punching artists in a Moscow empty lot. According to Bobkov, the initiative came from the local Party; KGB agents hurried out to save the paintings. The general, “stunned,” as he described himself, told them: “Take care of the artists!”36
Alas, the paternal concern of the secret police for the avant-garde was too late, and the world media picked up the scandal. “To tell the truth, there was nothing we could say in justification,” the KGB general lamented. “Our enemies were given a very wide field this way, and they used the platform for a new, thoroughly prepared attack. Disregarding cost, they helped ‘banned’ artists in every way possible to get abroad, thereby killing two birds with one stone; first, it started a new wave in the press: talented artists cannot work in the USSR and they flee abroad; and second, they had made a certain calculation: the artists who benefited would try to repay their patrons by participating in the Cold War. Their calculation turned out to be correct.”37
The KGB general’s dismay is understandable, considering the time, money, and effort the secret services spent on keeping unofficial culture under control. Even Bobkov admitted it: “The KGB should not have tried to act as arbiter in the rivalry among schools of art. However, there were circumstances that forced us to appear sometimes on that arena.”38
The general is being too modest. One of the prominent nonconformist artists maintained: “The old-fashioned, populous spy network entangled the underground, and colleagues in the arts readily denounced one another in order to hang on at the Dip-Art trough and earn as much as possible.”39
The sphere of intensive interest for the KGB included not only the avant-garde, but such realist artists of a nationalistic bent as Ilya Glazunov, whose house in Moscow was a gathering place for Soviet and foreign dignitaries, diplomats, and correspondents. The writer Leonid Borodin, a close friend of the artist, wrote: “Undoubtedly, the appropriate agencies could not leave this oasis of socializing unattended, and everyone there understood that.”40
According to Borodin, the parties at Glazunov’s house were “a permanent object of rumor, gossip, suspicion, and accusations. And not without reason.”41 In that sense, the Glazunov circle could be seen as a microcosm of the elite of Soviet culture, existing with the morbid sense that it was in a bell jar of constant surveillance and interference from the KGB. (This sense has been confirmed by declassified documents, which are now being published less frequently and more selectively than in the early post-Soviet years.)
It was not easy living and working in that paranoid atmosphere. Everyone suspected everyone else of collaboration with the KGB, and that heavy fog of mutual distrust (probably quite beneficial for the secret police) was used to settle personal scores, when “the most reliable way to smear a rival was by calling him a KGB agent…. For some people such defamation ended in tragedy. But of course, real agents did exist.”42
In the post-Soviet years intellectuals began making public admissions of having been forced to work with the KGB. We must assume that the number of these (self) exposes will grow, and we will find that the KGB used the most unexpected people. One surprise came in the memoirs of Stalin-era KGB boss Pavel Sudoplatov, published in the second half of the 1990s: the poet Boris Sadovskoy, who died in Moscow in 1952 and was known to family and close friends as a monarchist and implacable foe of the Soviet regime, had been recruited by Soviet counterintelligence back in the war years.43
It was also astonishing to read in Sudoplatov’s book that the composer Lev Knipper, nephew of Chekhov’s wife, had been enlisted by the secret services to assassinate Hitler should the Fuhrer appear in Nazi-occupied Moscow.44 Knipper, author of twenty symphonies (and the popular song “Polyushko-Pole”), was an impeccable gentleman of the old school. Knipper killing anyone? It seemed impossible. A similar surprise (and even shock) for old emigres in NewYork was the mention in one of historian Dmitri Volkogonov’s books that the Russian musicologist Alexis Kall, a friend of Stravinsky’s and his secretary for a while, sent reports to Moscow from Los Angeles on the political situation in the emigre milieu.45
Andropov was proud that the KGB was implementing a “very cautious and flexible policy” toward the intellectuals. After the “bulldozer show,” an agent came to the leader of the rebel artists, Rabin, with a message that “a bad peace is better than a good quarrel.” A compromise was reached and the KGB “with great difficulty”(as General Bobkov recalled) got the Moscow Party officials to give permission for a large show of nonconformist art in Izmailovo Park for September 29, 1974.46
Perhaps the KGB did see this move as “cautious and flexible,” but in Moscow in 1974 the exhibition in Izmailovo Park was perceived as a capitulation by the authorities. On a warm sunny day, on a huge green meadow, more than fifty artists showed hundreds of their works to thousands of Muscovites, dazzled by the spectacle. The attendees will never forget the rare atmosphere of an unsanctioned public festival, a people’s celebration with an opposition undertone. The Izmailovo show was simultaneously an important cultural gesture, a picnic, and a demonstration—a breath of freedom and a harbinger of the changes that took place more than a decade later.
In the meantime, the KGB continued using the carrot and stick approach with unofficial art. On one hand, several “permitted” exhibitions by avant-garde artists took place, on the other, so did a series of searches, arrests, and “accidental” beatings. As the artist Kabakov recalled, “We were always under the threat of arrest or exile…. Icravenly refused when Oskar Rabin invited me to participate in the famous bulldozer exhibition.”47 Kabakov explained further: “Fear as a state of mind persisted in every second of our life, in every action, and like coffee and milk, that is, in any possible combination, there was not a word or deed that was not diluted by a certain dose of fear.”48
Kabakov and his friends in conceptualist nonconformist art—the poets Prigov and Lev Rubinshtein, the prose writer Vladimir Sorokin—held the idea, unusual for Russian culture, that the artist need not participate in public life, “defend anything, speak out against anything.”49 According to Prigov, this was also “a great art—not falling into public scandals or provoking them…. Increasing tension did not lead to anything good. Therefore it was a very complex policy dealing with the authorities…. Our goal was to expand our zone of freedom little by little. It was not a sociopolitical or even an existential strategy, it was rather an aesthetic one.”50
Paradoxically, a position of nonengagement on the part of the Soviet postmodern artists created additional problems for the KGB because it blurred the borders between permitted and not permitted. The nonconformist artists and poets were not openly anti-Soviet, yet the KGB felt it necessary to give them “prophylactic” talks every now and then: “They began calling us in a lot in the late 1970s, when they had put away all the dissidents, and the water level dropped sharply. That is, now the heads were visible of people who were not involved in politics or in any social protests at all.”51
In Leningrad, the KGB gathered the avant-garde writers into a special association, the literary Club-81, “so they wouldn’t have to drag themselves out to the outskirts to our readings,”52 as one of the participants deduced. They herded them into the organization by various means: “some were intimidated, others persuaded, given promises. One woman poet…managed to get the ceiling of her room whitewashed in exchange.”53 Also in Leningrad, the first officially published almanac of underground literature,
The secret police started to herd artists under the aegis of various quasi-official “covers.” One of their plans was to supervise Dip-Art and the underground art market. The Soviets were always looking for new ways of adding revenues in hard currency. In 1971, KGB chairman Andropov suggested “studying the question of the possibility and
