Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I spend my last afternoon in Moscow with Vasily N. Istratsov, director of parliamentary relations for the foreign ministry. A sage man in his midthirties, he has been pulled from his position as a professor at Moscow University into this high office. Ironical, witty, charming, he has the bearing more of the worldly diplomats in Tolstoy than of the self-promoting men and women I have met. He and I talk about the politicians I have interviewed, many of whom he knows. “You know,” he says, “the traditional structure of Russian politics is like a football game. Everyone is on one of two teams, and they are interested in winning by attacking each other. The only thing that changes is the subject of division: this week, pro-Yeltsin is facing anti-Yeltsin, but last week it was something else, and next week it will be something else again. I am a civil servant, a close-up spectator at the game. I watch as the sides align and realign themselves, as the teams re-form, the way they’ve been re-forming in this country for years. These members of the younger generation, the people you’ve been talking to—they’re not spectators. They’re out on the field, playing the game. But they don’t have on uniforms. You ask yourself, ‘Are they with black or with white?’ And very soon you understand that they are playing not on the side of black, not on the side of white, but on the side of the ball.”

The real source of the chaos of the new Russia is not the weakness of the police, the dominance of the mafia, the difficulty of constitutional reform, the undependability of Yeltsin, the spiraling inflation, the naïve policies of Western governments in their distribution of aid, the shortage of food, or the inefficiency of state-run factories. The problem is the ascendancy, in a society in which everyone was once asked to work for the common good, of a system of values within which everyone has an eye only on his own progress. It inheres in the impossibility of coherence in a country now run on the chance alignments and misalignments of hundreds of thousands of different, singular, individual agendas.

Timur Novikov died of AIDS at forty-three in 2002; Georgi Guryanov died at fifty-two in July 2013 of AIDS-related liver failure. That same year, Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe drowned at forty-three in a shallow pool in Bali—perhaps because he was too drunk to roll over after he fell, or perhaps, as some have suggested, in a staged murder, since he had been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin.

Petlyura’s attempt to build a “free academy” came crashing down due to poor organization, but he gained an international reputation, appearing under the auspices of the avant-garde theater artist Robert Wilson in the United States. In 2000, Petlyura staged a retrospective exhibition about the disappearance of the socialist dream into the new Russia. Pani Bronya, meanwhile, won the Alternative Miss World title in 1998, while Garik Vinogradov became a target of Moscow’s powerful mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, in 2009 after making an anagram of the mayor’s name to spell skillful thief. Valera Katsuba has developed a following in the West, recently doing a portrait series of fathers and sons. Olga Sviblova has become an international celebrity; one artist recently described her to me as having “a personality like a propeller—always going.”

Boris Grebenshchikov was featured in Newsweek as the “Soviet Bob Dylan.” After a failed attempt to become a US pop sensation, he has gone home to Russia, where he is now called the “grandfather of Russian rock.” MC Pavlov is actively mourning the loss of his popularity to a new generation of Western-style rappers. Artyom Troitsky has protested against Putin, citing Article 20 of the Russian constitution, which prohibits censorship. Putin scornfully likened the protest symbol, a white ribbon, to a condom; in 2011, Troitsky dressed as a condom for a protest march, mocking Putin.

Yuri Begalov became a partner in a major minerals and oil industry firm and married, and then divorced, a famous television presenter.

In 2009, Aleksandr Kiselev was appointed head of the Russian postal service. In 2013, he resigned from that position and received a payout of more than 3 million rubles. Sergei Stankevich was charged with graft in 1996 and fled to Poland; he has returned to Russia and is a senior expert with the Anatoly Sobchak Foundation.