27 USSR

In 1990 and again in 1991 (before and after USSR) and long before the current nightmare, I visited with the Soviet Union of Artists across Russia. I paid for it - but because I could pay in roubles in that first year, it was my one and only taste of how an oligarch might feel. 

First trip was with my Delfina Studios colleagues to make work for an ice sculpture festival in Gorky Park Moscow. We bought hats. We also went overnight on the Red Arrow to Leningrad, swapped our clothes with the guards, we all pretty much looked like staff when we arrived in the morning. Slightly hairy moment when the police stopped a flotilla of vendors following our bus into town. I automatically reached for my little point and shoot camera. It was an overcast sky which made it flash… all guns swung towards me.

Going again six months later (Leningrad had become Petersburg) and all points east and south. Met artists underground (literally) in Moscow, wild evenings in Tashkent, a beautiful couple in Novgorod who were committed artists (ра̀бота, ра̀бота, ра̀бота) and very much in love… ‘in the evenings when the light is poor we paint abstracts’. Eventually making it to the House of the Artists in Gurzuf (home of the Ninth Wave), and losing my mind one night to the home-made wine crafted by a local engineer, who scoured the vineyards in the dead of night for the muscat grape. Vineyards had been closed and guarded by Mikhail Gorbachev to tackle alcoholism. 

In the Soviet era, you had to have a job. If you were an artist you had to be an artist. You were allocated the tools of your trade, paint, canvas, brushes. Towards the end, and I noticed this travelling, things were so tight that even road signs were being made by artists, because they had the materials. I remember seeing a roundabout sign in Bukhara which was very like the one in Sankt Petersburg, but on canvas, and in sunnier colours. Nice.

In Moscow we became part of history one evening, happening on a huge crowd in the process of toppling the massive statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky outside KGB headquarters. People were so happy, normally the square was the emptiest in Russia. We were there until the wee small hours, until finally the crane that was holding it by the neck, lifted Dzerzhinsky into the sky like an avenging angel. It wasn’t the effect the crowd had expected. There were a few anxious moments before the cheer finally erupted.