The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 Holiday specials 1111H
alfwaybetweenMoscowandthePacificOcean sitsthecity
of Krasnoyarsk. At its heart, on the banks of the mighty Yeni-
sei, stands a brutalist building encased in granite. Built in 1987, it
was the last of the Lenin Museums that the Soviet Union bestowed
on deserving provincial cities to showcase the achievements of so-
cialism. It is now an art museum. And when night falls, giant let-
ters are projected onto one of its stark walls: SVOBODA.
Svoboda, or freedom, is not the first thing which springs to
Western minds at the mention of Siberia; the vast region is more
readily associated with fetters, exile and suffering. Nor is it a word
much associated with present-day Russia. But it is a word that fits.
The projection on the side of the Krasnoyarsk museum is at
least as much about geography as politics: a tribute to Siberia’s lim-
itless expanse, its high skies and rivers that flow so fast and so deep
that their water will steam rather than freeze. It is a historical state-
ment, too—Siberia has been seen for centuries, by visitors and in-
habitants alike, as a place of freedom. But by the same measure it is
also an ironic one: Siberia was a place of punishment and exile
long before the Soviet Gulag.
Inside the museum you will find a lot more irony. An artistic
movement called “Siberian ironic conceptualism” is well repre-
sented. “Irony and self-irony is a mode of survival in Siberia,” says
Vyacheslav Mizin, an artist from Novosibirsk. He and his partner,
who style themselves “The Blue Noses”, produce pieces which
populate the Siberian landscape with American rock stars, poking
fun at state propaganda and liberal fetishes alike. If you are incapa-
ble of irony, Mr Mizin says, “you turn beastly. The harder the condi-
tions, the more you need it.” Whether the conditions are climatic,
political or spiritual goes unsaid.
This Siberian school is less intellectual than the conceptual art
you find in Moscow. It is more coarsely grotesque and openly
mocking. It embodies a Siberian belief held far beyond the world ofartgalleries:thatSiberiaisboththeessenceofRussia
and separate from it.
The movement’s most famous piece is called “Un-
ited States of Siberia”. In the early 2010s Damir Mura-
tov, an artist from Siberia’s ancient capital, Tobolsk,
some 1,500km west of Krasnoyarsk, took an old wood-
en door and painted it with green and white horizontal
stripes, a field of snowflakes in the top left corner. It
was a homage to the American painter Jasper Johns,
who in the 1950s first posed the question of whether a
painting of a flag was something different from the flag
itself—and if so, what, if anything, such somethings
symbolised.
Mr Muratov’s painting was similarly not a flag. It
did not represent a country—merely suggested one—
and it did not fly free in the wind. For Mr Muratov, the
wind is the essence of a flag. “The most important
thing is the movement of air,” he says. “Where there is a
wind, there is a flag.” But because the windless wooden
painting still looks like a flag, it is clearly asking to be
taken as a symbol: of a non-state, of artistic freedom, of
an anarchy free from any authority other than the end-
less horizons of the Taiga forests and the patterns of
falling snow.New worlds
The symmetries between Siberia and North America
date back centuries. Russia’s colonisation of Siberia
began in the reign of Ivan the Terrible—roughly at the
same time as Elizabethan England began to explore its
new world. Siberia’s Walter Raleigh was an audacious
Cossack called Yermak. Previously a raider on the VolgaTheironies
offreedom
SiberiaIRKUTSK, KRASNOYARSK, NOVOSIBIRSK AND TOMSKAn empty land filled with contradictions,
art, freedom, history and many, many trees