Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (3 page)

If moving to England was the beginning of my jubilant exile, my removal to Moscow was its apotheosis. My high school glee club trip had been canceled thanks to the invasion of Afghanistan. The family trip to the Soviet Union we planned some years later was canceled at the last minute thanks to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So much of my favorite literature was Russian that like Chekhov’s renowned
sisters, I had taken to asking, plaintively, when I would ever get to Moscow. In 1988, I was working for the British monthly
Harpers & Queen
as arts correspondent, and Sotheby’s was planning its first auction of contemporary Soviet art. After looking at the advance materials, I had concluded that terrible art was being hyped to wealthy collectors in a scheme of cynical exploitation. I proposed writing a tell-all article about the jet-set tomfoolery of the whole sorry affair.

Then I went to Moscow. My third day there, I had planned to interview a group of artists who had studios in a squat at Furmanny Lane, and my translator failed to show. I didn’t want to be rude, so I went to their studios by myself. They indicated that I could hang out for a bit. At first, there wasn’t much communication; I spoke no Russian and they spoke no English. A few hours later, someone came by who spoke French, which I speak poorly, so we made some headway; a few hours after that, someone came by who spoke English. But the gift, though I didn’t know it at the time, was those hours of being unable to communicate verbally. It gave me time to watch the artists interact. As they showed their work to one another, I saw that they were getting things from it that I wasn’t. Later, I learned that the artists had designed their work to appear banal to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the KGB, but had filled it with hidden meanings. The key to understanding those meanings lay in the personal relationships among the artists, none of whom expected to exhibit to a larger audience. The work was full of inside jokes. More important, it reflected a deep mysticism: these artists believed they were safeguarding integrity in the face of a regime that was out to undermine truth itself.

If my translator had come that morning, I would never have recognized any of that. The West was curious about these artists; I soon understood that they were just as curious about the West and lacked a point of reference, all interchange having been forbidden. I entered their orbit knowing a bit about the Western art world, and they wanted the guidance I could provide. Shockingly unmoored from familiarity, I didn’t know how to make sense of their world, but they were kind to me as a mutual coherence slowly emerged.

The following summer, I returned to Moscow for a month of research. I remember sitting at Heathrow Airport in a panic. I wanted to see my Russian friends; I had decided to write my first book about them; yet I felt a tinge of that dread of unfamiliarity that had overcome me in Morocco four years earlier. My sense of myself was still fragile and depended on the constant reassurance that only familiarity affords. Everything in Moscow was different: what I ate, where I slept, what we talked about.

I started out living in a dacha with a group of German artists, but ended up camping out somewhat apprehensively in the Furmanny Lane squat. I considered myself an observer but came to understand that my artist friends considered me a participant in whatever was happening—both because lives are changed by being recorded, and because the presence of an interloper is never neutral. More than a hundred artists were living in the building by then. Though there were toilets in various locations, only one bathroom, at the far side of the courtyard, was fully functional. Unlike the artists, I bathed every day. I borrowed a fuchsia terry-cloth bathrobe from the painter Larisa Rezun-Zvezdochetova. Since Larisa is not quite five feet tall, the robe hung rather weirdly on my lanky frame. A Russian documentary, released a few years later, about the art world in that late Soviet period includes overhead footage of my daily trek across the courtyard in Larisa’s bathrobe as a kind of punctuation to mark the passing days.

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

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

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

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

I moved home from London and Moscow when my mother was dying so I could spend the final months of her life close at hand. Leaving New York had given me independence, but my mother’s death eviscerated my self-created identity; my independence had required something of which to be independent, and that something had been partly the United States and partly my family of origin. Reckoning with my mother’s illness, I concluded that differentiation was overrated. I moved home to be with her and stayed there because I was finally able to accept being more or less American. No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of
home
is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.

