The soldiers look at one another and then they look at us. We are so wet, so cold, so impotent in all but the courage of our convictions—so entirely persuaded that we speak in the name of righteousness, but so transparently lacking in material defenses—that the soldiers might easily laugh. Instead, after staring at us intensely for a full minute, the driver of the front tank shrugs as though he were doing nothing more than giving way to the inevitable course of destiny. “We must bow to the will of the people,” he says, and instructs us to move aside so the tanks can make U-turns. It takes a lot of space and some time for a tank to make a U-turn.
“Why do you think they are really leaving?” I ask Kostya.
“Because of us,” he replies. “Because we are here, and because of what we’ve said.”
All of us—friends and strangers—embrace, then stand and cheer until we are hoarse.
Only after it is over do we feel the particular enthralling mixture of our receding fear and our brush with heroism. Then we decide that we have had enough of bald courage for the moment, and so we collect friends, to whom we enthusiastically recount our adventure, and go back to my hotel, where we have a good lunch and are proud. My visa expires today, so I leave for the airport after lunch. The others are going home to sleep and recover and make phone calls and prepare for the night’s vigil.
But that vigil does not come. By the time I check in for my flight, the coup has failed, defeated in part by internal argument and in part by soldiers who deferred to human barricades.
For the artists, this has brought another kind of liberation. Freedom has always been their obsession; in these three days they have had the luxury of physically defending it. “We won the war,” says Kostya when I speak to him later on the phone. “You, me, and all our friends.” He pauses for a second. “But it was my flag.”
RUSSIA
* * *
Young Russia’s Defiant Decadence
New York Times Magazine, July 18, 1993
When I returned to Russia two years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the country was changing dramatically with the sudden explosion of personal freedom and new wealth. I was in my late twenties, and found my contemporaries of particular interest because they were capable of accommodating the new order. Old Soviets’ sensibilities were mostly fixed in the poisonous system that had formed them; these young people seemed—even more than most young people—to be defining what was to come. Vladimir Putin has since taken Russia in another direction. I read today with particular sorrow the assertion by experts that broader gay rights were nearly an inevitability, an optimistic position that has now been roundly disappointed. But these character sketches speak to the Yeltsin years, when cynicism and autonomy were committed bedfellows.
* * *
Traveling in Russia recently as a writer, I came quickly to feel like a spy—not an American foreign agent, but a spy for each emerging social class to the others. Members of the Russian mafia—the organized-crime circle—are fascinated to hear that intellectuals believe the criminal class exerts social influence. The intelligentsia are obsessed with the greed of the new rich businessmen, whom they blame for the end of idealism. A return to the Orthodox Church has left homosexuals worried about repressive neoconservatism; nightclub owners are pondering whether artists who flourished underground can survive in the new daylight. Politicians wonder whether power will devolve to these chaotic elements. Across all these strata, the changes are most evident among members of the younger generation.
Overall, their outlook is harsh indeed. According to an article in the mainstream newspaper Argumenty i Fakty in April, “Young Russian malcontents are considering suicide every second.” One-third want to leave the country. Since 1989, the birthrate has dropped 30 percent, as discouraged young people choose not to have children.
Even so, some young Russians who fall outside these depressing statistics are plunging ahead with often-decadent abandon to find freedom, wealth, and power, defying both the timidity and the idealism of the older generation. They have broken up into hundreds of different tusovki, a colloquial word that mixes the ideas of “clique,” “scene,” and “social circle.” In this world, the Wild West mentality of nineteenth-century America mixes with a decadence reminiscent of Berlin between the wars. Only someone from the outside can move easily from group to group, reporting to one what is happening in another. It’s a shame that Russians can’t do this more easily, because the essential truths about the new Russia lie not in the behavior or beliefs of any one group, but in the very diversity of visions, opinions, and goals now rising from the wreckage of Communism.
Raves, Parties, and Nightclubs
We are going to a rave, Kristall II, at the big St. Petersburg ice-skating rink. Beforehand, we visit Viktor Frolov, debonair man-about-town, who is loosely connected to the party’s organizers. Among those present are a pop singer, a few artists, some models, a film actress, and others without clearly defined jobs. The women are all attractive and wearing Western-type makeup and retro-chic clothes. The men have leather jackets. Frolov is an eminently courteous host. Everyone must have several drinks and get high before we go: hashish, now available only for hard currency, is expensive, but whereas it used to be difficult to procure, it is today always available to anyone with money. Some take magic mushrooms, easily found in the woods around Petersburg. Some do cocaine to prepare for the long night. Earlier this year, customs officers seized a shipment of the drug that had arrived in Petersburg disguised as detergent. Television news showed officials confiscating this cargo; three days later, every dealer had it in bulk.
At around 2:00 a.m. we drive to the rink. About twenty-five hundred people are there. There is live music by a visiting Dutch band and relentless, recorded techno music, and an elaborate laser show. Half of the rink has been boarded over to make a dance floor. On the other half, people are skating. In the grandstands, people smoke more hash or pass out on the seats. From the bar in the corner, people buy big cups of vodka. We are on the wrong side of the Neva, and at night the drawbridges go up; we will not be able to get home until they go down again at 6:00 a.m. Everyone agrees that raves are no longer “in”—no trend can last more than a year—but members of every fashionable tusovka have nonetheless come this evening. “The craze is over,” explains Georgi Guryanov, a painter. “But there’s nothing else to do.”
The mafia contingent makes up 10 to 20 percent of the crowd. Everyone knows who the mafia people are. They will get a share of the profits from this party; every club or bar or party in Russia pays the mafia between 20 and 60 percent of its revenue. “In your country, you have taxes,” someone explains. “And we have this system.”
The rave scene in Russia began with the First Gagarin party on December 14, 1991, organized by Yevgeny Birman and Aleksei Haas. Held at the Cosmos Pavilion at VDNKh, the ultimate Stalinist temple to the socialist state, it attracted more than four thousand people. “The First Gagarin was amazing because everyone was so hungry for it,” explains Birman, who has since organized other major parties. “We’re trying to mix the semiotic in this postmodern world and bring these different tusovki together. It’s about autoeroticism and an absolute beauty code, which we never had in the Soviet period.”
Birman is boyish, exuberant, and fun; Haas has a cosmopolitan professionalism and a hard self-assurance. I chat with him in his Moscow apartment near Red Square while his American wife prepares dinner. “The First Gagarin’s budget was twelve thousand dollars,” he explains. “We had to pay for security, music, DJs, rent, firemen. We gave the mafia twenty percent”—a low figure, achieved by sharp negotiations—“and we didn’t make a profit. But I proved to myself that these people did exist in Moscow. I went out in my car in the weeks before the party, and when I saw the right kind of people, I gave them invitations. I invited a thousand friends for free. We ran TV ads on the day of the party; they were in English, to select the audience.” The First Gagarin was unlike anything ever before seen in Moscow: lasers bo
unced off the rich architecture and Western disc jockeys played the latest music.
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, actr
ess, 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.
Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change Page 9