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Art And Corruption
By Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling, in Saint Petersburg, on what's really going on in Russia.
From the window of a speeding taxi, Saint Petersburg is a klepto architectural
mélange of Venice, Amsterdam, and Paris. Intended as Imperial Russia's
Window on the West, the city was specifically designed to appear elegant,
advanced, and thoroughly European. The scheme succeeded, if you discount
the eerily straight, flat boulevards and the mammoth scale of the enterprise.
Czarist Russia didn't do restraint. Czarist Russia was the political and
economic heyday of Saint Petersburg, and it despised restraint; they did
something they liked to think of as "grand magnificence." Czarist taste
is nervous and full of psychic overcompensation: if the fountains of Versailles
are elegant, then a field of fountains the size of an aircraft carrier
has got to be better yet. If one gilded cherub is good, then a whole flying
death squad of gilded cherubs must be right on the money.
The locale was not a natural choice for a city; it's a river delta, a swamp.
All these grand temples to czarist autocracy are set on pilings, built
on sand. The streets are ruinous; they settle, they freeze, they crack.
It didn't help that the Nazis exploded 100,000 bombs inside the city limits;
it's as if the whole city had been picked up and dropped. The Soviets never
quite repaired all the war devastation, being busy with their own madly
impressive enterprises: tanks, nuclear reactors, giant dams, expensive
spacecraft.
Saint Petersburg isn't Europe: not even now, not by half. It's Moscow's
sweeter, kinder, sissy kid sister - the San Francisco of Russia, a place
to go when you have the atavistic urge to wear flowers in your hair. Modern
Saint Petersburg is Petersburg 3.0: the first release was czarist, the
second was the communist Leningrad, the third is global-capitalist
Sankt-Piterburg,
just another friendly Baltic seaport, a big tourist draw. Built as Russia's
Window on the West, it has become the visiting Westerner's Window on the
East.
The Hotel Rus
The bathroom tile in my "suite" is especially noteworthy. Properly installing
tile requires a lot of sustained, nitpicking attention. The Evil Empire
perversely specialized in failed attempts at bourgeois ease. The tile is
crooked and warped, its inferior grout as porous as a sponge. The unhappy
tiling crew blew it so utterly that you wish, for everybody's sake, they
had simply stayed home, drunk.
There's no plug in my bathtub. The water gushes from a handheld sprayer
- evil Saint Petersburg swamp water, in a tasteful shade of tawny brown.
My guidebook solemnly warns me against drinking it.
Yet the Rus is by no means a bad hotel, by local standards. There's a Russian
SF literary convention taking place in it, which I happen to be attending.
One night in my suite, with its squeaking TV and sheetless bed, would cost
Ivan Sixpack half a month's salary. They're really trying, that's the
touching
part. The Russians have come so amazingly far. My narrow, lumpy bed is
industriously changed every day. The stained and barely functional toilet
boasts a DISINFEKTED sticker in bold Cyrillic. And after I coughed up a
hefty sum in advance for the room, I could swear that the reception clerk
actually smiled at me.
None of my fellow attendees seem to be suffering much. Russian science
fiction writers, their robust tastes are unspoiled by surrealistic levels
of Western luxury. In the past six years, Russian science fiction has suffered
dizzying transformations in ideology, publishing, personnel, finance, and
distribution; always flexible and forward-looking, Russian science fiction
is doing OK.
Certainly Russians no longer read much classically Soviet SF, that national
genre of rock-jawed Leninist engineers storming the stars as the cosmonautic
vanguard of Progressive Mankind. Modern Russian SF tends be quirky, fantastic,
moody, surreal, even somewhat Pynchonesque. The conference is bestowing
major awards on eager young people in their 20s. A genre that can do this
has little reason to fear for its future.
It may be doing OK, but Russian science fiction is not the top of the pops
in Russia these days. The monster hit in Russian publishing circa 1997
is definitely the pulp thriller. Lurid detective novels are sold in subway
kiosks; they're read in parks and cafés. Unlike much of local pop
culture, Russian pulp thrillers are not imported, overdubbed Western schlock.
These best-sellers are authentic native produce. This is good old-fashioned,
homegrown, potboiling rack fodder, a form of genre publishing that was
unimaginable under the Soviet system.
Pulp thrillers are hitting the mark because they tackle modern topics that
interest modern Russians: mafia gangs, crooked cops, shady businessmen,
big money, glitzy settings, and hardboiled dames in fishnet hose. These
books boast lurid, glossy covers with diamonds, furs, martini glasses,
powerboats, stilettos, and chromed handguns. These are big, cheap, fat
books written in a hurry. They feature punchy, no-nonsense titles like
Trap for the Rabid, The Dummy Setup, and The Scum Cop.
One thing about these Russian cops-and-robbers books: quite a lot of them
are written by Russian cops. The unquestioned queen of the genre, for instance,
is Alexandra Marinina, a lieutenant colonel in the federal police force.
The heroine of her stories is the attractively named Anastasia Komenskaya,
a senior police detective whose severe devotion to punishing criminals
is periodically interrupted by her steamy dalliances.
Then there's Alexander Bushkov, whose thriller Hunt for the Piranha
involves
a maniacal murdering millionaire terrorizing Siberia. One of Bushkov's
many saving graces is that he cordially despises wimpy Russian literary
intellectuals. Bushkov never misses a chance to dis them in print. Apparently,
those highbrow losers who are still mooning over Nabokov and Akhmatova
ought to just shut up and get out of the way.
Russia is chockablock with litterateurs. Bookworms can turn up under the
weirdest circumstances. Cops become bestselling novelists. Even tough,
tattooed drummers in death-metal punk bands, guys who would be glue-sniffing
animals in any other country, reveal themselves to be weepy, wounded,
Pushkin-reading idealists.
Russia's traditional literary intellectuals are predictably appalled by
the pulp-thriller boom. The sudden appearance of an actual, fully functional
market in Russian fiction is a shocking advent to them. They devoutly hope
that Russia's humiliating vogue for gaudy thrillers will somehow go away.
I believe it will go away, someday, but not until Russia stops looking
and acting just like hardboiled pulp fiction.
The Trenchcoats
Late one afternoon last February, Tambovskaya kingpin Victor Gavrilenkov
was enjoying some downtime at the Vienna Café, a classy eatery in
the posh Nevskij Palace Hotel. As usual, this notorious gangster was
accompanied
by two armed bodyguards. Mr. Gavrilenkov's personal flunkies were off-duty
Saint Petersburg cops.
Then, two heavies in long brown trenchcoats entered the hotel. They strolled
through the shining glass-lined mall, which offers furs and amber and icons
for the hard currency of foreign tourists. They marched with purposeful
steps to the Vienna Café, where they spotted Gavrilenkov and his
two cop henchmen.
They then reached inside their trenchcoats and opened up with a pair of
Kalishnikov automatic rifles. In 40 seconds, they had emptied 60 shots
in the general direction of Gavrilenkov. The two cops were snuffed immediately.
Gavrilenkov caught a couple of nonfatal rounds, but, being quick on the
uptake, he tipped over one of the Vienna Café's high-stylin' pink
marble tabletops and safely hid behind its stony bulk.
A fusillade screamed over Gavrilenkov and lodged in John Hyden, a harmless
Scottish lawyer who happened to be sitting near the line of fire. Mr. Hyden
was hit in the head and died immediately.
The hit men then took it on the lam. Before jumping into their waiting
getaway car, they abandoned their trenchcoats and a Makarov pistol. They
had just rubbed out two police sergeants and a foreign lawyer, but they
got away with it. They haven't been seen since. As for Gavrilenkov, he's
also wandering around loose. He was released for lack of charges.
Kazansky syndicate leader Artur Kzhizhevich has an unpronounceable name,
but an exemplary career. A onetime boxer, Kzhizhevich is your basic modern,
hands-on Saint Petersburg thug. He founded the Kazansky gang in 1988. By
1992, the thriving gang had 200 members and was big enough to provoke the
envy of serious rivals. So his car was bombed. Kzhizhevich lived through
that. In 1993, enemies set fire to his Mercedes. He survived that, too.
Later, Kzhizhevich was ambushed outside his apartment and shot in the back,
but he's a plenty tough guy, and he just shrugged it off. Kzhizhevich finally
went to the slammer for kidnapping a businessman, tying him to a tree,
and firing a bunch of handgun shots into the tree trunk around the guy's
head. This businessman was plenty tough, too. Not only did he not crack
or pay up, he testified in court. Hardly anyone ever does.
Antigang actions by Petersburg's police, while vigorous, seem a little
confused. There are four police agencies in Petersburg, and like all cops
who suffer from poorly delimited lines of authority, they all hate each
other's guts. First there are the actual Petersburg city police, a much
put-upon lot whose own chief describes them as fat, corrupt, incompetent,
and living in squalor. Then there are the OMON, the scary paramilitary
heavies; the RUOP, the anti-organized-crime task force; and, finally, the
federal FSB, whom most everyone still calls the KGB, despite their tactful
change of initials.
Last April, a gangster rubbed out a RUOP cop on the street, and, consequently,
the cops went on a vengeful rampage. Mere hours after the killing, they
violently busted into 80 Saint Petersburg hotels and casinos and arrested
no fewer than 670 people. Six of the arrested were Saint Petersburg city
cops, who (as is their wont) were moonlighting for the mafia as bodyguards.
For their own part, the OMON paramilitaries are staffed by stunningly violent
Chechnya war vets. In February the OMON smashed into a Petersburg nightclub.
They frogmarched attendees out of the place and kept them face down at
gunpoint in the street in the freezing snow. They busted up the bar, rifled
through the cash registers, and emptied wallets and purses, deftly pocketing
the proceeds. Saint Petersburgers were surprisingly understanding about
all this, figuring, apparently, that the OMON really needed the cash.
