Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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.”