Passport to Moscow : Mihail Chemiakin : An emigre artist, exiled 18 years ago, returns as a U.S. citizen for Moscow, Leningrad shows.

When artist Mihail Chemiakin stepped off the plane from New York here last week, he was wearing his ragged old sheepskin coat--the same one he wore 18 years ago when he was sent into exile by Soviet authorities for his nonconformist style.

That was Chemiakin’s way of reminding them: “I have not changed my ideas, I have not compromised my principles. It is you who have had to change.”

And indeed the Soviet art scene has changed, perhaps as dramatically as the country’s political scene, in the past four years.

“Until the very day I got on the plane to Moscow, I could not think of returning to the Soviet Union,” said Chemiakin, who now lives in New York and and later became an American citizen. “This was a land where everything I had done and wanted to do was forbidden, and not only forbidden but punished, savagely punished. . . .

“But change has come--big changes, exciting changes and, I hope, truly deep changes. I was still dubious, still apprehensive when I arrived here, returning as an artistic and political exile to what we call with such nostalgia the rodina --the motherland--but I think the changes are as sweeping as they are dramatic.”

While Chemiakin’s works--often symbolic, sometimes fantastic, occasionally grotesque and tortured--go well beyond the mainstream of Soviet art even in its liberated forms today, they are clearly recognized for their intense creativity and artistic integrity.

“Every artist has his own face, his own philosophy, his own view of life, his own feeling for our times, and now we recognize this, we finally recognize this,” Tair Salakhov, first secretary of the Soviet Union of Artists, said in an interview. “For a long, long time we unfortunately had another view of art, another approach to culture.”

Chemiakin, whose attempts at private shows for his avant-garde works in the 1960s were routinely broken up by the KGB, the Soviet security police, now has two major monthlong exhibitions. One is in Moscow and the other is in Leningrad, and both have been lavishly greeted by Soviet artists and intellectuals as a major cultural event and a homecoming for one of the country’s premier artists.

“Politically and culturally, this is a very important exhibition,” Salakhov said. “Many people never believed that this could happen, that Mihail Chemiakin could return to the Soviet Union. For those who want to see in concrete actions that we are changing, that this is not just rhetoric, look at the exhibition of Mihail Chemiakin.”

Brutally interrogated, imprisoned in psychiatric institutions and even tortured for his attacks on Socialist Realism, the artistic orthodoxy here for decades, and for his refusal to bow to the authorities, Chemiakin is now feted by the official Union of Artists and senior government officials.

“That Mihail Chemiakin has been invited back and honored after being persecuted for years and then forced into exile testifies to the changes that are under way in the Soviet Union,” said Serge Sorokko, another Soviet emigre who has become Chemiakin’s art dealer in the United States. “His work is now, as it was when he was exiled, totally at odds with Socialist Realism and that whole cast of mind.

“His return reflects, of course, the political and cultural liberalization here under (President Mihail S.) Gorbachev, but it is also part of the country’s desire to reach out and embrace its children who have done well in the West. They want to bring back the best of the emigre community in all the arts to restore the creativity and vitality that Russia used to have.”

The return of the emigres, among whom were many of the country’s greatest artistic and scientific talents, has become a major feature in Soviet cultural and intellectual life in the past year:

Ballerina Natalia Makarova returned to dance with Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet last month, 19 years after she defected to the West.

Yuri Lyubimov, who was fired as director of the country’s most daring theater and stripped of his Soviet citizenship five years ago, is back at Moscow’s Taganka Theater and producing previously banned plays.

Andrei Sinyavsky, the dissident writer, returned for the funeral of his friend Yuli Daniel in January and expects to visit again.

Film director Andrei Mikhailov-Konchalovsky has come back to work here.

The Soviet Union of Composers recently reinstated the renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who now conducts the National Symphony in Washington, and has invited him to return for performances this year or next.

Invitations are also being extended, according to well-informed Soviet sources, to the poet Joseph Brodsky, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, to dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, a defector from the Bolshoi Ballet, and to writers Vladimir Voinovich and Lev Kopelev.

So far, however, there is no serious suggestion of inviting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate exiled in 1974 after publication of his “Gulag Archipelago.”

These and others had all gone into exile, some voluntarily as emigrants or defectors but many involuntarily, during what is now characterized as the “period of stagnation” under President Leonid I. Brezhnev, who led the country from 1964 until his death in 1982.