Recently a new trend of payoffs has surfaced in Petersburg:
Fizba kryusha.
The Fizba is the FSB, which has been the first of Petersburg's four police
forces to become a more or less open mafia protection service. The city's
chain of corruption has become so convoluted that normal people are actually
paying their police to protect them from criminals. Fizba kryusha is definitely
a trend to watch: just cut the whole business short, and actually
pay the government to protect you from crime!
All it requires is a little tax paperwork,
and everybody will be right back where they started.
No wonder pulp fiction is striking such a resonant chord with the Russian
public. But mafia scare stories shouldn't be overplayed. It's not that
the situation is out of hand. After 10 years of vigorous organized crime,
the situation is organizing rather well. It's institutionalizing, even.
The Seven Bankers
Which isn't to say that things aren't pretty awful, but things in Russia
are always awful. There's food in the streets of Saint Petersburg; not
many potatoes, but lots of papayas and pineapples. Apparently Russians
have dispensed with the basics and seem content to live on the luxuries
from now on. Six years ago, you might have seen people standing in the
streets and subways, offering random possessions for cash. You might, for
instance, see a sad, kerchief-headed old woman with a steam iron, a crowbar,
and a book of crossword puzzles. Nowadays there is still a great deal of
personal street trading, but even the shabbiest operator seems to have
a coherent hustle: they'll sell pantyhose, or flowers, or pencils. By European
standards, the population looks depressed and poverty stricken, but people
don't seem feverish or jittery; they just don't look revolutionary.
It would appear that, for the first time since 1991, a Russian status quo
has emerged. This new condition even has its own nickname: the
semibankyrshina, or, "the age of Seven Bankers."
It is called this because Seven Bankers basically own Russia today. Seven
men control half of the Russian economy. It is unclear that anyone ever
intended for this to happen. There's a fairy-tale quality to it, really.
It's weird, improbable, conspiratorial; a scenario right out of a pulp
thriller. But that's what is going on, and everyone knows it.
The Seven Bankers are Vladimir Potanin, Vladimir Guzinsky, Boris Berezovsky,
Vladimir Vinogradov, Mikhail Fridman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Alexander
Smolensky. These seven men are robber-baron moneylenders of fantastic scope
and scale. In the past six years, they have emerged from deep obscurity
to gut and consume a nuclear superpower, becoming some of the richest and
most powerful human beings that the world has ever seen. These guys are
uniquely Russian bankers, because they behave almost exactly like the
silk-hatted,
diamond-stickpin Wall Street oppressors of communist legend. Basically,
they behave as if property were theft and the agenda was to get right on
with it. They are the bejeweled super-merchants in the court of Czar Boris,
and they move in and out of the Yeltsin government at will.
These bankers own or control gas and oil, and cars, and diamonds, and
minerals, and rare metals; but they want more. They want to control the
media. The Russians have never had much media to play with before, because
they passed most of the 20th century in the strangling grip of communist
agitprop. But Russians in the age of semibankyrshina are trying hard to
find Russian things to do with the media.
The Politicians
It would be foolish of a mere Yankee like myself to pretend that I really
understand Russian politics. Nevertheless, I can attempt a workable summary.
It's going to require a chart and maybe some pronunciation gazetteers;
here's what a genuine, fin-de-siècle Russian information society
really means.
First, Boris Yeltsin. The fist-clenching, tank-climbing hero of 1991. But
this is 1997. Boris Yeltsin is a tired old man. He's sick a lot of the
time, he drinks far too much, and he doesn't have a lot of inventive or
original ideas. It probably wouldn't help if he did. Yeltsin is facing
a grotesque political and economic situation that is probably beyond the
capacity of any statesman, anytime, ever.
Yeltsin has, however, mastered one highly effective political tactic: he's
very good at co-opting ambitious rivals and holding them out into the line
of direct fire, while he himself fades into the background with a benign
crocodile smile. Once political turbulence and failed policies abrade his
rival's credibility and reputation, Yeltsin emerges from torpor and has
the guy fired, to general cries of relief and gratitude. Then Yeltsin recruits
the next victim: some other charismatic figure on the make who is winning
popularity by leaps and bounds. He straps that guy against the grindstone,
too. Then he sits back and waits. This tactic works great, and it requires
only one precondition: everything in Russia has to be awful, and it has
to stay awful.
The first victim of this inspired Yeltsin tactic was Mikhail Gorbachev.
Yeltsin, always the loyal supporter, stepped back a pace and dropped the
entire collapsing colossus of communism squarely onto Gorbachev's dappled
head. In the years since, Gorby has sunk like a stone. People in the West
still have kindly feelings for Mikhail, and even the much-resented Raisa;
but in Russia the poor guy is an ambulatory black hole.
Then there was Defense Minister Grachev. The swaggering, overconfident
Grachev absorbed the heat for the Chechnya debacle, and fell flaming from
a great height. Then there was Alexander Lebed, another ambitious general;
Yeltsin gave Lebed all the rope he wanted. Lebed started strutting the
public stage like a pocket Napoleon. When Yeltsin finally rose from his
sickbed, he cut Lebed off at the knees. Lebed is now off in the deep political
wilderness, muttering paranoically about lost atomic bombs in KGB suitcases.
Then there was Alexander Korzhakov, a KGB general and ambitious two-fisted
palooka who was once Yeltsin's all-powerful bodyguard and drinking buddy.
Korzhakov is something of a special case, as he was basically shoved off
the political cliff by Tatyana and Chubais; but Yeltsin was the one who
actually fired him.
Anatoly Chubais is a unique figure in the Yeltsin circle, because Chubais
has absorbed this lethal punishment from Yeltsin and returned from the
dead for more. Most of Yeltsin's "trusted friends" get burned once and
are ruined for good. But Chubais is a very special kind of guy: he's a
real player.
Chubais basically invented the Russian privatization process. He came up
with a brilliant economic hack known as the "loans for shares" scheme.
Loans-for-shares basically allowed Russian state enterprises to sell themselves
via financing their own purchases by private entities. I doubt that Anatoly
Chubais realized that this clever financial invention of his would lead
to half his country being bought up by seven ambitious oligarchs. The "reform"
turned out to be no reform at all; it was just a bald handover of the Russian
economy to the seven guys who were fastest with a rubber checkbook. The
end result is nothing at all like a competitive market economy. There's
no "market" involved in this, no competition, no improvement in efficiency.
The economy crashed drastically, and the ruble hyperinflated. Vast hordes
of Russians were flung out of work or, worse yet, found themselves working
and not being paid for it, for months on end. The astonished communists
actually won back power in the Russian parliament, the Duma. This dreadful
occurrence led Yeltsin to loudly and publicly fire Chubais, firmly tying
the millstone of botched privatization around the guy's neck.
Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about Chubais is that he boldly
hacked the Soviet economic system and accidentally crashed it. Chubais
has never recovered politically from this debacle - he is still one of
the most hated men in Russia. Even his allies seem to think that he's a
slick operator and an amoral political hack. His personal unfavorables
are through the opinion-sampling roof. People just don't trust him. Chubais
suffers from a markedly un-Russian name. He's too smart. As a final oddity,
he has red hair, and Russians are rather superstitious about red hair.
Chubais was still spinning slowly in the wind when the Seven Bankers suddenly
panicked about Yeltsin's reelection prospects. These bankers had been the
primary profiteers from the privatization orgy, and if a communist somehow
became president, they'd swiftly join the ashbin of history. The Seven
Bankers got together at a convenient locale, the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland, and they had a serious conspiratorial discussion. With
the economy in free fall and Yeltsin both drunk and sick, they seriously
needed a turnaround. They had plenty of money, but they needed a heavy
PR operator. Yet who would trust them? Whom could be trusted to work in
their interests? Chubais was fully and publicly responsible for their very
existence, so it seemed likely that Chubais would be pliable.
Chubais came through heroically for the Yeltsin-banker coalition. The Russian
media was saturated with glowing ads and softball coverage, including some
ludicrous Yeltsin disco-dancing footage for the always-gullible youth
demographic.
The media campaign of communist Gennady Zyuganov was boring, thumbfingered,
and Neanderthal. The other major candidate, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was so
in love with the sound of his own insane ranting that he just couldn't
shut up. Russians don't much mind violent maniacs as national leaders,
but they don't like an empty blowhard.
Once Yeltsin was safely reelected, the bankers looked forward to Chubais's
swift departure. But when the president, worn to a frazzle by the hard
campaign, became very ill, Anatoly Chubais was right there on the spot,
laptop-armed and ready to step in as chief-of-staff regent. Weakened, feeble,
and in pain, Yeltsin became ever more reliant on the last person he really
trusts: not Chubais, of course, but his beloved daughter Tatyana.
For her part, the only man in the Yeltsin circle that Tatyana trusts is
Anatoly Chubais. When Tatyana reluctantly entered her father's inner circle,
it was dominated by the macho, hard-drinking Korzhakov, who rashly dismissed
Tatyana as a "bit of fluff." (Serious tactical error.) Chubais, on the
other hand, takes Tatyana seriously, and, given his lack of an independent
political base, he doesn't have much choice but to suck up to her. The
new Tatyana-Chubais courtier axis has proved a formidable combo. You have
to reach the president to talk to him, and Tatyana sets the old man's schedule
now. She also is his image handler; she's gotten him to comb his hair properly,
smile more on camera, and, best of all, cut back on the sauce.
Under the Tatyana régime, the New Yeltsin looks much less like a
blundering, trigger-happy thug. Basically, he looks like the kind of guy
that a sane Russian woman might want to vote for: a kindly, somewhat remote
Good Czar Boris figure, a guy who's above the political fray, but with
the common touch. His speeches are vaguer and more conciliatory. His suits
fit better. He talks about warm, cuddly issues, like culture, farming,
and family values.
