Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  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.

  Russia has no shortage of defiant decadence. Pravda, always a government organ, spews nightclub propaganda: “According to Forbes, Moscow has more billionaires than any other city in the world, so you can imagine the level of opulence you’ll be able to experience firsthand in some of the nightclubs. This makes the destination a great place for a guys’ getaway or the perfect location for the most epic stag parties.” Disdain for social norms is only strengthened as those norms become more rigid. At twenty-four, Avdotja Alexandrova created a modeling agency called Lumpen, which features women with scratched faces, unkempt hair, and puffy eyes, on grounds that an “emotionally inexpressive face, no matter how regular or symmetrical the features, cannot be beautiful.” Sergey Kostromin, who founded a zine called Utopia, said, “Everyone is in search of their own private utopia: satisfactory emotions that might be faked with the help of consumerist society.” Another zine, Russia Without Us, was founded by Andrey Urodov as “a magazine for teens who miss the times they never had the chance to live in.” It’s a nostalgia rag for the Yeltsin days. Asked to characterize the scene, one Moscow food critic said, “Every Moscow restaurant is a theme restaurant. The theme is that you’re not in Moscow.”

  Pop music continues to be censored. Andrei Makarevich, called “the Paul McCartney of Russia,” found his concerts closed down after he performed for children in eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s best-known rapper, Noize MC, accepted a flag from a fan at a concert in Ukraine. “I sang in Ukrainian, and someone gave me a Ukrainian flag,” Noize said. “And in Ukraine, it was totally fine.” Weeks later, his shows started to be canceled; sometimes, bomb squads showed up claiming fictive dangers. Almost all of his performances during a tour of Siberia were blocked; authorities visited his hotels and physically stopped him from playing at alternative venues.

  The anti-gay-propaganda law has resulted in innumerable vigilante attacks on gay people. Groups lure gay men and teenagers by professing to want a date, then beat their victims and force them to perform humiliating acts such as drinking the urine of their assailants. These episodes are recorded and posted; hundreds appeared online in 2015. Many victims sustain bone fractures and facial injuries; some develop anxiety and depression; others are so frightened that they become homebound. Gay people are assaulted on the streets, in the subway, at nightclubs, or during job interviews. The Russian government has refused to prosecute these acts as hate crimes.

  Yelena Klimova has been forced to pay enormous fines for trying to build an online resource for gay teenagers. In the spring of 2015, she published an album called Beautiful People and What They Say to Me, in which she shows the profile photos of people who have threatened her on social media. A smiling woman holding a bouquet wrote, “Go and fucking kill yourself before they come for you”; a man whose winsome profile pic shows him with a baby goat wrote, “Gunning you down, you little bitch, is just the beginning of what you deserve.” The gay activist and poet Dmitry Kuzmin wrote, “Russia lacks the concept of respect for another person simply because he or she is another person, a unique, independent individual. It is therefore useless to say here: ‘I’m gay and I have rights.’ ” Kuzmin said that escalating homophobia makes gay people into unwilling radicals. “As long as the image of the enemy is being concocted out of gays, I must make all my public statements exclusively as a gay man on the battlefield in this war that has been imposed upon me against my will.”

  The countercultural status the Orthodox Church enjoyed in Soviet times (though the church even then was complicit with the KGB) has vanished entirely; it now openly enforces Putin’s agenda. In 1991, only a third of Russians described themselves as church members; in 2015, more than three-quarters do. At the same time, nearly a quarter believe that religion does more harm than good, and a third of church members say they do not believe in God. Few attend services. The leader of the church, Patriarch Kirill, described Putin’s leadership as “a miracle” a
nd said of the opposition that “liberalism will lead to legal collapse and then the Apocalypse.” Patriarch Kirill is rumored to have a personal fortune of some $4 billion and flaunts a $30,000 watch and a penthouse in Moscow. He rents out the Cathedral of Christ the Savior for commercial functions.

  Putin has been photographed repeatedly with the Night Wolves, an Orthodox biker gang. Ivan Ostrakovsky, the group’s leader, said, “The enemies of Holy Russia are everywhere. We must protect holy places from liberals and their satanic ideology. The police can’t cope with the attacks. When I came back from serving in the Chechen War, I found my country full of dirt. Prostitution, drugs, satanists. But now, religion is on the rise.” Another skinhead Orthodox gang severely injured a protester who was marching in opposition to the stiff sentence meted out to Pussy Riot, the radical band arrested for performing an anti-Putin prayer in Moscow’s cathedral. “He insulted our sacred, holy things,” they said.