“I had been arrested many times by the KGB,” Chemiakin recalled in an interview. “They said my art was a threat to the security of the state, that it was subversive or seditious or some such. I had been put into psychiatric institutions for forced treatment. I had been sent to labor camps. I was repeatedly put into jail for what they called ‘interrogation’ or ‘administrative detention.’ This went on and on. . . .

“The last time I was arrested I had a very polite conversation with a well spoken gentleman in Leningrad whom I took to be from the KGB. He said simply that I could either go back to the psychiatric hospital--there were enough people who thought that my art was mad and that I must be insane, though this hardly mattered--or I could go to prison and then to a labor camp for a long, long time.

“The only other possibility was to go abroad. ‘Face it,’ this KGB man told me, ‘you cannot live here. They won’t let you, we won’t let you.’ And so, I agreed to leave. I was only 27 then, and already half my life had been one kind of trouble or another with the authorities. It was all very quick. I was forbidden to tell my parents or my friends. I just packed up and left.”

Chemiakin, whose face and arms are heavily scarred from what associates described as self-inflicted wounds from that period, went on: “We were like nails. Those who could not be hammered flat were pulled out and either discarded abroad or thrown into the political trash bins here.”

Sorokko, who emigrated 10 years ago and is now a partner in the Bowles-Sorokko Galleries in Los Angeles and San Francisco, recalled how “anything that did not reflect Socialist Realism and promote the party’s ideology and its political twists and turns” was characterized as “deviant,” and this made “nonconformist” art seditious in the official view.

“Art and culture as a whole were an ideological battlefield,” Sorokko said. “If a work did not reflect the leading role of the Communist Party and all that the party put forward, it was subversive. If it did not portray what the party said was policy in the way that the party said it was portrayed, it was by definition nonconformist and thus forbidden. Chemiakin even got into trouble illustrating innocent things like Dostoyevsky’s novels, Charles Dickens’ novels and (Ernst) Hoffmann’s fairy tales.”

Chemiakin, however, sees “politics, dirty, grubby politics,” rather than ideological questions, as underlying his problems.

“It was traditional to blame the authorities, the KGB and so forth,” he said. “But the real battle then was within the Union of Artists in Leningrad. The Union of Artists was a huge pie around which many were trying to gather and feed from. Naturally, they tried not to let anyone else near that feast, and against those whose works were nonconformist their weapons were ideological. The KGB carried out all the nastiness while the people who set them on me remained in the shadows as ‘honored workers of culture.’ ”

Chemiakin, the Moscow-born son of a Soviet army colonel and a prominent Russian actress, went into exile in Paris in 1971, and was immediately hailed by art critics in Western Europe, where he had a series of successful exhibitions.

But Chemiakin, who is now 45, was disappointed when the French capital did not live up to his romantic idealization of it as the city of Ernest Hemingway and Edith Piaf, and in 1981 he moved to New York.

“The first time I saw New York, in 1975, I felt it was my city, my home,” he said. “But it took me a few years to establish my name in Europe to give me a basis to move to New York.”

Although he left out drawings he describes as “erotic-grotesque,” the selection of 160 works has been uncompromising for the exhibition at the new House of Artists at Moscow’s prestigious Tretyakov Gallery, as well as for the retrospective show in Leningrad of earlier works.

“What they did not like, I have brought back, and they have accepted me and my work,” he said with pride. “I am very interested, for example, in the question of how beastly a person can become towards others, as in the twin themes of Hitlerism and Stalinism, and that is represented here.”

Chemiakin has been rewarded by huge crowds at the exhibition as well as the attendance of leading cultural figures at the opening.

“For me, Chemiakin has always been a great artist,” said Salakhov of the Union of Artists. “I personally love his works, and I appreciate his philosophy and his viewpoint on life. We can see that Chemiakin’s will, his character as an artist, his courageous spirit have not been dissipated among all the numerous artistic movements in the West, but he kept it and enriched world art.

“To bring his work back to the Soviet Union in two exhibitions that reflect him so well is a very important thing for us. These exhibitions will inevitably influence other artists and will have an impact on Soviet art as a whole. But we also hope that what he will see in Soviet art today will give him new food for thought. Our people are not standing still.”