Martin Walker takes a day-trip and gets a glimpse of unofficial Soviet culture Aboard Moscow River Boat 14 with the flower of Russian art

Press, 27 July 1987, Page 12

Martin Walker takes a day-trip and gets a glimpse of unofficial Soviet culture Aboard Moscow River Boat 14 with the flower of Russian art

AS WE STEPPED aboard the good ship Moscow River Boat 14, the Constructivist poet Dmitri Aleksandrich handed each of us a different short poem. Mine read: "Citizen, you have often had the self-same thought before, only better.” The small stars and stripes flag woven into Dmitri’s beard waggled in time with his grin. On the quayside, four young men in black shirts stood to attention as a hand-wound and ancient gramophone played “Arrivederci, Roma.” As our boat, bearing the members and guests of the Avantgardisti cultural club pulled away into the Moscow River, the young men unfolded a banner which read, “Come back to your senses.”

If the suspicious old dinosaurs who still run so much of Soviet cultural life had known about this boat trip and picnic in advance, one well-placed-limpet mine or torpedo would probably have wiped out Soviet artistic life for the next 40 years! Alexei Parshikov, the most striking of the new generation of Soviet poets, lounged at the

ship’s rail, looking disconcertingly like the famous portrait of Pushkin, and debated whether rationalism had been a nine-teenth-century phenomenon in Russia, or whether the country had really shared in the European rationalism of the eighteenth century. His wife Olga is exceedingly beautiful, the brightest modern art critic in Moscow, and a focus of creative energy that fuels the new experimental video club, the new Avantgardisti group, and half the cultural energy in the country. She was making a film of the boat outing, suspecting with her usual optimism that this would be a historic day in the development of Russian culture, while cursing the incompetence of the Soviet economic system which had caused another nationwide shortage of film stock. Five productions being shot at the Mosfilm studios are currently stood down because of lack of film. Olga had characteristically

managed to acquire a video camera Instead. Art will find a way. The last man to jump aboard as we pulled away was Africa, an ex-punk young musician from Leningrad. He has vivid pink hair and a settled conviction that reinforced concrete is an indispensable component of modern music.

Downstairs, the young artists who have formed a comic rock group, with a punning name that can be translated as Central Russian Hills or Average Russian Attitudes, were hammering out their best-known song. Its chorus goes: “Mummy, you told me daddy was just a black man. You didn’t tell me he was an American spy.” Our medium-sized river steamer passed a much larger and grander boat with the proud name October Revolution. That provoked many Gorbachev-era jokes about the revolution being left far behind.

Grisha Bruskin came by for a chat He is the young artist whose Fundamental lexicon was one of the stars of the seminal modern art exhibition back In February, the event that signalled the reality, and the possibilities of the Gorbachev cultural thaw. The 128 miniatures that made up the painting, a subtly devastating satire of the the iconography of the Soviet State through an exaggerated portrayal of its own favourite symbols and self-images, was bought by the Czech film director, Milos Forman.

But Grisha was worried. “It would be terrible if modern Soviet art was simply seen In the West as something exotic, like African masks, just another new fashion,” he grumbled. “We exist on our own terms. We have a right to be judged on the world’s terms, to learn, to teach and contribute.”

A passing young film critic applauded solemnly. He was

wearing only underpants, on which the gold star of a hero of the Soviet Union was pinned, and he handed out lottery tickets. The prizes were modern paintings by the Avantgardisti group. Curious, since he is part of the other significant modern art group of Moscow, known as The Hermitage, and I suspect a Montague-Capulet style of cultural rivalry may be in the offing. We reached the picnic spot, swam and rented rowing boats, ate and drank and talked the hot summer’s day away as the river police launches circled offshore like worried midges. At 7 p.m., the boat’s siren' summoned us back, and Dmitri had unfurled a vast banner on the boat-deck that read, “Who are you with, renaissance man?”. The twilight slowly darkened' over the bay of joys as the band roared into “Born In The U.S.S.R.”

MARTIN WALKER is the Moscow correspondent of the "Guardian” of London. This article first appeared in the “Guardian.”

‘Africa has pink hair and a conviction that concrete is an indispensable component of modern music’