Publisher Mr Øivind Johansen
My wife, Kari, and I first traveled to Russia back in 1970. We spent four or five days in Moscow, the last leg of an around-the-world journey that also took us to such far-flung locales as Guam, Tokyo, and Tashkent. Although profoundly moved by the cultural riches experienced during our brief stay in Moscow—breathtaking performances at the Bolshoi, the magnificent tsarist regalia housed in the Kremlin Armory, and the like—I was also struck, perhaps even more so, by the somber mood of the country.
Generally unsmiling and avoiding eye contact, the Russians we encountered seemed depressed, chronically so. There was an almost total lack of communication, and not only with us—foreigners from the West who barely spoke the language—but with each other.
This trip occurred during the Brezhnev years—the era of stagnation, as the period is famously known—a time when it seemed as though the Soviet colossus would last forever, that life in the Soviet Union would continue indefinitely much as it had for the previous fifty years, with the absence of freedom of speech, mobility, and other basic liberties: a state to which Soviet citizens had sadly grown very accustomed. Fortunately, change did come the following decade, in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Not long after he rose to power in March 1985, Gorbachev launched glasnost and perestroika—policies that resulted in greater openness, increased freedom of expression, and ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Alongside their political and social repercussions, Gorbachev’s reforms had an important ripple effect in the realm of culture as well. Perhaps most strikingly, works by artists long banned by the Soviet regime finally began to be removed from the museum storerooms to which they’d been consigned for many years, and displayed to the public for the first time in more than half a century.