First in a weekly series of articles on the fate of the arts in Russia that will appear each Tuesday.
Russia, 1996. President Boris Yeltsin has been re-elected and reforms limp along. The Cold War is over, the missiles are being dismantled, other weapons of war chopped up into scrap metal.
That's the good news. The bad? Shocking poverty, rampant corruption, an ailing president, the decline of a culture. Amid this ruinous mess lie the arts, once the pride of the Soviet Union: the world-famous ballet, the crack musical ensembles, the fabulous theater.
The arts -- dance, music, theater, visual arts -- where are they headed? Now that they have been freed from the shackles of socialist realism and government censorship, are they in fact flowering? Will they be in better shape in 2001, or will they limp along, underfinanced, neglected by a society that is trying harder to make a buck than feed its soul?
"No one can say what will happen here in the next five years," said Violetta Mainiece, 46, a ballet critic who writes for the publications Muzykalnaya Zhizn, or Musical Life, and Kultura. "There are a host of things that can't be rationally predicted. Very few people are paying attention to the problems of culture."
Nevertheless, in a new weekly series of five articles that starts today on page 9, The Moscow Times will look at the state and future of the various arts in Russia and try to offer some answers.
One problem common to all of the traditional arts is funding. Many artists, musicians and dancers are up in arms against the government, which once was the primary cultural wet nurse but is now a withered hag unable to cope with ubiquitous calls to make it all right.
"The government used to finance us fully, and that was that," said Mainiece.
But government financing -- and the cultural straitjacket that accompanied it -- were precisely the problem in the Soviet Union, said Yevgeny Popov, a writer and self-described aesthetic dissident. "Under the Soviet system, literature was slavery -- nothing else."
Writers had three options, Popov said: emigration, the concentration camp or conformism. "Theoretically, a writer can publish what he wants now. ... Writers have nothing to complain about."
Still, many artists insist the government come to the rescue. The government is actively investigating new possibilities for raising cash to bail out struggling museums, theaters and musical ensembles. In August, Culture Minister all the more shocking that cultural programs have actually received only 65 to 70 percent of this amount in recent years. In Britain, according to Yelena Skorokhodova, arts officer of the British Council, the arts receive more, around 1 percent of the total government budget.
A federal program, printed in late July in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, plans to provide a total of 31.2 trillion rubles ($5.7`billion) for cultural programs in the next three years -- from 9.3 trillion rubles in 1997 to 11.4 trillion rubles in 1999.
But florid assertions and heightened attempts by the government to fill the gap cannot solve all the problems confronting the arts. The bleakness of the present situation has driven many of the best and brightest abroad, thus draining the country of its rich heritage.
Nikolai Petrov, pianist and president of the Academy of Russian Art, said artists from a tender age eye the prelesti, the charms, of the West as eminently preferable to the chaos reigning at home. "From the age of 10, talented artists are looking to leave to the West. And so Russia continues to be the milked cow of world culture. This is very disturbing."
But not all cultural figures see the depletion of the artists' ranks as negative. Writer Anatoly Korolyov, in an essay published in The Moscow Times last May, wrote that the current situation is a natural evolution. "Now there is a healthy competition: the competition of horses at the track, not the competition of sick spiders in a jar."
Many believe the vicious cycle of funding crunches and emigrating artists is leading to a frightening cultural degradation. Sergei Markov, executive director of the Russian National Orchestra, thinks otherwise. "We think that cultural traditions in Russia are strong enough to survive," he said.
"In my opinion, art has not changed. When the artist is involved with art, he is talking with God. Little depends on what surrounds him." What has changed in Russian culture, Markov said, is that the old system has broken down, while a new one has yet to replace it. "The old forms of organization between culture and society are not working."
Markov, director of a privately funded orchestra created in 1990 that flourishes as state-sponsored ensembles flounder, pointed the way to a solution to the cultural morass: corporate sponsorship.
But seven decades and three generations of socialism erased most traces of this heritage. "The West has known this situation for 100 years," said Mainiece. "We're just starting out."
For now, any discussion of the future of the arts in Russia will probably focus on this paralyzing question of financing. Many artists, administrators and politicians are too distracted to discuss the appearance of new Kandinskys, Stravinskys or Akhmatovas.
Nevertheless, Popov and those of like mind are looking only forward, toward artistic freedom and all its attendant possibilities. "The situation under the Soviet regime was death. Now the situation is like an illness. At least with an illness, there is hope that you'll get well. With death, you have no chance."