This is not to say that Yeltsin is popular. Russians think he's doing a
horrible job. They think that because it's the truth. Yeltsin has no real
agenda. The things he tries just don't work. He's not very popular. He
doesn't deserve to be.
Boris Nemtsov, on the other hand, is popular. Nemtsov is a handsome,
well-spoken
former governor, a peacenik and a Green, who was brought into the government
by Yeltsin and was recently appointed first deputy prime minister. Young
Mr. Nemtsov is supposed to have a free hand to engage in "vigorous reform."
In practice, this makes Nemtsov the point man for the Yeltsin government's
many public resentments. He will be systematically discredited and ground
away by controversy. When Nemtsov is turned to powder, Boris Yeltsin will
still be there: as unpopular as ever, but free of another potential rival.
Nemtsov knows all this. He has publicly declared that he knows he's on
a "kamikaze mission." But he's taking the job anyway. He might succeed
in the mission; life in Russia might actually improve. Somebody has to
try, right? Or, Yeltsin might well die in office before the turn of the
century, and then all bets are off. Besides, there's no real action in
Nemtsov's home base, the modest city of Nizhni Novgorod.
The Media
Instead, information warfare has broken out.
Since Yeltsin's reelection, all the major players have realized that control
of the media means control of the country. Any Russian politician without
his own television and publication base is going into combat unarmed. The
Seven Bankers bought the president his winning media campaign. Tatyana
and Chubais took power and held it because they are spin doctors. Chubais
is hated by the multitudes, and Tatyana is resented as a little Kremlin
princess, but they are the two best image hackers in modern Russian politics.
The Seven Bankers are galled to see Chubais willing and able to publicly
menace their interests. Chubais is bold. He clearly believes that he made
these guys and he can break them. He may well be right. Chubais does have
a tactical advantage. The Seven Bankers are already divided into greedy
warring factions, while Chubais has his back firmly covered by Tatyana.
The natural, if weird, outcome of this situation has been the recent "War
of Compromats," aka the Bank War. For fans of leakage, Whitewaterization,
and black disinformatsiya, the orchestrated negative media campaigns -
carried on as instruments of intimidation and dominance within the new
Russian oligarchy - are tasty indeed. Sometimes, as in the US, they percolate
upward from the sleazy tabloids; but at other times, this being Russia,
they are simply flung like sledgehammers with the full force of national
broadcasting networks.
Negative media attacks are now breaking out all up and down the Russian
political hierarchy. Mostly, these attacks take the form of detailed corruption
allegations. They are often spiced with illicit videotapes, treacherous
testimony by former confederates, and even covert wiretapping. Anticorruption
leaks make particular sense in Russia because corruption is so omnipresent.
Corruption is everywhere, and everybody is against it.
Even though corruption is a complete necessity. The official State can't
even pay its own workers: not merely the long-suffering coal miners, but
the Russian military, on-duty soldiers and sailors, air traffic controllers,
even nuclear-power-plant workers. Basically, they all continue to work
without pay because they live off the other, street-level economy: gray
kickbacks, emergency "favors" from bosses, and stolen office equipment.
People are paid in kind with weird stuff that arrives at the back door
via "connections": mysterious crates of baby bottles, furniture, household
appliances, even condoms and tampons. Companies deprived of a revenue stream
live off handwritten IOUs; there are so many of these stamped IOUs floating
around now that they've become a working, parallel currency.
Into this environment broke the first political sex scandal that Russia
has ever had. Yeltsin's minister of justice, who had been making a nuisance
of himself by being unduly just to the wrong people, was deliberately rendered
a public laughingstock. A corrupt Russian banker was discovered with a
trove of illicit videotapes that showed the 53-year-old justice minister
cavorting naked with some hookers in a sauna. Mind you, these weren't merely
hookers, but mafia-associated hookers; and it wasn't just any sauna, but
a sauna known to be used by gangsters. Russian gangsters love any and all
Russian saunas. No Russian hooker stays in business nowadays without gangster
kryusha. But the justice minister was outed in a tabloid, and then on national
TV. After that, the poor man was toast. He wasn't missed because he was
being too honest, and nobody much liked him anyway.
Unlike the insanely lascivious US citizens, who can't get over the stunning
idea that a politician might ask for a blow job, the Russians have tended
toward indifference about the shape, size, and use of their leaders' genitalia.
The justice minister's sex smear really worked, though, and it was pretty
clear that some clever soul was trying this out deliberately, just to see
if the concept would fly in the current media environment. Results were
encouraging.
Then the Bank War broke out in full cry in August. The bankers were presented
with a pair of rich prizes: Norilsk Nickel, a monstrous mining concern,
and Syazinvest Telecom, the Russian telephone infrastructure company. The
bankers who lost the bid lost their tempers. The sore losers were Boris
Berezovsky and Vladimir Guzinsky, the two moguls among the Seven Bankers
who have invested most heavily in media enterprises. They clearly felt
illused by Chubais, Nemtsov, and their rival banker, Vladimir Potanin of
Uneximbank, who had walked off with the goodies. So they decided to carry
the scandal to their tame press.
Losing their chance at those tasty metals and telephones made these two
freebooters throw caution to the winds. They denounced the privatization
deals as rigged and broke ranks with their former ally, Potanin. The media
artillery swung into action, and the charges and countercharges flew.
The techniques are new, for Russia, but there's a certain tactical
sophistication
here. The bankers don't merely attack one another, or Chubais, or Nemtsov.
Instead, Russian media war takes the form of pawn attacks, chewing away
at the outer fringes of the Kremlin's rival circles of influence. There
are investigations, allegations of investigations, allegations of covered-up
investigations. And it's not just politicians and bankers who catch the
heat. There are also direct clashes: tactical attacks, by media, on the
personnel and practices of other media outlets.
It's the sheer scale and boldness of the Russian practice that's amazing;
it's as if Ted Turner had declared open war on Rupert Murdoch and enlisted
the FBI. Now that I mention it, that's not such a bad analogy, since Vladimir
Guzinsky counts Rupert Murdoch as a close personal friend and professional
role model.
The Aquarium
It would be a mistake to think that Boris Grebenshikov is merely a rock
star, though he is, in point of fact, a major rock star in his own country
(and in many other former Soviet countries). Rock stardom never had the
same function in a Soviet context as it did in the capitalist West. If
you listen to Grebenshikov's music, you hear a guy with the dark,
brow-wrinkling
sincerity of Leonard Cohen, singing pleasant Russian folk rock over a 4/4
backbeat. But to imagine what Grebenshikov means to his fellow Russians,
you have to imagine Cohen, complete with his alternative street cred and
literary ambitions, somehow achieving the fame of Elvis and the political
clout of Jesse Helms.
Grebenshikov's dense, moody lyrics are poorly understood even by Russians,
but it's enough for our purposes to know that he once coined a truly great
cultural metaphor. He named his rock band Aquarium.
The concept of Aquarium explains much of what one needs to know to understand
the spirit of Saint Petersburg. It is a window city, and an aquarium is
all about windows; it's a structure made entirely of windows. Inside an
aquarium, harmless, colorful creatures swim. They don't know (or care)
much about the world outside. They can see that the world is there, but
they know there are glass barriers all around them, so they can't do much
about it. They have to concentrate on living in a world that's entirely
their own. They're alive, they're even pretty. They're on public view.
But they're swimming in a different moral universe. They can't be touched.
The height of Aquarium's fame came before perestroika, when in the dark
days of Chernenko and Andropov, any light seemed bright, and people all
over the USSR knew that there were people in the aquarium who, against
all odds, were somehow daring to live, think, and feel.
Nowadays, Aquarium (www.aquarium.ru/)
is still a huge band, but rock stardom is just another form of media celebrity.
Rock and roll as a Russian social movement is over. Modern pop stardom
in Russia is best represented by the indestructible Alla Pugacheva, a
Soviet-era
chanteuse who recently appeared before the Duma in designer shades and
a Stevie Nicks hairdo, bitching about her taxes.
Boris Grebenshikov, who is still writing, still composing, and now in his
mid-40s, is still 105 percent attitude. In a recent interview, he declared:
"In my opinion, the term 'Petersburg Culture' is a myth dreamed up by people
whom it suits and who are making money out of it." Basically, Boris
Grebenshikov
is modern Petersburg Culture, but there's a lot to what he says: the official
version of Petersburg Culture is all about moving tourist product and putting
foreign butts into opera seats.
When asked about the sainted corpse of Vladimir Lenin, the irrepressible
Grebenshikov further opined: "First, there's a criminal lying there, and
not just that - an embalmed criminal. I don't want to start going into
metaphysics, but an unburied body is a source of great evil." Boris happens
to be a Buddhist - a classic hipster Buddhist, of the Temple of Ginsberg
variety. He has arrived at this metaphysical conclusion by unorthodox means,
but he's probably right. People in the former Leningrad have every right
to feel itchy about the fact that Lenin's not yet shoveled under.
The Seven Riverniks
Prominent among them are a group called the Rechniki, or the River Club.
The members of the River Club are living legends in alternative Saint
Petersburg:
there are seven of them. These soldiers of the night are pioneer leaders
of the Petersburg squatter contingent. Their names are Linas, Roman, Max,
Denis, Stas, Timothy, and Egor. They've been illegally occupying large
buildings since 1989.
The Riverniks are not merely squatters. Russia is in economic depression
and there are a lot of homeless people around, lurking in attics and basements
without any ability to pay. The Riverniks are squatters-movement people,
a "radical self-sufficient artistic association." This means that they
are illegal squatters, plus political organizers, graphic artists, rave
performers, videomakers, pirate-radio enthusiasts, Web users, junk sculptors,
and interior designers. Furthermore, in order to survive, they've also
become locksmiths, welders, electricians, and plumbers.
