Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I had gone to Moscow knowing about the darkness of Soviet dominion, but I had not reckoned on the heroic dimension of resistance, nor the sociability that a protracted ideological crisis can engender. These Russians’ capacity for intimacy correlated to their society’s dysfunction. I had long daydreamed about the power of art to change the world, but I had also always assumed that art was in fact just entertainment. To the Russians, though, changing the world was the prime reason to make art. “You see,” the artist Nikita Alexeev said to me, “we have been preparing ourselves to be not great artists, but angels.” Now faced with a Western market system in which they were expected to comply with commercial expectations, some produced work that played well to collectors and museums; some continued to follow their original moral purpose, creating art with little market potential; some renounced art entirely.

Irony had been their best defense from the Stalin years onward, and irony was the armor in which they approached the new world order. The artist Kostya Zvezdochetov had been called up for punitive army service in the early 1980s, one of many Soviets who were excused from military conscription and later drafted; this process attracted less Western attention than a sentence to the gulag, but served the same function. Kostya found himself among a coalition of thieves and murderers in Kamchatka, the peninsula that lies east of Siberia and north of Japan. His battalion had been ordered to excavate the foundation of a building that had been constructed on melting ice. Kostya, who is physically diminutive, got sick repeatedly; his superiors finally realized that he was a gifted draftsman and put him to work making propaganda posters. Many years later, at his first exhibition in Western Europe, he reminded me that he had once been sent farther east than he had ever dreamed of going or wanted to go, and that he had been put in a room and given paints and supplies and been told to make art, and that he had done so even though he did not agree with the purpose of that art, because it saved him from hard physical labor. Now, he explained, he was farther west than he had ever dreamed of going or wanted to go, and once more he had been put in a room, and once more he had been given paints and supplies, and once more he had been told to make art, and once more he suspected that what he was doing supported an ideology to which he did not subscribe—but once more, he would do it if it saved him from hard physical labor.

When my book The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost was published in June 1991, people asked whether there would be a Russian translation; I replied that the Soviets hardly needed a foreigner to tell them about what was happening in their own country. In 2013, however, a Russian edition was published, with an introduction by Kostya. By then the political and artistic landscape of the country had completely changed, and the lives we had led were of historical interest. That made me feel old, but it also made me contemplate the possibility that my adolescent goal of participating in change had come to fruition—that chronicling the changes had inscribed me in them.

In November 2015, I had dinner with one of these artists, my friend Andrei Roiter, and told him about this book, recalling some of the shared history I was putting into it. “Remember how much hope we had?” he asked. I wondered whether he regretted the dreams that hadn’t come to fruition, and he said, “Even if it turned out to be groundless, the very fact of having felt that hope at that moment determined everything else I have thought, everything I have painted, everything I have become.” We bemoaned the iniquities of Putin’s Russia, and he said, “Even that violence is different because it follows on hope.” As we talked, I came to understand that hope is like a happy childhood; it equips its beneficiaries to deal with the traumas that inevitably ensue. It is experienced as a primal love. My life, relatively apolitical until I went to Moscow, took on the urgency of such embattled integrity when I was there. I did not yet know to call it purpose, but the travels described in this book all followed from that exaltation. The feeling of optimism among those Soviet artists was based on what turned out to be largely a fiction—but it was a genuine feeling even if it pertained to an imagined reality. A crushed hope is suffused with nobility that mere hopelessness can never know.