The Economist - USA (2019-12-21)

The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 Siberia 113

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rizons of Russian people widen along with the Russian border-

...Whatever the history of this land, it cannot be deprived of its

future.” America was, once again, the model.

On July 4th 1918, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution,

Siberia claimed its sovereignty. It could not hold it, and eventually

fell to the Bolsheviks, many of whom had spent time imprisoned

in the region. They went on to do unto others as had been done

unto them on an industrial scale. Tsarist-era exile settlements

were turned into slave-labour camps.

Yet even as the country descended into Stalin’s great terror, Si-

beria retained its romantic allure; its sense of being a place of shel-

ter. Osip Mandelstam, one of Russia’s most significant 20th cen-

tury poets, who would soon perish in the Gulag, described this

paradox in 1931. In Vladimir Nabokov’s translation:

On my shoulders there pounces the wolfhound age,

but no wolf by blood am I;

better, like a fur cap, thrust me into the sleeve

of the warmly fur-coated Siberian steppes,

...

Lead me into the night where the Enisey flows,

and the pine reaches up to the star,

because no wolf by blood am I,

and injustice has twisted my mouth.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 new hope arose. Novosibirsk, about

800km west of Krasnoyarsk, was chosen as the site for a new, sci-

entific town, or Akademgorodok, that would accelerate the Soviet

Union into the communist future. It brought together, among oth-

ers, nuclear physicists working on thermonuclear fusion and lin-

guists considering how to communicate with aliens in the cosmic

future Yuri Gagarin had opened up.

Other futurisms were less welcome. The 1970s saw huge new

industrial projects in the region carried out under the aegis of the

communist youth league. One of Siberia’s earliest chroniclers had

rejoiced that “the air above is cheerful”. Not once the smelters

started. The air was poisoned and the rivers dammed,

engulfing whole villages. People were enraged and the

19th-century notion of a separate identity resurfaced,

notably in the work of the Siberian “village writers”. In

1987 Irkutsk, the city where Alexander Kolchak, the Im-

perial Army admiral recognised by many countries as

Russia’s head of state, was executed in 1920, staged the

first mass anti-government demonstration in the his-

tory of the Soviet Union. It was aimed at a barbaric plan

to dump waste from a paper-processing plant on the

shores of Lake Baikal into the river which supplied the

city’s water.

When the Soviet empire finally collapsed, Boris

Yeltsin, Russia’s new president, promised the coun-

try’s regions “as much sovereignty as they could swal-

low.” Siberia was to get 10% of all the revenues raised

from its natural resources. The region’s affinity for the

wild West returned with a vengeance as oligarchs, local

criminals and chancers tussled for dominance. Tomsk,

home to a university that had served as an intellectual

hub for regionalism in the 19th century, grew into one

of Russia’s most politically vibrant cities, with a criti-

cal, independent television channel—tv2—and com-

petitive politics.

All this stacked up against Tomsk when President

Vladimir Putin started to consolidate his power. Mikh-

ail Khodorkovsky, the boss of Yukos, Siberia’s largest

company, was imprisoned. So was the mayor of Tomsk,

his fate a warning to uppity regional politicians. Yukos

was dismembered. tv2was taken off the air in 2014.

The monstration mash-up

In 2004, the year of Mr Khodorkovsky’s first trial, Ar-

tem Loskutov, an artist, saw a Soviet-style May Day pro-

cession in Novosibirsk in which workers marched un-

der the portraits of their factory bosses and logos of

their produce. A poster for a strip-club painted in the

style of Great Patriotic War propaganda demanded “ca-

pitulation” from its clients and promised a “victo-

rious” shot of vodka. “The whole thing was absurd,” Mr

Loskutov recalls. Enthused and amused, he and his

friends joined in, carrying posters with slogans such as

“Something like this” and “Oh!”. Thus did Novosi-

birsk’s “Contemporary Art Terrorism” group come into

being, deconstructing a demonstration until it was

just, as they put it, a “monstration” instead.

At first it was just playful. But as Russia descended

deeper into authoritarianism—and with it, state inter-

vention in art—the monstrations grew in size and in

substance. “Don’t teach us how to live, or we shall teach

you” read their main slogan in 2008. Two years later:

“If everyone starts walking like this, what kind of anar-

chy will it be?!” Other cities started to copy Novosi-

birsk’s example. Mr Muratov began to paint his “flag”.

Responding to the everyday surrealism of Putin’s

Russia, Vasily Slonov, an ironic conceptualist from

Krasnsoyarsk (whose heavy-metal crown, poking fun

at Western pop culture, is pictured), inverted one of the

slogans from Paris in 1968: “Be impossible, demand re-

ality.” Before an exhibition in Moscow in 2018, he dis-

played a toy bear carrying the slogan in Red Square. The

bear was subsequently detained by the police, and has

not been heard from since.

In a small, packed Novosibirsk bar ironically (of

course) decked out as a Soviet-era pivnaya(beer hole),

what strikes you about such artists and their intellec-