VII

JAMES BIRCH AND PAUL CONRAN

PHOTOGRAPH BOB CHENCINER

Klokov was waiting at Sheremetyevo airport in his green Pierre Cardin suit, holding one of the soft leather men’s hand bags that he favoured and which, he told me, with pride, had cost $1,000. I shook his hand, adjusting to the rules of Klokov time and Klokov space as I did so. I had prepared Paul as best I could for the arrival in Moscow which, if it was your first time, was like landing on another planet.

For one, we would be watched, Paul should presume that everything we said or did would be overheard and reported and that all our conversations would have another, hidden, audience. Since my first visit I had become an avid consumer of news from Russia and, as well as ploughing through Elena’s reading list, I had continued my crash course in Sovietology in a desire to understand my rather complicated notion of the Russia I had discovered. I loved the deep and hidden sensuousness of the writing and the complexity of characterisation in Russian literature as it fanned the flames of my growing passion for all things Russian. My reading also connected me in some way to Elena ; it felt important though I didn’t know why.

In the meantime, the West had become fascinated with events beyond the Iron Curtain. For over forty years we had viewed the Soviet Union as our significant other, the totalitarian state that would never go away. And now it was changing.

How far that change would go we couldn’t know. Some thought that perestroika, like Khrushchev’s brief thaw in the early 1960s, was doomed and argued against naively trusting in Gorbachev. Those like the defector Oleg Gordievsky, who had escaped the Soviet Union’s clutches, argued it would always be a tyranny. Amongst his many revelations Gordievsky had confirmed the obvious, that notable visitors from the West were assigned officers to report on them. Klokov, I knew, was monitoring us under licence and probably reporting on our every move.

Looking back on my first visit to Moscow, in July 1986, I realised that I had only gone to the places that Klokov wanted me to go. If a stranger came up and spoke to me to ask for a Marlboro cigarette, in the Union of Artists café-cum-restaurant, somebody else in my group which usually consisted of Klokov, Misha and sometimes one of the Union’s technicians — and not always someone I had previously realised was in our party — would push them away. The first time this happened I thought it was an over-zealous attempt to protect me from unwanted attention, but it kept happening and I came to the gradual realisation that, just as John protected Francis in Soho, I was being prevented from speaking to anyone other than those people that Klokov or Misha wanted me to speak to. Occasionally someone would get through the invisible cordon to ask me for a smoke. Essentially, they were begging me for cigarettes and to make the encounter less embarrassing they would offer to show me photographs of their children who as a general rule they revered. I was pleased to be able to share the moment and in return, I would take out my wallet and show them a picture of my daughter Zoe. I had found these encounters strangely moving but I now realised they only happened when Klokov allowed it.

Despite this I experienced the same guilty thrill I had on my first trip when Klokov waved his KGB badge at the waiting officials and marched us through customs again. But this time Paul and I were officially part of an Intourist tour and there was no exception to the rules. A government ministry had sent along a guide to ensure all travellers went straight to their hotel without photographing military installations, keeping assignations with Soviet double-agents along the way, or more generally undermining international communism wherever we might find it. The tour guide was a middle-aged woman and absolutely determined that we should get into her waiting bus with the rest of her group. She was implacable, we had to travel with her. Klokov put his hands up in mock surrender. There were some things even a KGB badge couldn’t fix.

An hour and a half later we arrived at our hotel, The Belgrade II, opposite the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a looming and ominous Stalinist building. I never discovered a Belgrade I. Our tour guide took away our passports and our return tickets, which were only to be given back on the day of departure from Moscow. This was standard practice, but invariably I felt the familiar sinking feeling that I would find myself trapped in Russia and never able to return home. Throughout the period of my visits to the USSR I never got used to it. To my admiration, Paul seemed much more accepting of our situation. He handed his documents over happily and I admired his carefree attitude but then, I reflected, it was his first time behind the Iron Curtain.

