Word: cheremushki
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...Sunday in September 1974, a couple of dozen Soviet painters carried their canvases into a patch of wasteland in Cheremushki, an outlying district of Moscow, and began to set them up on makeshift stands. A small crowd of onlookers gathered, and so, to one side, did a platoon of KGB agents with bulldozers, dump trucks and water cannon. The secret policemen were disguised as civilians doing volunteer work on the abandoned site. As the spectators peered at the paintings and a few Western reporters clicked their cameras, the agents attacked, flinging the canvases into rubbish trucks. Then the bulldozers...
Provincial by Western standards, the artists whose work was vandalized by the state at Cheremushki may not have been of high interest, outside the U.S.S.R., to a historian of style; it was as though the New York City police had been sent to crush one of the weekend art shows at Washington Square. Yet the meaning of the event lay not in the merits of this "dissident" art as art, but in its power to provoke repression simply by existing. Of all the major Occidental powers, only the U.S.S.R. treats art as though it were politically dangerous. By doing...
Belting it out are a group of rugged country cousins to the College Swing types that used to save the varsity show in Hollywood musicals of yore. These kids swing in an unfinished Moscow suburb called Cheremushki, "where skies are blue, and dreams come true," and where an empty flat gets heat in the summertime. "Don't worry, in the winter it'll be cold," quips Boris, a lumpish, curly-topped blaster on the construction crew. With everyone's dream swaddled in Red tape, and keys to the new flats hard to come by, Boris waltzes around...
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