Being Russian, the River Club likes to think big. A common squatter's tactic
in Saint Petersburg involves legally renting an apartment, then refusing
to leave the premises while not paying the rent. That tactic is OK for
wimps and sissies, but the River Club rarely bothers with "paper permissions."
Back in 1994, the River Club squatted a big fishing trawler called the
Stubnitz. They swarmed on board while the authorities weren't looking,
equipped the ship with PCs and pirate radio, and turned it into a mobile
ocean-going rave. The Riverniks and their allies then puttered around the
Baltic with a crew of bewildered professional sailors, emitting crazed
radio manifestos about invasions from Jupiter and a World War III breaking
out inside the human brain.
The Riverniks, who are very much players within their alternative aquarium,
naturally have their own dedicated propaganda media unit. It's aptly known
as "Mess Media." Mess Media spreads underground rumors, runs pirate radio
and Finnish Web sites
(muu.lib.hel.fi/netbo/mess/squat.html),
scares up
donations, spews reams of posters and graffiti, arranges sub-rosa rave
concerts, cheers the local armies of the night, and runs mindboggling head
trips on unsuspecting Russian straights.
We're not talking mere "dropouts" here: these Riverniks are sincere, utterly
dedicated, violently antimaterialistic, arty anarchists. When I met them,
they were physically occupying the third floor of a large vacant building
owned by unsuspecting US absentee landlords. The Seven Riverniks have strung
their own unpaid power lines and installed their own unpaid gas lines and
unpaid telephones, and they're running a full-scale, screaming,
spark-and-chip-throwing
60-decibel machine shop in there. The place looks like a set from
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari overlaid with welders and punch-presses.
It's crammed with
distorted metal furniture and raw material that the Riverniks have "obtained"
from dumps, abandoned military depots, and other, er, sources. When I arrived,
I found them loudly transforming scrap metal into more of the furniture.
The furniture is a big hit, for some reason. Straight people are actually
paying them for it.
There's not one shred of weekend-hippie pretense about the Riverniks. These
cats are strictly heavy gauge. They look the way SRL's Mark Pauline would
look if he had never heard of shampoo or multivitamins. The Riverniks wear
military-surplus gear and big scarred boots, and I'm pretty sure that they
cut their own hair with sheep clippers. They truly redefine the concept
of grunge - a Yankee concept they understand all too well and airily dismiss
as mere kid stuff.
The River Club's current big project is an Internet café. This won't
be a cute, clean, commercial Internet café. Their Internet café
will be in a basement, and they're rather expecting police raids. This
is going to be a brand-new Internet café for the River Club's core
demographic, the 4,000 people who gathered sans any cops or security for
their latest rave extravaganza, a flame-spouting forest bacchanalia they
called Air and Fire. The Riverniks have big plans for the club's interior
decor, because they recently discovered a cosmonautic junkyard, where Russia's
equivalent of NASA has discarded satellite hulls, outmoded control boards,
and pre-Western computers. These are all-Russian computers, mind you! With
true-blue Russian microchips! The biggest microchips in the world!
Saint Petersburg already boasts a very civilized Internet café,
the Tetris (www.dux.ru/netcafe/eng/cafehome.html).
I've been to Internet cafés here and there, so I've noticed a principle
in the business: the better the bandwidth, the worse the food. The Tetris
had the best food I've ever had in an Internet café. I strongly
recommend the "pork à la Tetris," where a pork cutlet comes surrounded
by a video-bright mélange of sliced apples, pineapples, cherries,
canned pears, oranges, and three kinds of grapes. (Russians still haven't
gotten over the marvel that is fruit out of season.) The sturgeon à
la Tetris is similarly grand. Even their coffee may be the best in town.
Tetris staffer Dmitry Bagrov told me that people have been known to show
up in the Tetris merely looking for the coffee.
A preternaturally neat café, Tetris is all green marble tile and
hippie wind chimes, where local hackers (and the occasional misplaced
Australian)
are picking up files and email under shiny racks of Russian Internet zines.
People get the word about the Internet from wandering into the café.
Every Sunday the café staff throws well-attended seminars. Quite
often, customers sign up for service provision from the Café Tetris's
sponsor, the Dux corporation.
Little by little, Saint Petersburg is going digital. One of the city's
three computer-graphics companies, Creat Inc., occupies a suite of fourth-floor
offices within the monstrous dead carcass of Lenfilm, which was once the
Soviet Union's state-supported film and media apparat. This mammoth Leningrad
Babylon is not merely run-down, but positively eldritch, with huge multistory
cracks in its brickwork, dank, dark, echoing halls, and floors so badly
damaged that they have interior potholes. Yet here they sit, these 20 eager
designers and programmers - young, with-it, coffee-swilling, and arty,
who would be instantly recognizable in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch
and, in fact, have an agent there trying to scare them up some
computer-graphics
action. They work their 70-hour weeks in a place festooned with muscle-PCs
and precious back issues of Animation magazine,
Computer Graphics World,
Siggraph publications, and Wired.
Creat's president and CEO is Anton Petrov, a buoyant 31-year-old Saint
Petersburg native. Creat once worked doing flying logos and graphics effects
for Moscow national television. It still gets work for local Saint Petersburg
TV, but it's hitching its future on computer-gaming work in Europe and
America (www.creatstudio.com/creatstudio/).
Petrov says it's simpler to hunt up work in LA or London than it is to
fight upstream in the media empires of Moscow. Besides, Moscow already
has 15 computer-graphics companies compared with Saint Petersburg's three
(Positive, Lesta, and Creat). Furthermore, Russia's telecom industry is
so primitive that it's easier to dial up New York or Berlin than it is
Moscow.
Creat faces a daunting set of challenges. It gets no state support; the
city scarcely knows it exists. The original Creat, which began as a
computer-retail
firm, has already collapsed, spinning the design firm loose. The survivors
are far from the global action in animation and special effects. But they
do have major-league talent. Being Russian, they have particular strength
in mathematics: Creat's programmers are math professors who have been surviving
in Saint Petersburg State Technical University on next to no salary. Computer
graphics is glamorous work, so they get to comb the student corps for talent,
too. What's more - and this is the wild card - some of the people in the
Creat orbit are actual, genuine Russian Artists - Artists with a capital
A.
Still, it can't be said that Saint Petersburg is a computer-industry town.
It's not an industry town at all, though it does have a very large port,
military naval facilities, and its own nuclear reactor (which is just like
Chernobyl, except that it's older). This city used to be in the government
business as the country's capital, but it's not in power any more. Petersburg's
main claim to fame and self-worth is that it's the "cultural capital of
Russia."
Saint Petersburg has a heritage industry. The city is trying, in a halting,
thumb-fingered fashion, to develop a modern, tourist-baiting, museum economy.
The city does boast one of the world's truly great storehouse-museums,
the Hermitage, which is chock-full of first-class czarist art-loot. It
has at least 23 other museums, large and small. It has ridiculously magnificent
architecture: palaces, fortresses, cathedrals galore. It has the Kirov
Ballet, the Philharmonia symphony orchestras, the Pushkin theater.
That's all very nice, without a doubt; it's "culture," but it's not moving
around much.
What Saint Petersburg really had - and has - is the Saint Petersburg spirit.
The city has soul, it's still alive. When creative people are surviving
in stark defiance of their surroundings, the result is a vibrant
counterculture.
Squats are a big counterculture deal here. In a city whose government officials
extralegally appropriate apartments and distribute them to friends, squatting
makes perfect sense; it's poetic justice. The core of Petersburg's contemporary
art scene is also a squat. It's a multistory building, prominently placed
downtown on 10 Pushkinskaya Street, and has simply been physically taken
over by a huge revolving crowd of rent-refusing art hippies. The two lower
floors are occupied by about a hundred people; the third floor features
galleries and display spaces, and the fourth has a bar named Fish Fabrique
that's a byword with the hip expatriate set.
I had a couple of beers in Fish Fabrique with some Russian FidoNet zealots,
and it strikes me as a place that is sure to loom large in fond local memory.
Fish Fabrique has certainly earned its cachet, but actually experiencing
it is another matter. Fish Fabrique's "furniture" is battered formica tables
and dismantled car seats. It's lethally gloomy, and it looks and smells
like a Soviet bomb shelter. The only real lighting in the place is a naked
bulb hanging over, of all things, a foosball table. The bar's drippy Day-Glo
decor was apparently assembled at random by people on ketamine and magic
mushrooms.
A lot of art is created in 10 Pushkinskaya. It's a very genuine urban cultural
center. Gallery 21, the city's foremost venue for digital art, is located
here. So is the Techno Art Center and the Photopostscriptum Art Agency
and Timur Novikov's far-famed New Academy of Fine Arts. Ten Pushkinskaya
is truly famous. It is also semilegal at best, and it's full of squalid,
ultraradical illegals who live outside the law and who are quite often
higher than kites.
Shock, shock, horror: Russian hippies are on dope! We're not talking a
little weekend chablis here. We are talking heroic Russian drug use. Ketamine
and psilocybin are the city's current psychedelics of choice. Saint Petersburg
is very much a psychedelic town.
Three years ago, some unsung botanical genius discovered that a certain
breed of "poisonous toadstools" that infest the woods around Saint Petersburg
were saturated with of psilocybin. This news gladdened the patriotic hearts
of Russian hippies - at last, a free, all-natural, all-Russian hallucinogenic!
A native, noncommercial psychedelic that you can gather by the basketful
while singing romantic folk songs in the birch woods! There's now pro-mushroom
graffiti on walls and in alleys all over Saint Petersburg. Why ketamine
is also popular is beyond me, but it's regarded as a truly marvelous substance
and is referred to in hushed tones of mystical respect. As for Ecstasy
and hash, they're so common as to be beneath comment.
