Russian Culture 1985-93

[Olga Meerson]

I have no idea where to begin to look and yet...
Something is telling me that it was important that,
during those years, many e'migre' thinkers and
cultural figures started to either come back to
Russia or to enter a dialogue with her, a dialogue
long assumed dead and impossible to revive. Of
course, mass cultural returns started after Aug.
'91, but what could be returned or retrieved had
been brewing at least since '86. I also distinctly
remember several highlights -- a fascinating
festival of contemporary Soviet (really,
not-so-soviet) music in Boston, in mid-eighties; the
murder of Fr. Alexander Men' in Sept. 1990, a
martyrdom which brought fruit in new
intelligentsia-filled parishes (at least two in
Moscow, and one, or perhaps two, in St. Petersburg),
that were a matter of cultural revival no less than
ecclesiastical (perhaps more, alas...), as well as a
time of heightened political alertness; the
so-called Congress of the Compatriots which, for the
first time since the closingof Soviet borders, had
gathered in Moscow emigrants who had considered
themselves completely cut off from their homeland --
in... Aug. 1991. There are many such highlights. I
think it is easier to loo for bibliogtaphical
material if one works on one of these or similar,
narrower and excitingly concrete topics, rather than
when merely the time-period is delineated.

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