A year after I resettled in New York, my London solicitor called
to advise me that because I had held a British work visa for six years, I could apply to be naturalized as a UK citizen. I needed only to meet a dozen criteria. I had always paid my taxes; I had never been arrested for a felony. The final criterion, however, was that I not have spent more than two months outside the UK in any of the previous six years, and here, alas, I was in trouble. On a lark, I wrote a letter to the Home Office explaining that I’d been in Russia to research my book and in the United States to care for my mother, but that in my heart I was loyal to the Queen. A bored clerk must have been on duty when my note arrived in the autumn of 1993 because I received citizenship papers by return post.

British citizenship conferred legitimacy on what had previously seemed something of a subterfuge. It allayed some anxiety in me to have dual nationality; I could not only claim two different places, but also be two different people. It seemed to rescue me from the burden of crafting a single identity, from the exhausting attempt to squeeze my contradictory nature into a single narrative. It marked my experiment with foreignness as a success. And it gave me options. I couldn’t look at that new passport and not think about my father saying, “They had nowhere to go.” I had someplace to go, permanently.

The naturalization papers validated my claim to be a world citizen. Though I would doubtless have continued to travel, I now felt doubly justified in exploring far and wide. Days at home often blur into one another; days in strange surroundings intensify life. Tennyson’s Ulysses said, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees.” I cherished travel for the ways it stopped time, forcing me to inhabit the present tense. Augustine of Hippo legendarily said, “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page,” and I wanted to go cover to cover. I set out to see the change I wanted to be in the world.

My friend Christian Caryl, a distinguished political journalist and essayist, moved to Kazakhstan in 1992 to head the country’s institute of economics; I went off to visit him there a year later. When I said
I wanted to go out to the steppes and meet nomads, he laughed and asked what I planned to say when I met them. While hiking up a mountain at the edge of Alma-Ata (which has since been renamed Almaty), we were caught in a blizzard. After an hour of huddling against the storm, we heard a vehicle approaching and waved it down frantically. The driver took us in; he was drinking regularly from a flask, but we were hardly in a position to complain. When he passed his tipple over to me, I took a swig of what I assumed would be vodka, but it was
spirt
—pure grain alcohol. That single swallow made me temporarily blind and dizzy. Then I passed it over to Christian. Drinking and singing, we made our way down the mountain. When our rescuer asked me what I was doing in his part of the world, I blurted out my line about meeting nomads on the steppes, and he offered to take us to the steppes the following morning. We volunteered to buy the next day’s
spirt
.

The nomads (who had become somewhat less than nomadic since Stalin’s forced collectivization) could not have been more welcoming. We sat in their yurt and peppered them with questions. One mentioned that his perceptions of Iran were based on that country’s provision of roads and hospitals in the area, while his impressions of the United States were drawn largely from episodes of
Baywatch
, the foreign program most often broadcast there. He had decided on this basis that Iran was good and America was decadent and evil. Since Kazakhstan is a large and oil-rich country and was then newly independent, I thought this was momentous information. When I got home, I wrote it up and submitted the piece to an editor I knew at the
New Republic
. He called me back almost immediately and said, “Oddly enough, this is the second proposal I’ve had this week about Kazakhstan’s prejudice in favor of Iran. Something must really be going on there.” I sheepishly called Christian, who acknowledged that he, too, had submitted the story of our day out.

Traveling with my parents when I was younger, I had absorbed the touristic notion that a visitor should come to observe a society, not to engage with it. As a journalist, I quickly became aware of the narrowness of that precept. When I visited a new place, I was usually on the receiving end of enormous generosity from the people I met there, and I didn’t
see how I could fail to reciprocate. In 1992, a friend and I were in a car crash in Zimbabwe. Our front tire had blown out on a dirt road, and our car had landed upside down in a thick jungle. We had to get our jalopy back to South Africa. We had been camping and had with us ten days’ worth of food as well as many bags of mealie meal, a corn-derived staple of the local diet that we had planned to share with locals if we needed to stay with them. There was no point taking it all back with us. So just after sunrise, we pulled off the road near a collection of particularly shoddy rondavels, and I climbed a steep bank. Several people were rubbing their hands for warmth around a thin fire, and I handed them ten bags of groceries and basked for a moment in their astonishment. Travel entails help both to and from strangers.