Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (11 page)

Andrei smiles. “Of course you can have it.” He hands it over. “Long live Russia.”

What was wholly ironic between Andrei and Kostya, then semi-ironic as the banner of the vanguard—“And how will we find one another tomorrow?” Larisa asks. “We will have to meet like tourists from Japan, under a green umbrella”—has become at this moment of crisis wholly unironic.

Tuesday, August 20: In the afternoon, Viktoria, the photographer, calls me to say that she went to Germany last night, using up her one-exit visa, to deliver film from Monday. “I wanted to make sure
the photos got there. And now I have returned to defend my country. Who knows whether I will ever be able to get out again?”

Kostya stops by my hotel to watch CNN for half an hour. “It’s my flag,” he says when the Parliament building flashes on the screen, the balloon and flag hovering over it. When we get there, a little later, we are in time to hear Yeltsin speak of rallying under the Russian flag, and Kostya and Andrei exchange glances. “It’s our flag,” they remark.

That evening, I have dinner with Kostya, Larisa, Serioja, and Kostya’s mother, a survivor of hard labor in the gulag. We drink lots of toasts: to Kostya’s mother, to Kostya and Larisa, to me, to freedom, to Gorbachev, to Yeltsin. Kostya doesn’t want his mother to know that he is going to the Parliament. We have a whispered consultation and devise a ruse.

I am feeling increasingly uneasy. A curfew has been declared. Driving back to the hotel, I see that the streets are almost empty. In the lobby are men from the military police.

At about 1:00 a.m., Tanya Didenko, a musicologist, calls me. Her apartment, opposite the Parliament, has become a sort of base of operations for many members of the intelligentsia, and throughout the night I check in with friends who have gone there to get warm, have tea, or use the phone. “Who would have thought it?” Tanya says. “My home has become the public lavatory of the vanguard.” She is organizing the women’s line, to stand behind the men in the human barricade, and she is also negotiating contact with the outside world. “Please keep me informed as you get information from your CNN,” she says. CNN keeps saying that its information is not yet available to the crowds outside the Russian Parliament, but as I repeat everything to Tanya, she sends runners down to tell the mob. I hear that there has been one death; she hears that there have been seven. Much of the time, it is hard to tell who has the more accurate information.

There are a few hitches. The phones are going haywire; they work and then stop, cut us off and reconnect us. There is constant clicking. Once, Tanya gets through and asks me to tell her exactly what CNN is saying. I reply that CNN seems to have shifted its reporting away from the Moscow coup and is now going on about a hurricane that is hitting New England. I explain that Hurricane Bob is wreaking
devastation on the East Coast. Half an hour later, word is running around the Parliament that Hurricane Bob is coming in from Siberia, destroying everything in its path, and will soon hit Moscow.

At two thirty, Kostya calls to say that he and Larisa and Serioja have been looking for gasoline and have been unable to get any. The metro has stopped running, and there are no taxis. So they have all gone home. I make a halfhearted effort to get down to the Parliament, but I am stopped by the military police. So I pace outside the hotel for a while—symbolically breaking the curfew—and then I go to bed.

At four, I later learn, Josif Bahkstein, the critic, wakes from a bad dream, gets into his car, and drives to the Parliament, joining the throng outside the building. “I met many very attractive young girls,” he says afterward, “one of whom I will see again in some days.”

Wednesday, August 21: The day breaks cold and wet. Kostya and Larisa and I go to the Parliament, where we find a damp version of the previous day’s rally. We want to see where the men were killed last night—the three fatalities, apparently the only ones so far, occurred at 1:00 a.m. in a tunnel as they attempted to block the observation slit in an oncoming infantry fighting vehicle—so at about noon we head off together toward Smolenskaya. Where the bodies were dragged after the shooting, flowers are scattered; perhaps a hundred people have gathered to speak of the tragedy.

