The Magical Chorus

Gorbachev told Efremov that his production of Uncle Vanya was a “feast for the spirit.” However, in Russian his words “pir dukha” could easily sound like a rude criticism, perdukha, which basically means “a big fart.” The director tensed up, but when he realized that Gorbachev had meant no insult, he asked for an audience with the general secretary. In response, Efremov heard “historic words” from the leader, which were probably the reason he had called in the first place: “Let me get the flywheel going first.”¹⁴

They got the flywheel going so fast that the whole state flew apart. In the process, MAT broke up, among many other things small and big. Under Stalin, or even later, the division of MAT was unimaginable, although Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had seriously considered it when they were feuding. (That hostility was depicted with a satirical edge by Bulgakov in his unfinished masterpiece, Theatrical Novel.)

In 1986, when Efremov realized that he would not be able to handle the overgrown and contentious company (more than 150 actors alone, of which Efremov used only three dozen or so in his productions), he presented his half-baked idea of dividing the MAT troupe into two parts. The authorities unexpectedly gave him the go-ahead: it was in accord with the new spirit of total perestroika.

The more conservative group of actors, headed by the theater’s prima donna Tatyana Doronina, rebelled. MAT did not survive the attempted reform from within and collapsed; on its ruins two totally separate troupes formed in 1987: MAT in Kamergersky Alley, under the direction of Efremov, and MAT on Tverskoi Boulevard, where Doronina ruled. In 1989, Efremov’s theater added Chekhov to its name, while Doronina’s company kept the Gorky name, given by Stalin. The lines were drawn.

In 1998, the centenary of the Moscow Art Theater was celebrated with pomp. The festivities, accompanied by heavy nostalgia for the olden days when MAT had been the pride and cultural symbol of the country, were one more excuse for the endless squabbling between the proponents and the opponents of political and economic reforms in Russia.

In an interview, Doronina readily agreed with the remark of a conservative journalist that the destruction of MAT was a conspiracy and the model for the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union: “The entire collective of MAT stood for unity. And this unity should not have been destroyed. Just as our country should not have been destroyed. But there were people at the theater and in the state who took advantage of our nonresistance, our Christian meekness—and got their dividends. The schism of the theater was planned, just as the collapse of the country was planned and rehearsed.”¹⁵

Conspiracy theories explaining perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union as an evil plan executed by the West’s “fifth column” abounded among radical conservatives. The writer Alexander Zinoviev, a former dissident, spent many years living abroad where, he said, he was in contact with Western intelligence agencies, and he claimed that “Gorbachev’s rise to power was not simply the result of the country’s internal development. It was the result of intervention from outside. It was a grand subversive operation on the part of the West. Back in 1984, people who were actively working on destroying our country told me: ‘Wait a year and our man will be on the Russian throne.’ And so they’ve put their man on the Russian throne. Without the West, Gorbachev would have never reached that position.”¹⁶

Zinoviev and his supporters called Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and other reformers “Soviet Judases” in the pay of the CIA, a view that was not shared by everyone in the ultraconservative camp. But Zinoviev went even further: since the Gorbachev reforms were implemented “before the eyes of the people, with its connivance and even approval,” the writer branded the whole country as the “traitor nation.”¹⁷

Valentin Rasputin, one of the respected leaders of “village” prose, was horrified by what he considered the evil mutation of the cultural landscape in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union: the uncontrolled breeding of rock groups, playing music that caused “dangerous changes in the blood” the proliferation of beauty contests; the formerly banned sex scenes now common in Soviet films and even the appearance of homosexuals in television programs, who, Rasputin reminded his audience, were still, thank God, illegal in the Soviet Union. All this, he insisted, was part of a planned program “to corrupt minds and souls.”¹⁸

The transformations in the country, which for many decades had been isolated from the influence of Western mass culture, really could be seen as quite radical. Particularly annoying for the archconservatives was the ubiquitous presence of innumerable rock groups, finally let off the leash.

In Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, rock music existed underground, and under the watchful eye of the KGB: it was considered ideologically harmful, replacing jazz, which had become respectable even in the eyes of the Party bureaucrats (it was said that Andropov was a jazz aficionado). Young people by now preferred disco music and then rock to jazz, and in big cities almost every building had its own amateur group that imitated Western models, especially the Beatles.

Some reasonable minds in the KGB understood they were unlikely to eradicate this mass underground movement and therefore tried to control it. In Moscow, Leningrad, and a few other large cities, the KGB—as an experiment in the 1970s—permitted several rock festivals to take place and rock clubs to be organized, the one in Leningrad becoming the most famous.¹⁹

The first popular domestic rock groups with original Russian-language repertoire appeared: in Moscow Mashina Vremeni, led by Andrei Makarevich, and in Leningrad, Akvarium, whose leader, Boris Grebenshchikov, was called the Soviet Bob Dylan, even though he preferred to be compared to David Bowie.

These and other early rock groups (DDT, created by Yuri Shevchuk in Ufa, Nautilus Pompilius from Sverdlovsk, Auktsion from Leningrad, and Zvuki Mu from Moscow) existed in a parallel reality, on the edge of permitted and forbidden, legal and illegal. Makarevich, Grebenshchikov, and Shevchuk wrote songs that could be called proto- perestroika, like “The Turn,” a hit from Mashina Vremeni that back in 1979 told people in allegorical terms not to fear extreme shifts in the country’s life.

During perestroika, the frightened conservatives imagined that this music they so hated enveloped them; Rasputin declared that rock had a “destructive influence on the psyche” and fumed, “The news on television has rock music, music class in kindergarten has rock, the classics are given in a rock version, plays are given rock scores.”²⁰

For “villagers” like Rasputin, even more unacceptable was the sudden ubiquity of the new androgynous pop stars like Valery Leontyev or the openly homosexual theater productions by Roman Viktyuk, as well as the tolerance of works that used to be considered experimental. Many authors of such works, who had moved from the shadows to the center of attention, were women (the writers Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya, the poets Elena Shvarts and Olga Sedakova, the film director Kira Muratova, the artists Natalya Nesterova and Tatyana Nazarenko, the composers Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina), and this only added to the traditionalists’ discomfort. This was new and powerful women’s art, a vivid continuation of the “Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde at the turn of the century, and there were people who could not stomach it.

The conservative camp of Russian culture, sensing a threat to its existence (or at least its well-being), panicked and moved even closer to the opponents of the Gorbachev reforms. On July 23, 1991, they published “A Word to the People” in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, and it became the anti-reform