Recent Attack Prompts Flight to Opposition
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
PETROVO-DELNEYE, Russia -- Marat Guelman muses on the possibility that his broken nose and abundant bruising, which force him to squirm painfully when he shifts in his armchair, are a form of blowback. Is the intolerant, xenophobic, nationalist and authoritarian Russia that he now fears the fruit of his own labors?
"Such arguments are only fair," says Guelman, who until two years ago was a political consultant for the Kremlin. Guelman remains infamous for his roles as master of political intrigue and patron of incendiary art. He retreated from political life in 2004 to concentrate on art, but he remains a touchstone for controversy.
Late last month, 10 men burst into Guelman's Moscow gallery and assaulted him, kicking him in the face and beating him with chairs. And the attack, he says, may well prompt him back into politics -- this time employing his sorcery in opposition to the Kremlin.
"My face was like a piece of meat," said Guelman in an interview at his country home outside Moscow. They "beat me without saying anything. There was an impression they were just doing their job."
The assailants pulled paintings off the wall and destroyed 20 graphic works of art and two paintings. The gallery was exhibiting the work of Alexander Djikia, a Georgian artist, and Moscow, at that moment, was in the midst of an anti-Georgian frenzy sparked by political tensions between the neighboring countries. Policemen demanded the addresses of schoolchildren with Georgian names, presumably to run down their parents, and hundreds of Georgians, working illegally here, were rounded up and deported.
But Guelman cautions, "Our relations with nationalists have a long history."
Some would argue that Guelman himself uncorked some of the nationalist sentiment that now has turned against him. Guelman, 45, has been massaging public opinion, creating phantom parties and discrediting opponents since 1996, when he worked on the reelection campaign of Boris Yeltsin, a blitzkrieg of black PR that was designed to resurrect the moribund president in the face of a resurgent Communist Party.
In Guelman's former world, politics was not just a game, but post-modern combat, where the manipulation of public opinion was like the art he championed -- clever, provocative, cynical and effective. One example: Guelman, who is Jewish, held an exhibition called "Kompromat" -- compromising material -- at his Moscow gallery in 1996 that included a fake Israeli passport for Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader and Yeltsin's challenger.
"We should look at each situation concretely. In 1996, there was a danger of Communism, and I was the head of the anti-Communism campaign," he explains. "That's how I prolonged the political life of Yeltsin. One should not exaggerate my role, but at that time there was a concrete choice."
Born in the then-Soviet republic of Moldova, Guelman was the son of a famous screenwriter and playwright who became an ally of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and was one of the founders of the pro-perestroika newspaper Moscow News. Guelman went to university in Moscow and founded the country's first private gallery after the fall of the Soviet Union. He also began work as a political consultant and established the Effective Policy Foundation with Gleb Pavlovsky, an equally controversial spin doctor, who remains allied with the Kremlin.
Until recently, Guelman's choice was President Vladimir Putin and, indirectly, United Russia, the party that marches in lock step with the Kremlin and dominates parliament. In 2003, Guelman was behind the formation of the Rodina party, a creation of the presidential administration that was designed to boost United Russia by siphoning off votes from the Communists. The party, an elaborate artifice, successfully played to the leftist and patriotic sentiments of their voters. Guelman was also deputy director of Channel One, and he helped turn news broadcasts on the state-run channel into a nightly paean for Putin and his chosen allies, including, at the time, Rodina.
"Gelman's reputation for 'intellectual provocations' and for bowdlerizing politics into eclectic kitsch is justified," wrote Andrew Wilson, author of "Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World."
But Guelman says he has come to believe that Russia is atrophying under the Kremlin's centralization of power. "This entire concept of a vertical of power, a state machine, is a false concept," he said. "I believe it's a huge mistake. I believe it's a deep personal problem of Putin. He can only manage systems like this."
In 2004, Guelman broke with the Kremlin and retreated to the world of art. A year later, he organized the exhibition "Russia 2," a counterpoint to the official "Russia 1" exhibition in which any treatment of Putin, the Orthodox Church and Chechnya was quietly forbidden.
"Russia 2" tackled all three subjects, including a lifelike sculpture of a female Chechen suicide bomber under a crumbling Soviet statue. Another piece by a pair of Russian artists who call themselves Blue Noses was a portrait of the artists as Putin, Jesus Christ and Alexander Pushkin, the 19th-century Russian writer. And a series of posters by the artist Avdey Ter-Oganyan, who lives in Western Europe because of death threats, mocked religious anger at his anti-clerical art. One black poster with two pink circles stated: "This painting publicly humiliates the Patriarch of Russia, Alexei II."
The newspaper Kommersant wrote that he was trying to create "a cultural space parallel to the Russia in which creative, dynamic and independent-thinking people cannot fulfill themselves, the Russia 1 of Vladimir Putin."
Not everyone was taken with the new dissident artists. A group of Orthodox Christians filed a criminal complaint against Guelman and the artists alleging that the exhibition insulted religious people and incited hatred. The complaint was dismissed this year, but Guelman said he has been receiving death threats.
Earlier this year, a member of parliament, Nikolai Kuryanovich of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, put Guelman on a list of 100 enemies of the Russian people that is circulating on the Internet. The list followed the release by Guelman of a list of 100 alleged neo-fascists.
Because of the beating and what he views as an increasingly poisonous atmosphere in the country, Guelman said he is considering getting back into politics. He said he has already done some focus group work and polling to see what kind of opposition could be created to challenge pro-Kremlin parties in parliamentary elections late next year. He refuses, however, to discuss what form a new party might take or with whom he is working on the project.
"I thought I wouldn't get back into politics, but after what happened to me, this is very realistic now," he said. "Unfortunately, we don't have an opposition. If we're going to create something, it would have to be new. Certain people will participate. If this happens, we'll see in spring."
For now -- with his mother hovering in the background -- he's nursing his wounds and working on reassembling Djikia's exhibition. "We reopen November 9," he said.
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