A young man who looks like some early Bolshevik, or like the student from a Chekhov play—unshaven, wire-rimmed spectacles, crumpled cap held in a tense, pale hand—comes running from the barricade. He announces through a megaphone that tanks are approaching and asks for volunteers to come and stop them. Without discussion, we all follow him to the outer limit of the many-tiered system of defenses we have built and range ourselves along it. We are prepared for anything, though there have been so many rumors of tanks that none of us really expects to see one.

In fact, they arrive within minutes. I am petrified; facing down tanks has not previously been a part of my job description. But I am also exhilarated by the intense purposefulness of our stance. I have
never before had to defend my ideals this way, and though doing so in this instance is frightening, it also feels like a privilege. There is something oddly romantic about our encounter with brutality. The soldier in the first tank explains that they have come to destroy the barricade and orders us to move, adding that they will have to run us down if we do not give way. The man with the megaphone responds that we are holding our ground not in aggression, but to defend the rights of the people. “We are only a few, but there are tens of thousands at the Parliament, and across all this country,” he says. He speaks of democracy and reminds the young men in the tanks of the terrors of the past. Others join in; Kostya and Larisa both declaim to the drivers. We emphasize that no one can force orders on them. “If you do this, it is because you have chosen to do it,” says the man with the megaphone.

The soldiers look at one another and then they look at us. We are so wet, so cold, so impotent in all but the courage of our convictions—so entirely persuaded that we speak in the name of righteousness, but so transparently lacking in material defenses—that the soldiers might easily laugh. Instead, after staring at us intensely for a full minute, the driver of the front tank shrugs as though he were doing nothing more than giving way to the inevitable course of destiny. “We must bow to the will of the people,” he says, and instructs us to move aside so the tanks can make U-turns. It takes a lot of space and some time for a tank to make a U-turn.

“Why do you think they are really leaving?” I ask Kostya.

“Because of us,” he replies. “Because we are here, and because of what we’ve said.”

All of us—friends and strangers—embrace, then stand and cheer until we are hoarse.

Only after it is over do we feel the particular enthralling mixture of our receding fear and our brush with heroism. Then we decide that we have had enough of bald courage for the moment, and so we collect friends, to whom we enthusiastically recount our adventure, and go back to my hotel, where we have a good lunch and are proud. My visa expires today, so I leave for the airport after lunch. The others are going home to sleep and recover and make phone calls and prepare for the night’s vigil.

But that vigil does not come. By the time I check in for my flight, the coup has failed, defeated in part by internal argument and in part by soldiers who deferred to human barricades.

For the artists, this has brought another kind of liberation. Freedom has always been their obsession; in these three days they have had the luxury of physically defending it. “We won the war,” says Kostya when I speak to him later on the phone. “You, me, and all our friends.” He pauses for a second. “But it was my flag.”

New York Times Magazine
, July 18, 1993

When I returned to Russia two years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the country was changing dramatically with the sudden explosion of personal freedom and new wealth. I was in my late twenties, and found my contemporaries of particular interest because they were capable of accommodating the new order. Old Soviets’ sensibilities were mostly fixed in the poisonous system that had formed them; these young people seemed—even more than most young people—to be defining what was to come. Vladimir Putin has since taken Russia in another direction. I read today with particular sorrow the assertion by experts that broader gay rights were nearly an inevitability, an optimistic position that has now been roundly disappointed. But these character sketches speak to the Yeltsin years, when cynicism and autonomy were committed bedfellows.

T
raveling in Russia recently as a writer, I came quickly to feel like a spy—not an American foreign agent, but a spy for each emerging social class to the others. Members of the Russian mafia—the organized-crime circle—are fascinated to hear that intellectuals believe the criminal class exerts social influence. The intelligentsia
are obsessed with the greed of the new rich businessmen, whom they blame for the end of idealism. A return to the Orthodox Church has left homosexuals worried about repressive neoconservatism; nightclub owners are pondering whether artists who flourished underground can survive in the new daylight. Politicians wonder whether power will devolve to these chaotic elements. Across all these strata, the changes are most evident among members of the younger generation.

Overall, their outlook is harsh indeed. According to an article in the mainstream newspaper
Argumenty i Fakty
in April, “Young Russian malcontents are considering suicide every second.” One-third want to leave the country. Since 1989, the birthrate has dropped 30 percent, as discouraged young people choose not to have children.

