Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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.”