The Tourist Draw
The Church on Spilled Blood is said to be a "superb example of Russian
architecture and monumental and decorative art." The thing is hard to miss.
It's smack in the middle of downtown, and it's psychotically elaborate;
it's like a vast, fungal bouquet of psychedelic turnips and onions. There
is nothing soothing or peaceful about this memorial; it's traumatic, disturbed,
and disturbing, a deeply eerie memorial to the dual bloody wounds of Christ
and czar. It's state religious art by an autocratic régime that
knows it rests on sand. It's so much the Opium of the People that the huge
ironwork fences around the church have poppy flowers on them, incredible
wrought-iron dope poppies as big as your head.
After the fall of czarism, the church was slowly and utterly wrecked. Padlocked
by Stalinist bureaucrats, it was abandoned to the Russian weather (the
basement filled with water) and the tender mercies of Nazi artillery. Now
restored and officially reopened to the public, it's once again a functional
Orthodox cathedral. It's sanctified ground, even though it's a single-minded
cult totem for a bloodily murdered czar.
Inside, it's a giant media extravaganza in stone, a glimmering, echoic
mass of tortuous altars and astonishing acres of glittering mosaic that
feature a window-shop parade of saints and prophets. For their part, they
all look like they've eaten soap all their lives and cling to the walls,
vaults, pillars, and ceilings in rigid hieratic fixity, as if deathly afraid
to move.
A dramatic centerpiece of Christ on trial before Caiaphas, sadly, features
accusers who look really warm and lively. In all that mighty acreage of
rigid piety, these murderous sinners are the only people who seem to have
human appetites and a functional agenda. They gesture, they snarl, they
cower and glare; they're the cathedral's thriving counterculture.
Even after nearly 30 years of municipal effort, the Church on Spilled Blood
still isn't fully repaired. They've come a long way, but they just can't
quite get the job done. The back door is held together with duct tape.
It has taken 20th-century Russians longer to restore the church than it
took 19th-century Russians to build the whole thing in the first place.
Restoration was a problematic act; after all, the People's Will terrorists
were supposed to be the good guys.
The People's Will gang, being intellectual
amateurs, were easily rounded up and all summarily hanged for their crime.
So they, too, have their own, secular, Russian martyr's cult. How do you
simultaneously honor the dead sainted czar and honor the dead sainted heroes
who killed the czar? It's just impossible. But the Russians do it anyway.
It gets truly strange when one figures in the new, museum-economy angle.
Czarism is long dead, but that is what Saint Petersburg wants and needs
to sell to the rest of us. They can sell the melancholy glamour and bizarre
design sense of dead Russian royalty. They can sell their long-gone local
Belle Epoque. That's what they have to offer in the global culture sweepstakes,
and if they can somehow boot up the hard disk and erase the period from
1914 to 1991, they really do have a unique and attractive asset. The square
outside the Church on Spilled Blood has the biggest cluster of tourist-industry
kiosks in town. They cheerfully take dollars, they recite canned spiels
in fine English, and they sell matryoshka dolls, lacquer boxes, Baltic
amber jewelry, and even home-pirated Disney memorabilia. I couldn't leave
without the unique and attractive KGB T-shirt. It's only a matter of time
before they move right on to snow globes, fridge magnets, and "I detonated
the czar" Cyrillic bumper stickers.
This isn't merely a municipal money-spinning scheme. Reviving the economy
by putting 50,000 volts through the corpse of czarism has had some very
strange collateral effects. The concept seems to have caught on at a very
deep level: it's even become a local art movement. This may be the first
significant art movement that the young Russian Republic has given us.
The Artists
Then Stalinist Socialist Realism hung around its neck like an anchor for
70 years. But there were still subterranean cultural fires in Saint Petersburg:
poverty-stricken, persecuted, avant-garde dissidents held "shows" in each
other's homes, even calling themselves the Conceptualists, Sotsart, and
the like. As things eased up in the hippie Aquarium era, new little movements
came thick and fast: the Friends of Mayakovsky, the New Artists, the
Necro-Realists.
Now, finally, in the 20th century's fin de siècle, a group of local
artists has made a delightful and possibly significant discovery: after
a hundred years of avant-garde abstraction, classical beaux arts can shock
the bourgeoisie.
The restoration industry is very much alive here. But this isn't just a
case of dry-as-dust archaeologists taking their camel-hair brushes and
regilding old mosaics. In Saint Petersburg, classic, academic, representational
art is really new again somehow; it's become possible to do this with
attitude.
This is not a joke. It's actually workable. It's done with cameras and
computers. It's a sensibility. It's a form of local art that looks like
nothing else on earth. It's become possible to really disturb people by
digitally bending and warping classical art - to knowingly play on Russian
society's cracks, flaws, and discrepancies. To break the zombie sleep,
to revitalize Russia's walking dead.
The movement is called Neo-Academism, and its guru is a hippie theoretician
named Timur Novikov. The movement was born in 1991, the first year of the
New Russia. Neo-Academism has been gathering force ever since, and while
skeptical Saint Petersburg straights like to dismiss Novikov as an emperor
with no clothes, they're forced to admit that he is an emperor. Of sorts.
This is the first manifestation out of the New Russia that actually impresses
me. Neo-Academism is a weird, digitally enhanced shotgun marriage between
gilt-and-marble classical grandeur and total, poverty-stricken, street-level
hippie junk art. It's as if a non-stop Burning Man festival had broken
out in the giant, rotting palace of Catherine the Great. Neo-Academism
is big, and getting bigger: it's an across-the-board creative movement.
Like Surrealism once did, it fancies itself not merely a form of expression,
but a way of life. Neo-Academists are sculptors, photographers, set designers,
costumers, filmmakers, actors, musicians, graphic artists, curators, magazine
publishers.
Most avant-garde art movements fizzle and come to very little. Avant-gardism
is an old game now, easy to dismiss, full of predictable moves. It's been
a long time since the 20th century spawned any art movement that could
really get under people's skin. After Pop Art - well, no, after Jeff Koons
- it might seem that the entire conceptual territory had been clearcut
and plowed with salt. But Neo-Academism is so weird looking, and it arises
from such unique cultural and economic circumstances, that it looks to
me like it might actually get somewhere. This might become the first digital
art movement that really matters.
It's not that Academism has never been neo-ed before. Hippies in particular
have a continuing romance with gooey-dreamy representational art by the
Pre-Raphaelites, Alphonse Mucha, Maxfield Parrish. A little closer to the
target is Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a British High Victorian who specialized
in classical marble effects, with a lot of learned period detail, not to
mention luscious Greek and Roman bath girls. The Neo-Academists have a
big thumbs-up for Alma-Tadema, a man they clearly regard as a spiritual
ancestor.
But the capo of Neo-Academism, Timur Novikov, is a fin-de-siècle
avant-garde sophisticate; he knew Warhol, he knew Rauschenberg, he knew
Haring. Neo-Academism, Novikov argues, is not a gimmick or a reaction;
it's the future of Saint Petersburg's native culture. It's the authentic
path forward.
Neo-Academism had its roots in the compost of Necro-Realism, a sullen little
outburst of the late 1980s. The Necro-Realists earned their name through
their interesting discovery that rotting bodies hadn't received a lot of
aesthetic attention. They studied decay. They claimed that they were reacting
to the central lie of totalitarianism: the evil fantasy that says that
the body can be butchered for some abstract ideal - Nazism, communism -
while the unstained soul somehow lives on, gloriously. In reality, it was
the spirit that was killed long ago by totalizing ideologies, while the
body lingers on, as a rotting monument and visible reproach.
In retrospect, it's obvious that Necro-Realism was a response to the death
of the Soviet system. Necro-Realism did exemplify its times, but it couldn't
last. Fine, guys: the system is dying, it's dead. It's beyond rotten.
Now what?
Konstantin "Kostya" Mitenev might serve as a representative Necro-Realist
figure. In 1987, Kostya became involved in the "parallel film" movement,
painstakingly creating X-Acto-knife 16-millimeter animations on his kitchen
table. He began doing the experimental film circuit in Moscow, Bonn, Riga,
and Budapest.
Mitenev suffered a crushing artistic blow when his precious stock of handmade
films were stolen from the squat he was occupying. Mitenev decided to go
into digital art because, as he perceptively puts it, "it's somewhere else."
(Specifically, it's in a server offshore in Finland.) Light-fingered
sneak-thieves
will have a hard time purloining art that exists only in cyberspace. Mitenev
loves the whole concept of a parallel space: of cyberspace as the new aquarium.
Nowadays, he does Web animation and installations and produces signature
conceptual pieces like his videotape of a lamp. It's just a lamp, sitting
there in the middle of nothingness. It's a television forced to behave
as a lamp. It's an untouchable source of quiet light, gently shining from
inside the aquarium.
One of Kostya's artistic allies is Alla Mitrofanova, a self-described
"cyberfeminist
media critic." Alla Mitrofanova is curator for the electronic art program
at the Techno Art Center, located at Gallery 21 inside the Pushkinskaya
squat. Alla's not an artist. She's a postmodernist, French-theory-driven
feminist Russian art critic. Of course, feminism, like many another ism,
takes some odd transmutations in a Russian context; as Alla points out,
Russian radical feminism was very much a 1920s phenomenon. That was when
Bolshevik social engineering produced a sudden, unprecedented burst of
gender-leveling law and social policy. It helps to be a cultural historian
when you're a Russian feminist.
