Katherine Brabon - The Memory Artist

We want change was Tsoi’s rallying cry. We heard it all around us and we heard it within us.

The days seemed to float, merge in the heat of summer. Perhaps the only harness for time was the Nineteenth Party Conference. It had begun on 28 June 1988. We’d met at the Sukhanovs’ apartment, the whole group, to watch. The Memorial Society had been campaigning heavily for the monument to Stalin’s victims, and the petition—with the thousands of signatures collected on Moscow’s streets, in cinema foyers, parks and at market stalls—was going to be presented at the conference. In the preceding days, some fifty thousand people in Lithuania had rallied, asking conference delegates to push for autonomy from Soviet rule.

Over four days we followed the coverage of the conference: me, Anya, Ilya, Sukhanov and Lena, Yura and other friends from university and the Memorial Society, all crowded into the tiny apartment, camped around the television, sitting on windowsills and on the floor. There was the tinkling of glasses, the smell of brandy and cigarettes, the indistinct rise and fall of murmurs and laughter, Ilya’s music as loud as ever.

As part of the glasnost and perestroika reforms, Gorbachev had called for elections with multiple candidates and a two-term limit for government officers.

A clash between Yeltsin, who argued for political rehabilitation for Stalin’s victims (which would mean compensation or at least certificates deeming past arrests were unfounded), and Ligachev, an old Party man, was broadcast only in the small hours of the morning, as if those above hoped to conceal by night such an important debate. Ligachev still spoke of destructive forces , of reformers playing into the hands of our enemies as if he was stuck in the past. Yet all of us in the Sukhanovs’ crowded room, and likely most of Moscow, stayed up to watch the broadcast, alternating tea with brandy, snatching a moment of sleep here and there. Anya lay with her head in my lap, her shoulders moving softly beneath cotton as she clapped at something on the television.

Our cheers hit every wall of the tiny room when Gorbachev stood and announced that they would grant permission for a monument to Stalin’s victims. The change felt so great as to be almost unbelievable; a change in attitude from all previous leaders and even from the present one, as it had taken years to get this far with Gorbachev. I was used to seeing nothing but reports of robust crops in the provinces and heroic factory output, not fiery debate and the uncertainty it entailed, nor concessions to public thought and petition.

Though Gorbachev didn’t actually mention that the monument was a result of our petition, and nor did he refer to the Memorial Society, we felt it was our victory. That he neglected to speak of us, as though we didn’t exist, seemed to me, as the son of dissidents, the way things had worked my whole life. For as long as I could remember, the media had spoken about sources of anti-Soviet sentiment , but never were those vague enemies actually named as the books or radio stations or imprisoned activists I had grown up knowing. As though, if they didn’t mention those things, mention us, we wouldn’t really be there. But on the first of July in 1988, the success of our campaign was proof enough of our existence.

When the broadcast was over we had left the apartment, wandering aimlessly, too elated to care where we were going. Anya walked beside me, her small white bag swinging from one arm, her other wound through mine. Eventually we decided on drinks in Izmaylovsky Park. We took a metro there. I always liked that station, since it was one of the few above ground; the carriage arrived into clouds of green leaves. It was such a warm night, we all lay on the grass, in the wooded urban forest, losing the night little by little, drinking beer and arguing happily.

We had a great group argument about the Russian soul. We couldn’t decide if it was the same soul as it used to be, whether the essence of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky—the greats—had survived the twentieth century. Ilya stood in the middle of the circle, guitar in his arms. Sukhanov and Lena were entwined on the ground. Anya sat up, holding a glass of brandy, while I lay on the grass, facing the sky.

Of course it’s there, said Sukhanov. Artists today don’t work in a void. Neither did they in the sixties. You can’t say we only begin with Soviet times; it’s like saying our art only came because of Communism.

Ilya said the rock music movement was truer to our soul, nowadays. He and I both laughed, and I raised my drink to agree with him, but the others were serious.

But maybe, said Anya, maybe the better thing to ask is if it’s possible to have a collective soul to begin with, and whether it can travel between people or generations. She took a sip of brandy and shrugged.

Right then I felt more whole than I ever had before: I had a girl and a cause. For the first time I felt a sense of equilibrium, of sureness. Moscow in 1988 was for me the promise of things to come, a future in which my life, once split into two lines, would join in a single clear path. The political and the personal were intertwined, each as promising as the other. On the grass in Izmaylovsky Park, Anya lay down next to me; I could feel her warm cheek on my chest, and a gentle hum from her voice when she murmured a few words. As the day began to darken slightly, Ilya, Anya and I rolled up our jeans to stand knee-deep in Lebedyansky Pond, which was gradually cooling with the long twilight.

I started carrying a notebook with me, and I was constantly scribbling in it, sure that my notes would one day form a coherent whole, a worthy piece of work. Writing our history of psychiatry, we could combine the stories of our two fathers—Anya’s and mine—and by doing so write our own story of the country, write the truths censored from above. This would be my way to follow in the footsteps of the writers who came before me and to whom I felt as close as family. Our words could, I was sure, change the future by confronting the past. Before then, I hadn’t known the power of being able to point at a thing and say you care so much about it.

My mother, when she heard about what we were planning to write, suggested I speak to Oleg. And so in the summer he and I went out for the day, walking through a small forest near Moscow we had visited since I was young. We used to go mushroom picking there, in humid autumns. The heavy green-and-pine air brought me to those young memories every time I went into a forest. Oleg spoke as we walked. His thin shoulders and slightly stooped posture concealed how fit he was; his voice remained steady and his feet stepped confidently along the uneven pathways.

My wife, Marya, left the Soviet Union at the end of May 1974, said Oleg. The same year as Solzhenitsyn, in fact. We were not really married by that time, however, just bound together by unspeakable things. She took a plane to Paris, via another city that I cannot remember—Frankfurt or Düsseldorf—and that is where the story of her, as far as I can tell it, finishes. But I’m running out of order here. It’s difficult to start things at the beginning, so to speak, when you already know the end.

His wife. An image of Oleg from my childhood came to mind, of his blue eyes surrounded by cloudy red, his mouth straight, tense. I remembered that night; how his sadness frightened me, how I had hidden behind the divan, pretending to read, so as to avoid him.