Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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.

Monday, 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.