Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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, actress, 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.

Rock, Pop, and Rap

Throughout the seventies and the early eighties, the lyrics to songs by Akvarium, Kino, or Boris Grebenshchikov gave information about a better way of life to Soviet people. Rock music was heroic, the performers closely tied to the intelligentsia. Pop musicians represented official culture; their music was often on the radio, but their popularity was suspect and usually artificial.

I see Boris Grebenshchikov, who is about to release a new album. His records once sold in the millions; he now expects to sell fifteen or twenty thousand. “It’s time for Russian pop now,” Irina Kuksinaite says, “because all anyone wants is dollars and muscles.”

In Moscow, I spend an evening with Artyom Troitsky, director of music programming for Russian National Television. “When I was younger,” he says (he is thirty-eight), “the situation was incredibly simple. They were black and we were white. We stood for vitality and goodness in a society that was flaccid and evil. Young people choose the simplest thing. For us, the simplest thing was to be moral; today, the simplest thing is to live well. In my day, you were marginal because the system gave you no other options, and you expressed your politics with rock. Now, if you want to be in politics, no one is stopping you. It’s not forbidden; it’s just sickening. But you can’t very well sing about that.”

His comments help to explain the vapidity of the new Russian pop. One of this year’s most popular songs goes, “You are a stewardess named Zhanna. You are adorable and wantable. You are my favorite stewardess.” Bogdan Titomir—male sex symbol of Russia, hero of teenyboppers—has a video that features a kickline of Russian boys dressed in American football uniforms and helmets trying to dance like Michael Jackson. The Russian record industry has been destroyed by economic liberalization; only the lucky few can afford records, and the profits for singers such as Titomir come from endless concert tours.

The managers for the big pop stars are all tied to the mafia. “I get bribes pushed at me all the time,” says Troitsky. “People offer hundreds of dollars to get a video shown once. The man with my job at one of the commercial channels got murdered a few weeks ago. I don’t take bribes—it’s part of my old-fashioned heroic mentality—so I’ve only had my life threatened once. The managers drop like flies.”

I have dinner with the rapper MC Pavlov, whom I remember from his days in the rock band Zvuki Mu. Pavlov keeps out of the serious pop scene, but his new band is making videos, and his records are out; his concerts are increasingly popular, and even Titomir has admitted that Pavlov is the only true rap artist in the country. “I wouldn’t mind becoming nationally famous,” he says, “but I don’t want to get into crime. Corporate sponsorship would be good.” Pavlov is for the cultural elite, the supercool; he played at the First Gagarin party.