quarterly issue contains several hundred pages of dense philosophical text, translations of Western criticism, satirical essays, and sharp cultural commentary; each is designed by a different Petersburg artist.

I attend a staff meeting of the magazine, held in the Arabian salon of an eighteenth-century palace, where the artist Timur Novikov currently has an exhibition of textile pieces. The lights are low, and Eastern music plays in the background. The editors of
Kabinet
—Viktor Mazin and Olesya Turkina—read aloud a brilliantly provocative dialogue “in the style of Plato” about Timur’s work. The company of twenty-five includes Timur; Irina Kuksinaite, artist, actress, and
Vogue
model, who has just opened an exhibition in a palace nearby; Georgi Guryanov, painter; Yevgeny Birman, organizer of raves; and other intellectual-social trendies.

After the reading, the company smokes hash and drinks Crimean sherry while debating the merits of Mazin’s translation of Paul de Man on the Hegelian sublime. Mazin explains to me that he has translated several books of critical theory recently, without thought of publication, because he wants to share them with his friends. Irina Kuksinaite talks about the semiotic distinctions between the German concept of fatherland and the Russian concept of motherland. Others ask me about Lacanian revisionism in America and discuss the validity of the Stalinist apologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom they are translating for the next issue. Then we get onto the subject of the rave that night, who will go, what to wear, and what the music is going to be.

In Moscow, at the end of a dinner party, a young philologist recites Greek futurist poems of the thirties. Another guest responds with Mayakovsky. I say that this is unusual dinner-party behavior by American standards. “But how, then, do you sustain an oral poetic tradition?” an architect asks softly.

Rock, Pop, and Rap

Throughout the seventies and the early eighties, the lyrics to songs by Akvarium, Kino, or Boris Grebenshchikov gave information about a better way of life to Soviet people. Rock music was heroic, the performers closely tied to the intelligentsia. Pop musicians represented official culture; their music was often on the radio, but their popularity was suspect and usually artificial.

I see Boris Grebenshchikov, who is about to release a new album. His records once sold in the millions; he now expects to sell fifteen or twenty thousand. “It’s time for Russian pop now,” Irina Kuksinaite says, “because all anyone wants is dollars and muscles.”

In Moscow, I spend an evening with Artyom Troitsky, director of music programming for Russian National Television. “When I was younger,” he says (he is thirty-eight), “the situation was incredibly simple. They were black and we were white. We stood for vitality and goodness in a society that was flaccid and evil. Young people choose the simplest thing. For us, the simplest thing was to be moral; today, the simplest thing is to live well. In my day, you were marginal because the system gave you no other options, and you expressed your politics with rock. Now, if you want to be in politics, no one is stopping you. It’s not forbidden; it’s just sickening. But you can’t very well sing about that.”

His comments help to explain the vapidity of the new Russian pop. One of this year’s most popular songs goes, “You are a stewardess named Zhanna. You are adorable and wantable. You are my favorite stewardess.” Bogdan Titomir—male sex symbol of Russia, hero of teenyboppers—has a video that features a kickline of Russian boys dressed in American football uniforms and helmets trying to dance like Michael Jackson. The Russian record industry has been destroyed by economic liberalization; only the lucky few can afford records, and the profits for singers such as Titomir come from endless concert tours.

The managers for the big pop stars are all tied to the mafia. “I get bribes pushed at me all the time,” says Troitsky. “People offer hundreds of dollars to get a video shown once. The man with my job at one of the commercial channels got murdered a few weeks ago. I don’t take bribes—it’s part of my old-fashioned heroic mentality—so I’ve only had my life threatened once. The managers drop like flies.”

I have dinner with the rapper MC Pavlov, whom I remember from his days in the rock band Zvuki Mu. Pavlov keeps out of the serious pop scene, but his new band is making videos, and his records are out; his concerts are increasingly popular, and even Titomir has admitted that Pavlov is the only true rap artist in the country. “I wouldn’t mind becoming nationally famous,” he says, “but I don’t want to
get into crime. Corporate sponsorship would be good.” Pavlov is for the cultural elite, the supercool; he played at the First Gagarin party.

“Heroic Russian rock,” Pavlov says, “wasn’t for dancing. We wanted to bring some fun into this country. We do some rap and some house and some R and B and some jazz.” MC Pavlov is part of an amalgamated Russian music based on Western ideas, yet unlike anything heard in the West. He is tall with blue eyes and a shaved head, and he is wearing a little square hat and loose-fitting rapper clothes, a few rings, and a few ethnic necklaces. “We’re not from the ’hood. We know that. We’re not interested in being political like American rap or Russian rock; we don’t want to sing about the unavailability of sausages in the shops. We rap mostly in English because rap in Russian sounds stupid. I kind of make up a language, English words and Russian grammar.”

Pavlov’s music is danceable, with strong rhythms and good mixes. He has a kind of plausible funkiness that is not often found in Russia. “I guess if we have some concerns to get across, they’re spiritual rather than political. We’re vegetarian, antiviolence, antidrugs, antidrink, into pure souls. We follow the teachings of Buddha. People from the West worry about Russian politics, but we’re not up to that yet. First teach the people to be human, then maybe you can start on politics.”

The next night, I have dinner with the Moscow painter Sergei Volkov. “To see these young people trying to imitate American rappers,” he says, “is as incredible to me as it would be to you if you went up to Harlem one day and found everyone there dressed as Ukrainian dancers and strumming on balalaikas.”

The Gay Nineties

Gay life in Russia is somewhat better than it was. Even without antisodomy laws, “only those creepy activists actually go and talk about their sexuality all over the place,” a gay friend says. “And they do it only for the attention they get from the West; activism occurs here because Westerners put Russians up to it.”

This seems to be the general view. Even celebrities who are obviously
gay do not admit it in public contexts. The Petersburg artist Timur Novikov has worked on gay subjects for years. Privately, he says that part of the pleasure of homosexuality is its secrecy; interviewed on television, he denies any suggestion that he might be gay. Sergei Penkin, a pop singer who is sometimes called the Russian Boy George, has performed often in Moscow’s one gay club; but he, too, on television, says he is straight.