Russia’s Artists Try Courting Capitalists

Downstairs, scruffy musicians are picking up violins to start their daily rehearsal.

Upstairs, the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra’s general manager, Alexander Krauter, is picking up the phone to start his daily battle--to extract money from unwilling government officials to keep the orchestra going.

“If we don’t get financing, the orchestra will have to close in three months,” he says sadly. “State officials don’t understand that if they let Russia’s culture die, all they’ll be left with is a nation of bandits.”

But six years after lavish Soviet state funding dried up--and amid drastic cutbacks by the cash-strapped Russian government--Krauter has found a way of winning the battle in the free-for-all of capitalism: sponsorship by the new aristocrats of Russia, the bosses of big corporations. With this new help, the arts are even beginning to flourish again.

The dramatic economic changes here in the last 10 years make it impossible to say exactly how far state funding has dropped. The old distortions of the Soviet command economy of the 1980s, followed by a period of hyper-inflation immediately after the Soviet collapse in 1991, make comparisons of budgets and balance sheets meaningless. Many in the arts, however, are grieving for a lost time of certainty, when their salaries, homes, workplaces, instruments, exhibits and even tuxedos were all provided by the state, and when there was no sense that they could not afford to buy what they needed.

Now, when Krauter calls the state--the Culture Ministry, the Finance Ministry and the offices of various deputy prime ministers--Krauter says sadly, the answer is usually the same: no money.

Miserly pay--a soloist in the orchestra gets $150 a month--is two months late. Instruments and tuxedos are wearing out.

Krauter has started calling the corporations instead--and with them, he’s getting results. Nakedly commercial efforts like these, which a few years back would have been considered heresy in the purist Moscow arts establishment, have become more and more common among musicians, actors and painters trying to work out new ground rules for survival in a changing environment.

The marriage of convenience between wealthy patrons and artistic proteges suits both parties. As arts administrators such as Krauter learn to court the rich, Russia’s rough-diamond newcomers to wealth are settling down in their new life, and many want a highbrow cultural cause to patronize. In their search for a more sophisticated image, these donors are not even discouraged by the Russian government’s failure to give tax breaks for their gifts.

Among Krauter’s sponsors is one of Russia’s top millionaires, Vladimir Gusinsky of the Most banking and media group, whose empire is paying for a series of concerts for the disabled this spring. Germany’s Dresdner Bank has also given money for performances of works by Austrian composer Gustav Mahler.

Krauter might resent the time he now must spend at official receptions and dinners, worming his way into the good graces of potential donors in both public and private spheres. But, he admits, with all the new private help, “we may just pull through, after all.”

‘Auction Us Off to Highest Private Bidder’

The unaccustomed thought brings a wicked twinkle to his eye.

“If the state can’t pay, they should just auction us off to the highest private bidder,” he adds with a grin. “Even if we had to change our name from the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra to, say, the Mostbank Orchestra, it would still be OK. At least then we’d be sure of our funding.”

Others in the arts establishment are also starting to accept the state’s retreat.

“Of course, the Culture Ministry can’t do much for us anymore. It’s the same all over Russia--less money from the state. But our festival is doing well and funded by sponsors, like all festivals nowadays,” says Inna Pruss, who runs Moscow’s 17-year-old winter classical music festival, December Nights.

“Sponsors are the only way, and we’re very grateful to ours,” she adds.

Pruss honors her Russian and foreign patrons by naming them all on a prominently displayed billboard at the door of her concert venue, an elegant, columned hall at the side of the Pushkin Museum here.

In Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia’s old imperial capital, as well as in the provinces, a privately sponsored cultural renaissance is underway.

According to Valery Podgorodinsky, head of the theatrical department at the Culture Ministry, there were 500 Soviet state theaters in 1991. Yet there are now many more--about 1,000--professional theaters operating.

“They all find sponsors or grants from somewhere,” he says, adding that much of the best Russian theater is coming from the provinces rather than the urban centers. He says some Moscow theater directors have become too eager to sell their artistic souls for bigger grants--and too ready to put on lowbrow entertainment just to draw high-paying crowds.

“Some of the best theaters now are provincial. In Moscow, everyone wants to live better, and some people are forgetting that it’s never been the lot of the Russian intelligentsia to be rich,” he says. “But in the provinces, they concentrate on the drama itself, not just on trying to get more money.”

The much-needed flow of private cash has had almost instant benefits.

A donation from U.S. philanthropist George Soros helped the Lyubimovka Festival of Young Playwrights, canceled in 1996 for lack of funds, start again in 1997.

Nine Russian theater groups went abroad last summer to become the hit of the theater festival in Avignon, France, the biggest of its kind on the European continent. Experimental opera is flourishing. Moscow’s 1997 film festival attracted foreign stars, including Sophia Loren and Robert De Niro.

Private art galleries and auction houses have sprung up, selling antique silver, furniture and paintings to the wealthy. The Gelos auction house, Russia’s answer to Sotheby’s or Christie’s, even offers crash courses in fine arts, patronized mostly by the wives of new millionaires.

Moscow Takes Notice of Arts World Revival

And as the arts world shakes off its old dependency on the state--and Russia’s financial crisis begins to ease--even the government is beginning to follow the trend of a revival of enthusiasm for the arts with a series of high-profile projects.

