Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Though over two-thirds of Russians report being distressed by the country’s economic woes, the same number approve of Putin’s economic leadership. Most Russians get their news from state-owned media, which have portrayed the invasion of Ukraine and other acts as part of a “Russia vs. the West” scenario. “Putin knows what his people want to hear,” Bremmer writes. “It’s just not clear if he knows how to fix his flailing economy.”

Politics has grown ever more cynical. In 2014, Max Katz, twenty-seven and a sometime poker champion, was elected to the Moscow District Council. His campaign slogan was “The Moscow District Council is completely useless. It possesses no power whatsoever.” He claimed that he won because he “chose to be honest.” At twenty-four, Isabelle Magkoeva is both a boxing champion and an unabashed Communist—a face of the new Russian left who publicly describes Lenin as a “great revolutionary.” At twenty-nine, Roman Dobrokhotov, whose Twitter bio says, “Revolution is me,” has been arrested well over a hundred times. He sent Edward Snowden a letter explaining that since everyone knows that every conversation in Russia is monitored, he would find nothing to uncover in his new domicile.

Opponents of Putin protested after the elections in 2011 and 2012. They were led by Garry Kasparov, chess champion; Ilya Yashin, activist; Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov; Alexei Navalny, anticorruption campaigner; and Boris Nemtsov, member of a regional parliament. In 2015, Navalny and Udaltsov were placed under house arrest. Nemtsov was shot in the back as he crossed a Moscow bridge, hours after he posted a Twitter message asking his followers to protest Putin’s activity in Ukraine.

Georgy Chizhov, of Moscow’s Center for Political Technologies, said, “Russians are now divided between ‘us’ and ‘national traitors.’ Liberals cannot protest; they would be going against most of society.” Nikita Denisov, thirty-three, who had been an active protester, said, “We realized that going on these marches was actually useless, even unfashionable.” Yelena Bobrova, twenty-nine, said, “We took to the streets thinking that we could make a difference, but only met with indifference from not only those in power, but our friends and relatives, too.” So apathy has become a national pastime.

CHINA

Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China

New York Times Magazine, December 19, 1993

It can be hard to remember the presumption common into the 1990s that no art of merit was being made outside the West. After I had written about Russia’s new generation, my editors at the New York Times asked me what I’d like to do next, and I suggested artists in China without knowing whether there were any. I assumed that if so much was happening in Moscow and St. Petersburg, something parallel had to exist in Beijing and Shanghai. Work from the USSR had been incomprehensible to Westerners, but the work in China was inaccessible. Because the only art available for viewing internationally was state sanctioned, most critics presumed that everyone was working to Party decrees. Once I had landed the assignment, I panicked, but bit by bit I found introductions to relevant artists, initially via a German conceptualist I’d met in Moscow. Nowadays, half of modern art seems to hail from the People’s Republic, and Western exhibitions of Cai Guo-Qiang and Ai Weiwei have been among the most visited in the world.

I have restored some material excluded from the original published version of this piece.

On August 21, 1993, the Country Life Plan exhibition was scheduled to open at the Meishugan (National Art Gallery) in Beijing. Though the paintings were indifferent and had to the ordinary eye no hint of political significance, officials ruled that many failed to show the positive side of life in the People’s Republic and were therefore unacceptable: only about 20 percent of the work was approved to hang. The prime mover behind Country Life Plan, the artist Song Shuangsong, was furious that the exhibition had been edited. He told friends that on August 25 he would go to the gallery and cut off his long hair, a symbol of his individualistic way of life.