In a European context, there's a firm alliance between electronic art and
postmodern theory. Digital art fits neatly into a lot of postmodern analytical
obsessions: body theory (you have no body in cyberspace), gender studies
(in cyberspace nobody knows you're a dog), the simulacrum (it's all simulated
here inside the glass box, thank you), postmodern subjectivity fragmentation
(MUDs, hacker handles, false and alternate electronic identities), even
Paul Virilio's speed obsession (speed of light "speedy" enough for you,
mon frère?). Alla Mitrofanova, who is intelligentsia right down
to her deck-punching fingernails, enjoys nothing more than curling up with
the collected works of Monsieur Gilles Deleuze for a high-speed ideological
drift far above the thousandth plateau. I confess to a certain sneaking
fondness for this stuff myself. Alla, however, not only reads it in French
and thinks it in Russian, she can really churn it out in English.
As she once wrote in her husband's magazine, Artistic Will: "The motive
for the magazine to appear is today's aesthetic stagnation within the temporal
texture and the fact that the Now surface feels friable before interpretation.
This texture is a medley of meaninglessness, commonplaceness, and the keen
sensation of life formation: break, textural density, contemplating time
within which clots of cultural texture of the past are a part of the present."
Yeah man! Whoo! As behooves a guy who earns his living by Yankee cultural
imperialism, I have a warm, kindly, and protective feeling about European
postmodern art theory. True, some of my original thrill faded when I realized
that I could actually understand it, but that too has its benefits. I was
settling down with Alla for a friendly chat about shattered weltanschauungs
and the Situationist urban drift when her husband came in, having put the
children to bed.
Andrei Khlobystin is an art critic, curator, and art historian, but, he
insists, he is not a postmodernist. He's a blazing Neo-Academist zealot.
Although Neo-Academists like postmodernists enough to marry them (and even
reproduce), they're just not very postmodernist anymore.
Andrey sat down on the battered family couch above the night's throng of
Nevsky Prospekt, lit a cigarette, and launched into a full-scale,
no-holds-barred,
conquer-the-world, revolutionary Russian art rant. It was the first
Neo-Academist
sermon I'd ever heard. He was using terms and jargon that were totally
unfamiliar to me. I was thrilled. I couldn't have been more surprised if
I'd found a baby coelacanth frolicking downriver from Chernobyl.
Andrey blithely described Neo-Academism as something that had once been
an "art movement" but is now a lifestyle, a sensibility, and a community.
It's the Neo-Academists' measured response to "the disappearance of repressive
power" and its weird new reappearance as "the seductive power of mass media."
And Neo-Academism, Andrey solemnly declared, is prepared to eat mass media.
Eat it? I inquired cautiously.
Oh yes. You see, that's a tactical reaction to "the triad of sex, power,
and repression." It's a "new semantic revolution." It's a new creative
answer to the collapse of communism's official future and the consequent
"total crisis of identity for everybody." It's about finding the space
to communicate the positive energies, a "position of creative joy," "especially
for the rave generation and the hackers" - but it's not merely generational.
You see, Andrey mused aloud at a smoking 56,000 baud, "we live in a very
strange town that looks like an ideology in stone." But you get a "very
cold feeling when you see the difference between yourself and the
façade."
The city's energy derives from this stark contrast between the magnificent
shell and the squalid reality of trash-filled inner yards and brutal communal
apartments.
But Saint Petersburg has a great advantage: it has no art market, no "market
for souls." Neo-Academist art is created by "people who are making art
because they cannot do anything else." It's no longer about "art" per se,
because "art has no substance now - only media." This is avant-garde media
for media's sake, basically; it's daily life conceived as media, "daily
communication as a work of art." The core of the Neo-Academist effort is
quiet, supportive gestures from person to person, network freebies really,
on "the naïve level of everyday life." It's about sustaining creativity
in the free space, through potlatch - realizing your own interior riches,
and deliberately giving creativity away.
Neo-Academism is squatting inside the dead shell of classical art. Its
proponents like classical art because it's old and it's public domain -
now classical art is media freeware. "Neo-Academism is an aesthetic ghetto,
but all the other places were occupied by political correctness and crowds
of other people. This is a backyard, a rubbish-place. It's free, and we
can do anything with it."
There was a great deal more to Andrey's speech - all about Cartesian
rationalism,
Russian spiritualism, beauty, nature, language, the Superman, "killing
things by names," and "breaking through the white wall." But enough of
Andrey's rhetoric; how does this actually work? What separates Neo-Academism
from neoclassical schlock - say, a Maxfield Parrish
Saturday Evening Post
cover? Well, first of all, Neo-Academism isn't that cute. It's not soothing,
it's not decorative. It's pretty, but it's dangerously pretty.
And it's also magnificent - this may be the oddest element. People in Saint
Petersburg live in a city where magnificence was a political weapon, where
the ideology and architecture of an aristocracy is still a living and
compelling
part of the environment. Preindustrial aristocracy is an alternative
society
now, a lost world of patricians who would have roundly scorned our servile
acquiescence in the unchallenged rule of cash over human affairs. Aristocracy
is not communist, bourgeois, capitalist, or commercial.
Saint Petersburg's architecture always made communism look bad - and the
detritus of dead aristocracy is also a living reproach to any society
prostrated
by Pepsi, Marlboro, and McDonald's. Peter the Great was building to last.
Who builds to that standard these days? People will pay good money to get
into the Church of Spilled Blood - what has anyone built in the past 20
years that people a hundred years from now will pay to visit? We're infinitely
faster and better informed now, but also much more disposable.
The last 20th-century people who talked seriously about building for the
long term were the Nazis. The "Thousand-Year Reich." The Nazis were also
very much into academic revivalism, and they possessed a great sense of
set design. Albert Speer and his spotlight cathedral rallies, the Nuremberg
raves. The costumery of the SS still inspires fetishists a full 60 years
later. Nazi conquerors looted and emptied galleries and museums all over
Europe and took special pains to obliterate every czarist palace in Leningrad
they could get their hands on. Nazi art is the great buried and denied
art of the 20th century. It's pseudo-neoclassical, and it's the one form
of 20th-century art that still shocks and frightens people.
The Neo-Academists aren't Nazis. They're only barely living in the 20th
century. But they've thought a lot about who the Nazis were and how they
worked. Yeah, they're supposed to be harmless hippie eccentrics. But they
know history anyway. And it shows.
Nazi art used classical motifs with a thud and a blunder and a crunch.
Neo-Academist sculptor Julia Straussova does heroic busts of her friends
and colleagues. But these go well beyond parody - they actually hurt your
brain. They have the full-scale classical façade - laurel wreaths,
Greek helmets, symmetrical pedestals, an air of timeless glory - but the
faces are life masks of contemporary human beings. They're no führers
or god-emperors, they're people: Roman majesty and gravitas, but with
Andrey
Khlobystin's friendly-goblin mug grafted on. Julia Straussova once did
a series of busts of 12 German techno DJs: "The Twelve Caesars of the
Techno-Imperium."
Twelve rave DJs? Well, why not? Why shouldn't disk-spinning pop stars be
treated just like Caesars - it's all about fame and glory, isn't it? It's
all about celebrity. It's media.
Neo-Academists don't do postmodern irony. They do something else entirely,
something they call cruel naïveté. It's beyond mere cynicism.
It only works when done with a straight face.
The catalog Passiones Luci (1995) shows the Neo-Academist community in
full cry. Here we have a full-scale photographic tableau vivant that reproduces
selected episodes from The Golden Ass of Apuleius. This was an inspired
choice from Roman classical literature. The Golden Ass has been indecent
for 2,000 years and will probably be even more indecent 2,000 years hence.
Doing the book as a series of costumed stage photos was a challenging effort,
but that Neo-Academist potlatch ethic came to the fore. Everyone pitched
in. Artists become unpaid models. Alla Mitrofanova ran high-level interference
and helped squeeze some art funding out of the local George Soros art center.
Everybody crowded in front of the camera: the team of Oleg Maslov and Viktor
Kuznetzov, Timur Novikov, Olga Tobreluts, various local hippies, rock stars'
wives, artists' boyfriends and girlfriends, the guy down the hall at the
squat. The intended end result, as Ekaterina Andreeva (a Neo-Academist
and director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts) puts it, is "an
unraveling of historical time." Those eerily symmetrical costumes are certainly
weird enough - but the photographs, careful imitations of 19th-century
staged photography, were subjected to digital photomontage to an effect
beyond collage: it's profoundly weird, as if raw computational power had
somehow caused history to disintegrate.
And they know that's what's happening. As Andreeva says, "Technology aspires
to magic; society aspires toward maximum technological expertise and precision,
to create lifelike doubles and substitutes for reality." In Saint Petersburg,
this isn't merely a techie conceit; it's helping artists get a grip on
their profound cultural dilemma. "Technical lifelike doubles entangle and
exceed the boundaries of reality," says Andreeva. "They create the illusion
of the reversibility of historical time."
Suddenly the true Neo-Academist wildcard emerges: the digital imperative.
This is what truly distinguishes Neo-Academism from all those previous
attempts to resuscitate dead beaux arts. The Neo-Academists
have the technology. They can get a different kind of grip.
They can cut and paste it. Photoshop is their friend.
There's no question who the truly wired Neo-Academist is. Olga Tobreluts
is a 26-year-old Petersburg native who's never done anything but digital
art, like altered digital photography and video montage. She is the current
Queen of the Neo-Academist Scene.
Olga Tobreluts has been a model for other Neo-Academist efforts, and it
probably doesn't hurt much that she is stunningly photogenic; but that's
not why Timur Novikov recommends her work to foreign journalists (like
me). He considers her the Neo-Academist to watch. Twenty-one years old
when the Russian Federation was established, Olga Tobreluts doesn't have
the crushing historical burdens of the Necro-Realists. She was a child
in Leningrad; and she's one of the very first artists to become an adult
in the New Russia.
Olga's work is digital, and it's media, and it's all about heritage and
identity. It's not a stretch or a novelty for Olga to work with digital
art. It's just another means - the best means, the natural means - of coming
to grips with her subject matter.
