Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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.