  Georgi Mitrofanov, the sole Russian cleric who has demanded that the church acknowledge its historic relationship with the Soviet authorities, has said, “We lost so many honest people in the twentieth century that we have created a society where imitation and role play are the norm. Before we had people shouting they were building Communism, but they were just using slogans that gave them opportunities. Now a new lot, and indeed some of the old one, shout about ‘Holy Russia.’ The words mean nothing.”

  Russia’s criminal gangs are involved around the world in extortion, human trafficking, drug smuggling, prostitution, arms trading, kidnapping, and cybercrime. Both the English prosecutor leading the inquiry into the murder of whistleblowing FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London and Spanish money-laundering investigators have concluded that much Russian organized crime is coordinated from within the Kremlin. The Spanish inquiry alleged that Alexander Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which oversees major criminal inquiries, and Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service, associate with criminals. WikiLeaks cables identify Russia as a “virtual mafia state” that sustains an assortment of criminal organizations: larger ones such as Solntsevskaya Bratva (estimated annual income: $8.5 billion), Bratskii Krug, Tambovskaya Prestupnaya Grupirovka, and the Chechen mafia, as well as innumerable smaller ones. Many are run by college graduates who game the system at the most sophisticated level.

  Corruption costs the Russian economy as much as $500 billion each year. Freedom House gave the country a 6.75 rating on a corruption scale on which 7 is the maximum score. Putin has invited criminals who have assets abroad to bring them back; in 2015, he signed a law guaranteeing amnesty for such people, who will be protected from criminal, tax, or civil prosecution. Even so, an estimated $150 billion left the country that year. “We all understand that the assets were earned or acquired in various ways,” said Andrey Makarov, chair of the State Duma’s budget committee. “However, I am confident that we should finally turn the ‘offshore page’ in the history of our economy and country. It is very important and necessary to do this.”

  Symbolic shows of legal rectitude are staged for the population. Moscow banned imports of European cheese and other foods in retaliation for sanctions. This boycott has had much less effect on its foreign targets than on the Russian people. To show that Russia follows through, state television featured huge machinery destroying over six hundred tons of contraband food. Such theater is patriotic, perhaps, but in a country where people are starving to death, many Russians found it ostentatiously cruel.

  The economy has become one of the most unequal in the world, with just 110 people holding more than a third of the country’s wealth. The poverty rate increased by a third between 2011 and 2015. In the same period, a half million people fled to seek economic opportunity abroad. The Russian economy is afflicted by lack of diversification, over-reliance on oil markets, international sanctions, minimal worker productivity, corruption, and the lack of incentive to change. Moscow has sponsored large companies under government control, but not small and medium-size independent enterprises (SMEs). In the EU, SMEs produce 40 percent of GDP; in Russia, about 15 percent. This shift out of private enterprise is not economically promising. Oil and gas account for more than two-thirds of exports, which means that every time oil prices drop by a dollar per barrel, Russia loses $2 billion. Ongoing sanctions will reduce the country’s economy by nearly 10 percent. Russian workers remain singularly inefficient. Ian Bremmer wrote in Time that while an American worker contributes $67.40 for each hour worked, a Russian worker contributes only $25.90. However, financial training starts early; at VDNKh, a “young investor school” teaches financial literacy to children as young as eight.

  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

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  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 vers
ion 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.

  At noon that day, Song, his friends, a professional barber in a clean white smock, a reporter from Shanxi television, and I all gathered in the exhibition room. Solemnly, Song spread newspapers on the gallery floor and placed a chair in the middle of them. Chance visitors to the gallery stopped to watch. We all stood in fascinated silence as Song’s hair fell lock by lock to the floor. Song faced first in one direction, then in another, holding a serious expression for a while, then grinning and posing. After twenty minutes or so, Song had the chair taken away, and he lay down, cadaver-like, on the floor. The barber soaped Song’s face, produced a straight razor, and began to shave him. When his beard was gone, Song sat up for the final attack on his hair. But just as the barber began to cut again, the director of gallery security came in and saw the crowd and cameras. “Who is the authority behind this behavior?” he asked, his face tight with rage.