Even so, some young Russians who fall outside these depressing statistics are plunging ahead with often-decadent abandon to find freedom, wealth, and power, defying both the timidity and the idealism of the older generation. They have broken up into hundreds of different
tusovki
, a colloquial word that mixes the ideas of “clique,” “scene,” and “social circle.” In this world, the Wild West mentality of nineteenth-century America mixes with a decadence reminiscent of Berlin between the wars. Only someone from the outside can move easily from group to group, reporting to one what is happening in another. It’s a shame that Russians can’t do this more easily, because the essential truths about the new Russia lie not in the behavior or beliefs of any one group, but in the very diversity of visions, opinions, and goals now rising from the wreckage of Communism.

Raves, Parties, and Nightclubs

We are going to a rave, Kristall II, at the big St. Petersburg ice-skating rink. Beforehand, we visit Viktor Frolov, debonair man-about-town, who is loosely connected to the party’s organizers. Among those present are a pop singer, a few artists, some models, a film actress, and others without clearly defined jobs. The women are all attractive and wearing Western-type makeup and retro-chic clothes. The men have leather jackets. Frolov is an eminently courteous host. Everyone must
have several drinks and get high before we go: hashish, now available only for hard currency, is expensive, but whereas it used to be difficult to procure, it is today always available to anyone with money. Some take magic mushrooms, easily found in the woods around Petersburg. Some do cocaine to prepare for the long night. Earlier this year, customs officers seized a shipment of the drug that had arrived in Petersburg disguised as detergent. Television news showed officials confiscating this cargo; three days later, every dealer had it in bulk.

At around 2:00 a.m. we drive to the rink. About twenty-five hundred people are there. There is live music by a visiting Dutch band and relentless, recorded techno music, and an elaborate laser show. Half of the rink has been boarded over to make a dance floor. On the other half, people are skating. In the grandstands, people smoke more hash or pass out on the seats. From the bar in the corner, people buy big cups of vodka. We are on the wrong side of the Neva, and at night the drawbridges go up; we will not be able to get home until they go down again at 6:00 a.m. Everyone agrees that raves are no longer “in”—no trend can last more than a year—but members of every fashionable
tusovka
have nonetheless come this evening. “The craze is over,” explains Georgi Guryanov, a painter. “But there’s nothing else to do.”

The mafia contingent makes up 10 to 20 percent of the crowd. Everyone knows who the mafia people are. They will get a share of the profits from this party; every club or bar or party in Russia pays the mafia between 20 and 60 percent of its revenue. “In your country, you have taxes,” someone explains. “And we have this system.”

The rave scene in Russia began with the First Gagarin party on December 14, 1991, organized by Yevgeny Birman and Aleksei Haas. Held at the Cosmos Pavilion at VDNKh, the ultimate Stalinist temple to the socialist state, it attracted more than four thousand people. “The First Gagarin was amazing because everyone was so hungry for it,” explains Birman, who has since organized other major parties. “We’re trying to mix the semiotic in this postmodern world and bring these different
tusovki
together. It’s about autoeroticism and an absolute beauty code, which we never had in the Soviet period.”

Birman is boyish, exuberant, and fun; Haas has a cosmopolitan
professionalism and a hard self-assurance. I chat with him in his Moscow apartment near Red Square while his American wife prepares dinner. “The First Gagarin’s budget was twelve thousand dollars,” he explains. “We had to pay for security, music, DJs, rent, firemen. We gave the mafia twenty percent”—a low figure, achieved by sharp negotiations—“and we didn’t make a profit. But I proved to myself that these people did exist in Moscow. I went out in my car in the weeks before the party, and when I saw the right kind of people, I gave them invitations. I invited a thousand friends for free. We ran TV ads on the day of the party; they were in English, to select the audience.” The First Gagarin was unlike anything ever before seen in Moscow: lasers bounced off the rich architecture and Western disc jockeys played the latest music.