Olga Tobreluts lives in a building that might have been set-designed for
a Neo-Academist. It's a deeply eerie downtown Belle Epoque pile that was
built in full-scale Pharaonic Egyptian replication. The structure is almost
100 years old now and is falling photogenically apart at the seams, in
a mummified Necro-Realist fashion. Like all Saint Petersburg apartment
buildings, every inch of public space in the structure is in a state of
utter neglect. The stairwells smell and are totally unlit, since any fool
unwise enough to install a 35-cent lightbulb would find it immediately
stolen. The elevator is a maelstrom of heavy-metal rock graffiti. Olga's
door is a retrofitted portcullis of makeshift armor plate.
But beyond the door, it's Finland. There's a working studio, an atelier.
There's furniture, TV screens, a computer. There are caged birds and flowers
and a lot of rave promotion posters. That's a parenthetical oddity: you'd
think that, to be consistent, Neo-Academists would be into neoclassical
music, perhaps some kind of digital restorationist work involving sackbuts
and harpsichords. In point of fact, they're all techno-rave fanatics. This
doesn't strike them as contradictory. They're contemporary people, not
antiquarians. Their native music is rave music, sampled Eurodigital
electronica.
Olga's husband owns a techno night club. Timur Novikov does raves. The
Riverniks organize and promote rave events. The official Neo-Academist
house band is Novy Kompository, the New Composers, whose work is meditative
Brian Eno-like honks, bleeps, and ambient thudding. In fact, Eno was just
in town hanging out with the Novy Kompository, who found themselves to
be very much on his wavelength.
Olga's work isn't postmodern virtual art; it isn't the supposed wonder
and marvel of virtual reality. It's Art first, and digital as a distant
second. Olga Tobreluts's work has to do with the stark fact that she's
Olga Tobreluts: a child of Leningrad, an adult in Petersburg, a Russian
woman with a Baltic heritage and Baltic surname - Tobreluts - which wasn't
Slavic enough.
(She's not alone in that problem. Anatoly Chubais, Russia's greatest spin
master, is also from Saint Petersburg. He's also of Baltic ancestry. He
isn't Slavic enough, either. Although he's running the country.)
Olga could be Olga Komarova if she wanted - her infant son is Yakim Komarov,
an unimpeachably Russian name - but she is passionately Olga Tobreluts
and will not back down. She's gifted, and young, and energetic: but the
thing that makes Olga Tobreluts truly significant as a Saint Petersburg
cultural figure is that she so clearly knows who she is. She uses computers,
video montage, and digital photography to prove who she is.
When I first saw Olga's series Family, a set of eight computer-altered
photographs of herself and her ancestors, I told her that they seemed familiar
- somewhat like the posed historical photographs of Cindy Sherman. This
produced the instant retort that Cindy Sherman is a postmodernist.
Cindy
Sherman's art is "ironic"; she treats portraiture as a pose, a joke. The
Family series, on the other hand, is a set of old black-and-white photos
that have been montaged, colorized, altered, transformed. This isn't fake
identity, fragmented subjectivity, alternate identity, or virtuality: it's
an artist whose identity was already destroyed, repressed, and
fragmented
by political repression, who is using a computer because it
redeems her and it proves who she is.
That's a subtle difference, but it's all the
difference in the world.
Olga also works in video. She did an instant Neo-Academist classic called
Woe from Wit.
It's a brief video, done on no budget to speak of and featuring
various potlatch friends as unpaid stars. It's based on a 19th-century
Russian drama, but this thing that's been done to this classic play with
Olga's mouse and Return key is more than mere parody. Mutation would be
a far better term. Period-costumed amateur actors wander about the set
reciting their fractured lines, while canvases on the wall change their
subject matter without warning. Curtains turn into waterfalls, classical
nudes morph on their pedestals. There's a whole other world in that video,
maybe a whole other century. Certainly not our century. The coming century
of a young Russian woman.
Three or four years ago, Timur Novikov used to mutter to his intimates
that computers were the work of the devil. The future lay in the past -
in transforming Petersburg into a "green zone" for forms of art that are
obscured, forgotten, too troublesome, no longer practiced. People should
be taught to draw again, to understand perspective, proportion, classic
Greek aesthetics. Timur doesn't condemn computers any more. Timur has his
own Web site now. He knows that Olga Tobreluts, a woman who showed up in
his circle as a teenage architecture student, has become the apotheosis
of Neo-Academism.
As for Timur himself ... I met him, of course. I would never have turned
down the chance to meet Timur Novikov after hearing his disciples talk
about him. They literally think he's magic.
A skeptic would say that it's not all that hard to be "magic" when large
numbers of your nearest and dearest are skull-whacked on shrooms and ketamine.
But Timur Novikov is pretty damned magic, when you're sober and in broad
daylight. He's not a gifted artist; he's more than that: as they used to
say of André Breton, he's the torch who lights their steps. Everyone
this man knows has been turned into an artist. He's a Breton, or a Warhol,
only more so - because the people in his orbit need him more. Breton was
on the Left Bank when Paris was the ne plus ultra of Euro-intellectual
chic. Warhol was in New York when the Youthquake was happening, the economy
was booming, and there was art money all over the place. Timur Novikov
is in Saint Petersburg when the economy has crashed, the rule of law is
a pious fraud, and people are at their wits' ends and drinking themselves
to death.
But Timur is a "titan artist of a new type" - at least he is according
to his own publicity (www.dux.ru/virtual/timur/index.htm).
Timur decided that his situation required an artistic titan, so he made
himself into one. A touch of megalomania is a real asset in a situation
like Timur's: it helps you deal with the Soros art center, with pesky foreign
journalists who don't speak your language. He's got a major ego, and on
him it looks good! It gets him out of bed in the morning, day after day,
to inspire and organize the lives and psyches of temperamental Russian
artists.
In point of fact, pretty much nothing has happened in Saint Petersburg
art in the past 15 years without Timur Novikov either lurking in the background
or strutting on the stage. He started his first art movement, the New Artists
group, when he was a mere 24. Next year it was the New Composers music
group, with Timur neck deep in artistic design for the rock bands Popular
Mechanics and Kino. In the mid-1980s he decided it was time to leave the
aquarium, and he left to exhibit and study in Germany, Finland, Yugoslavia,
France, and the US. Then, in 1993, he opened the New Academy of Fine Arts,
the semi-official front group for the Neo-Academist movement.
Timur creates videos, photos, tapestries, and paintings, but he's a rarer
thing than a mere artist: he's a great critic and a great inspirational
figure. He radiates charisma - when he takes his turn in Olga Tobreluts's
video Woe From Wit,
in period costume, he looks like the Duke of Wellington.
And today, this unquestioned master of the Saint Petersburg art scene is
still not quite 40 years old - and he's blind. The illness began to attack
his eyesight about three months ago. His sickness has been vaguely described
as meningitis, but whatever it is, it's serious. This titan artist is very
sick. He looks 60.
It's truly one of the saddest things I've ever witnessed. Meeting Timur
Novikov was a raw confrontation with unappeasable Russian tragedy. His
friends say that his blindness has somehow made him stronger, more magical
even. But this is a man who's been an art critic since the age of 15, and
he can no longer see his art. He was proud and eagle-eyed - and now he's
gaunt and blind.
Lately he's been arranging press interviews in a fine old graveyard, near
the hospital, conducted in excellent English and betraying not just kindness
and generosity, but also a first-class mind. He talks about retrofitting
obnoxious Modernist buildings with classical façades, a serious
scheme which amuses Timur no end. After all, why stop at merely retrofitting
tedious old churches? Turn the whole city Neo-Academist, transplant the
past wholesale, "repair" that which needs no repair. It would be helpful,
too, Timur thinks, if tiresome 20th-century Modern Art, which has clearly
failed, could be removed from the aesthetic landscape and kept in a vault
somewhere for a hundred years or so. (Then, you see, it might become
interesting
and valuable - in much the same way that long-frozen czarist art is suddenly
valuable now.)
Timur is a little tired of squats full of ravers and druggies; given his
choice, he'd like to dwell in the Mikhailovsky Palace, elegantly surrounded
by busts of electroplated DJs and Russian ambient music. He'd be a figure
liberated from history, surrounded by "beauty." Beauty is not a mere figure
of speech in Timur's concepts. Beauty seems to be a substance to him, an
objective reality, a thing as omnipresent in Petersburg as bad communist
cement.
The Russians
Today Russians are adapting an Americanized, or at least a Europeanized,
façade just as fast as they can stand it. The people of Saint Petersburg
are particularly good at this; it's why their city was created. That's
a project dear to their hearts. There's a sour joke in Petersburg now that
says they should declare independence from the rest of Russia, become a
little Baltic state like Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia - and then declare
war on Finland and lose. Because Finland was Russian territory not so long
ago, and now it's a relative paradise of clean streets, socialist health
care, and Nokia cell phones.
But Saint Petersburg isn't Europe, and Russians aren't Americans. They
say they want to be "normal," and this is as close as they've gotten lately,
but they're just not normal yet. They're not dues-paying members of the
Group of Eight who merely happen to have been through 70 mind-warping years
of murderous totalitarianism. They weren't much like Americans before that
episode, and at the far end of it, they're still not like Americans, and
not at all sure what to make of themselves. They have a very deep, very
classically Russian problem right now, and it's a problem at which they
have failed, repeatedly and disastrously.
Sometimes a great people can rise by the good fortune of having great enemies.
Before our long quarrel with the Soviets, America was basically a giant
farm, a country whose hayseed soldiers boated over periodically to sort
out the troubles in Europe. At the end of all that, we've become the first
truly global superpower, the first military power whose cultural and technical
preeminence is so overwhelming that we can't even be bothered to steal
other people's land. We don't need their land. We don't want it. It's of
no use to us.
But the Russians aren't the only great people with a spiritual problem.