Moscow’s state-run Tretyakov Gallery is thriving with an expensive new layout, completed since the Soviet collapse in 1991. The city’s Historical Museum has recently reopened with several extra halls. In St. Petersburg, the Russian Museum has been allocated three extra palaces into which it can spread its exhibits. There is a state-funded, two-year celebration of the 200th birthday of Alexander Pushkin, the writer acclaimed as the father of Russian literature who was born in 1799.

The days of post-Soviet gloom--when state grants first vanished and resentful clusters of threadbare intellectuals gathered in half-empty concert halls to mutter that Russia’s glittering classical culture was on its deathbed--are past. Many artists who left then for the United States or Israel have started working in their old homes again; some, like the world-famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, spend much of their time fostering Russian culture.

“The doom-mongers were exaggerating, of course,” says Lidiya Iovleva, deputy director of the Tretyakov Gallery. “When a culture dies, so does the whole nation. Whatever hardships there are here, our culture won’t die.”

Like her culture colleagues, she says emphatically that private money does not come with strings attached.

“We don’t get private bankers trying to exhibit their collections, or anything like that,” she says with a laugh. “We’re ready to meet sponsors halfway, but no one dictates working conditions to us.”

As museum directors’ old sense of impending doom fades, they are returning to a more ordinary watchfulness about how much their competitors are getting from the state.

The visionary director of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, is one of the most respected figures in the Russian arts world. He has also been a leading figure in raising private funding, keeping his giant riverside museum perpetually in the headlines by publicizing every shortfall in state funds over the years, setting up a Western-style “friends of the Hermitage” association for patrons and traveling to the United States in search of other support.

His methods are clearly paying off. Iovleva says waspishly that the two big St. Petersburg museums--the Hermitage and the Russian Museum--had received a lot of extra money from President Boris N. Yeltsin’s administration last year for acquisitions. “We don’t know who their contacts are in the administration, but we’re a little bit jealous,” she says.

Even audiences of intellectuals--traditionally a class that despised money, was suspicious of corrupt authority and prided itself on staying poor but keeping its integrity--look sleek and well-groomed these days as money trickles down through the Moscow economy. They flock into theaters, museums and concert halls for the busy winter “cultural program” wearing new fur coats and hats as often as the old uniform of tired Angora sweaters and flowered scarves. Jewels gleam at throat and ear.

But the developing relationship between the culture-loving members of the arts establishment and the new millionaires is not without problems.

Experts are only now beginning to work out rules to govern the wild art market of the last few years. With big money suddenly transferred to the hands of often ill-informed tycoons who wanted to fill their mansions with works of art, the world market in Russian paintings has been wildly unpredictable since the early 1990s. Fakes abound.

A huge enthusiasm for avant-garde art from the early Soviet period petered out after a 1995 sale at Sotheby’s in London, when several paintings were withdrawn at the last minute amid suggestions that their authenticity might be in doubt. More recently, the seascapes of 19th century painter Ivan Aivazovsky have been equally in vogue in Russia.

Fearing more fakes, the Gelos auction house and several top private galleries in Moscow are working hard to establish foolproof ways of authenticating the pieces of art they sell.

British art historian Polly Gray, an expert in Russian art from Oxford University, says that many private dealers now ask experts from the top state-run museums, such as the Tretyakov Gallery, to examine and vouch for paintings before they go on sale to private buyers.

As the market steadies, the art experts’ old suspicion of the rich is turning into a more mellow amusement.

Alexei Zaitsev, press spokesman at Gelos, says with a wry smile that selling paintings to new Russian millionaires is a unique experience.

Hinting at the still dubious source of some new Russian wealth, he says his firm’s trade dips every time the government begins a new anti-corruption drive.

Auctions themselves are less of an event in Russia than elsewhere, he adds, because the impatient New Russians who drop into the salesrooms and take a fancy to a painting are unlikely to bother coming back later to bid against a roomful of competitors. Instead, he says, they tend to take out a fat roll of bank notes, pay for their impulse buy on the spot--and then carry it off with them.

Cheap Seats for the ‘In Crowd’

But elsewhere, some theater and concert organizers who want the top bankers’ money do not like the idea that their cozy, elitist evenings out could be overrun by newly rich vulgarians whose wealth they both envy and despise. As they reach out for sponsors, they are nevertheless doing all they can to preserve the snobbish exclusivity of their circles.

No normal system of buying good tickets has emerged since the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, just as before, there are free or cheap seats only for the “in crowd”--anyone who knows the director well enough to call and be put on a special list kept in the box office. The rest have to fend for themselves, either buying bad seats from kiosks dotted across town or, if rich, buying tickets for vast sums, often in Western currency, from scalpers.

“Our audience has always been made up of valued and knowledgeable lovers of music, people who met each other at concerts during their childhood and have stayed together ever since. It’s a narrow circle, not like the mass audiences that might come to, say, a Liza Minnelli concert,” Pruss says with a sniff.

“We have excellent artists at our concerts, and we want to make sure that they continue to perform for our good audience,” she adds. “We don’t want them just to play for a few people with Mercedeses and casinos.”