We Americans are a very strange nation. When you stay a while in Europe,
or even in Russia, you can glance back and you can come to see that there's
a strange, scalped quality about the US. There's a creepiness about us,
a blankness, a darkness. Behind all the glitzy military-entertainment video
product, our satellite rock and roll, our disposable diapers, and our racks
of shiny fluoride-strengthened teeth, there's a gum-popping Whore America,
who can be led to culture but who can't be made to think. We're a facile,
careless culture, so mired in Babbittesque philistinism that savaging the
NEA is our national sport.
Digital America is faster and maybe even richer, but it isn't much prettier,
and it might be even less civilized. Here we suddenly have a brand-new
class of ruling postindustrial moguls, a gang of digital hustlers to take
their historical place beside the five-and-dime store magnates, the railroad
barons, the steel monopolists, and the oil trusts. And yet these American
titans, astoundingly, don't have any taste. None. Even 19th-century
soap-and-starch
salesmen would build parks, libraries, public statuary. Even their bric-a-brac
weekend castles would last 200 years. But not US computer moguls. They're
spectacularly rich, a true techno-aristocracy. But in their heart of hearts,
they're workaholic Dilberts, guys whose idea of fine art is a nailgun splash
in Doom, or maybe a Hollywood dinosaur eating a lawyer.
Russia is in bad straits, but I will swear with my hand on a Unix bible
that when Olga Tobreluts enters the room, the image-crunching jockeys at
Industrial Light & Magic ought to genuflect and spit up holy water. She's
an Artist. No kidding. She's got something they just don't have. They need
it, too. They need it a whole lot.
We ought to work something out here. Now that we've given up staring each
other down, we ought to water the cultural roots and feed the butterflies
that follow. This could work. I can foresee a world where American computer
moguls actually like and buy Russian computer art. Maybe even collect
it.
I'd really like to see a few Russian titan artist become zillionaires -
that could liven things up considerably. Besides, the Russians are a little
too sanctimonious about their righteous poverty - I'd like to see them
deal with our famous artists' problems and see how they like it.
The whole population could do this. We could all dump our dated hippie
Pre-Raphaelite posters from our college dorms and yuppie dens and replace
them with some chrome-coated, deeply eerie, Neo-Academist digitalia. It's
just as "pretty," but it's a lot more true to our time and our basic
predicament.
America may not be up for this. We might just chew this stuff up, spit
it out, and use it to sell running shoes. But not every country on earth
has our personality problems. There's still hope, it's a big global world
now; the Neo-Academists could get a long way just by becoming big in Japan.
Japan is country that knows a very great deal about pseudo-Westernized
façades and deep, dark, sticky interiors.
And at the end of the day, art is still art, even when it's media. There's
a bigger issue at stake here. Photography - the first fully machine-mediated
art form - was a time bomb in the basement of representational painting.
Why go on with that always-bogus "fidelity to nature" when a camera can
give you real and objective fidelity at the click of a shutter? Baudelaire
knew that the camera was the enemy of painting. But he was a 19th-century
figure; he didn't know that the camera had an enemy, too. The camera's
enemy is the computer. All so-called fidelity melts and warps before the
21st-century scepter of digital imagery, the new usurper that can kill
the camera and avenge its grandfather: a paintbrush driven by the human
mind and hand.
And painting's just one part of it. Even the Church on Spilled Blood might
quail before the untapped power of the Neo-Academist computer. What is
a "mosaic" anyway? A mosaic is stone pixels. That's all there is to it!
Computers can handle pixels. You - yes, you - could get a computer, scan
any image you want, have the computer break it up into numbered, colored
pixels. Then you go out and you break some colored pop bottles with a hammer,
and you buy a tub of superglue. Then you find some forgotten wall in the
barrio, some obscure and evil place where people are murdered like the
czar, every day, without even God caring. You get some unemployed friends
and some workgloves, and you glue that broken glass up on the wall, pixel
after pixel. Presto - order out of rubbish! Beauty - it spreads like fudge!
Czarist fine art for nothing!
Do you like those magnificent stone altars with their fantastic hand-etched
curlicues? No problem! Scan them in on 3-D models, and have a machine tool
dig them out of solid rock with CAD/CAM. Detail that would have blinded
and killed Fabergé artisans can be yours - just for the willpower
it takes to do it. Not for a fortune. Not for years of arduous labor. Yours
for a gesture. Yours for potlatch.
Of course, you won't do it now - not just because you read about it in
a magazine. But you'd do it if Timur Novikov lived next door. You wouldn't
be able to stop yourself. He'd make you realize how rich you are, inside.
Maybe a Russian futurist - Boris Strugatsky - should have the last word.
Boris, along with his late brother, Arkady, were the best-known and most
admired Russian SF writers of their generation. But at the conference I
attended, Boris confessed sadly to his assembled compeers that his writing
of the 1950s now strikes him as the work of Marxist religious fanatics.
Those weren't novels, but utopian philosophical tracts.
Now Boris Strugatsky has a Pentium, a modem, and a stack of CD-ROMs - but
inspiration knows no baud rate. He says that inspiration hasn't changed
since the days of Pushkin. Boris has known suffering - he's a Russian Jew
in a country infested with anti-Semites - but it never occurred to him
to leave his beloved city.
"The highest joy of man is creativity," Boris told me with that complete
and somewhat paralyzing Russian sincerity. "No power, or wealth, or drugs
can match that. There are three great sources of happiness in life: friends,
love, and the work. Take care of those three, and you can forget the rest.
There is no cure for poverty of the spirit."
Saint Petersburg is still a place where people can say that and mean it.
At my hotel, I swiftly rediscover the unique hospitality that only the
formerly Soviet can offer. The Hotel Rus on downtown Artillereyskaya Street
features three armed guards in the lobby: amateurish wannabe toughs in
urban camo who bully and harangue the guests. The hotel's serenely indifferent
staff signally fails to man the counters. The officious, grumpy currency
clerks can barely be persuaded to rip off customers with their absurd
dollar/ruble
exchange rates. The hotel's food could kill a circus bear.
There are three major mafia gangs in Saint Petersburg: the Malyshevsky
mob, the Tambovskaya racket, and the Kazansky cartel. Like racketeers
everywhere,
these goons all hate each other's guts, and they go to the mattresses with
some regularity. The city's gangsters are classic Damon Runyon figures,
made guys with handles like The Mole, The Phantom, and Yury "The Elephant"
Alymov.
This is an extraordinary moment in the young history of the Russian Federation.
Notwithstanding the mob-and-police action, this is the very first time
in which nothing much is happening. After suffering crushing back-to-back
military defeats at the hands of Muslim tribal zealots so disorganized
that they barely resemble governments, Russia is fighting no wars.
Hyperinflation
seems to have exhausted itself. Boris Yeltsin hasn't sent any tanks against
his political enemies in a good four years; his quintuple-bypass operation
seems to have worked, and he's looking healthier than he has in years.
No coups, putsches, or military takeovers are in the works at the Kremlin.
Nobody seems to expect one anytime soon.
The bankers' sudden and consuming interest in media mostly owes to the
influence of the two foremost politicians in the Yeltsin court: Anatoly
Chubais and Tatyana Dyachenko. A remarkable pair, they are both hugely
powerful Russian politicians who've never been elected to office. Tatyana
is a computer programmer who happens to be the president's daughter. Anatoly
Chubais is a laptop-toting 41-year-old economist who was Yeltsin's campaign
manager.
In some other, quieter country, all might have been well between the troika
of courtiers - Chubais, Nemtsov, and Tatyana - and the Seven Bankers. After
all, they basically have everything in common, and it might even be said
that they created one another. The courtiers could have gently usurped
more and more of the old man's power, and the bankers could have contented
themselves by fleecing one of the planet's richest countries. But this
is Russia, so such good sense was not to be.
The foremost figure in Petersburg's alternative milieu is another Boris
- rock musician Boris Grebenshikov. This beloved personage is universally
known as BG,or rather BG. Grebenshikov is little known in the West, though
he once had an interesting album produced by a fervent admirer, Dave Stewart
of the Eurythmics.
Even today, Leningrad hippies - pardon me, Saint Petersburg hippies - are
not tame hippies. America has tame, New Agey, sensitive, bourgeois-type
hippies. But Saint Petersburg has heavy-duty, radically defiant, street-level,
hippie autonomen. These are people whose closest spiritual kin are Amsterdam
squatters and hash-bar radicals, Hannover chaos punks and British Spiral
Tribe rave fanatics.
T. S. Eliot would have called the Church on Spilled Blood an "objective
correlative." This church was built to commemorate the bombing assassination
of Czar Alexander II, who was killed in 1881. A relatively well-meaning,
liberal czar, Alexander was clearly reforming the state and improving people's
lives. That made him a natural target for Saint Petersburg's native anarchist
radicals, the People's Will Movement. First they blew up his royal coach
with a homemade nitroglycerin bomb; then, as Alexander was walking around
trying to comfort the wounded and dying, they threw a second bomb and blew
his legs off. This act struck a resonant chord with the Russians. They
constructed a huge church exactly on the spot where the poor man bled all
over the pavement.
Saint Petersburg is famous for art movements. This was once the home of
the Wanderers group, the first self-conscious gathering of Russian painters.
Wassily Kandinsky and the Jack of Diamonds group used to hang out here.
Saint Petersburg was the birthplace of Russian Futurism and Neo-Primitivism,
it was the home of Mayakovsky and Malevich, it harbored Suprematism and
Constructivism.
What does it mean to live in a country where the male life expectancy is
57 years? It means that for every man who dies at 74, there's a man who
dies at 40. That's Russian reality now. They're not being communists, but
they're not getting healthier. They don't yet understand how.
Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com) recently wrote Holy Fire , a novel.
Copyright
© 1993-2001 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994-2001 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights reserved.