I found the time difference exhausting, and the anticipation of arrival and its associated problems stress inducing. I lay on the bed and closed my eyes briefly before showering and shaving, delighted to find there was a bathroom plug this time. I had agreed to take Paul on a city walk so he could get a feel of the place, and we then joined the others in the bar. Klokov came to take us for dinner at his house. As we got into his car I asked Klokov if he had enjoyed his lunch with Francis at Wiltons.

‘It was very good. Lord Gowrie ! Bread and butter pudding ! I will tell you all about it later.’

Things were changing. The posters in the streets of Moscow were no longer about fighting imperialism but about fighting alcoholism, according to Klokov who translated as we drove. One particularly plaintive example that Klokov translated for me showed a miserable-looking family and the slogan, ‘The wife and children are asking tearfully, stop before it is too late !’ Perestroika and glasnost were picking up pace. Gorbachev had begun the liberalisation of the economy, allowing small businesses to open as long as they were run as co-operatives. It was the first private enterprise activity since Lenin’s New Economic Policy in 1923, Klokov told me, a policy which saved the young Soviet economy from collapse. In 1987 Gorbachev had announced the policy of democratisation. There would be elections in 1989, to a new congress of people’s deputies, and the process of the congress would be broadcast live and uncensored. This, Klokov explained, was unparalleled.

To me it seemed the course of events was leaving the old regime behind.

‘Democracy must mean the end of communism,’ I said, and was rewarded with Klokov’s deep and resonant laughter.

‘No James, democracy will save communism.’

And such was Klokov’s confidence, I almost believed him.

Klokov lived centrally in Moscow near the Cuban embassy. It was only the second private home in the Soviet Union that I had visited. It was spacious and open and the walls of the large white rooms were virtually bare. Instead of the art I had expected the living room was dominated by a huge TV set, which was showing a news report ; villagers in traditional dress were folk dancing somewhere in the Ukraine.

Although it was loud and distracting, the television was there as a backdrop to the main event, Klokov himself. He was no longer wearing the green suit but had changed into trousers and a fitted shirt which were also, he said, by Cardin. I was intrigued by Klokov’s apparently inexhaustible supply of outfits by this one expensive designer.

Klokov’s female coterie was also in attendance. Communists didn’t have domestic staff so Klokov had girlfriends instead. He had told me that he seldom cooked, that was left to Marina, who was now busy putting out snacks and offering vodka. And there, in the centre of the room, was Elena. I had not seen her since that last day we had spent together at the dacha with Klokov’s parents.

She was wearing a combination of fashionable Soviet and Western clothes rather than one of her constructivist outfits, but was no less striking for it. In the past few months I had been living at a frantic pace and had put Elena in a corner of my mind. But I had not forgotten her. I realised that I was very happy to see her and I felt intense desire flooding through me.

‘I have something for you Elena.’

I opened my case and brought out The Face.

‘James !’

I handed the magazine to her. It had finally published a piece about her. It was only small, and rather than my photographs they had used three of Elena’s dress designs that she had given to me on slides on my first visit to Moscow. Initially Elena was delighted to be handed the magazine but her face fell when she saw the photograph on the cover, a picture of The Beastie Boys.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Who are these people?’ she demanded. ‘What is this James? They not serious.’

Elena’s dark brows creased with displeasure.

I realised that she had expected to be on the cover herself.

‘No one gets on the cover the first time they are in the magazine Elena.’

‘I think Madonna would James.’

‘Well, perhaps.’ Her confidence made me laugh. I stopped myself before I could say, ‘But you are not Madonna.’ What was obvious to me was probably not obvious to Elena.

She searched through the main features section.

‘Here, let me show you.’ I took the magazine back and flicked through the front section where new bands, clubs and designers were given brief profiles until I found the three designs and one column of text below them based on a conversation I’d had with Louisa in London.

‘Is that it James?’

‘Yes, Elena, it is !’ It seemed she had also expected a five-page feature.

‘But look, your designs are fantastic.’

Elena’s frown slipped away and I was happy to see her totally engrossed. ‘These vibrant but somewhat naive designs use geometric shapes taken from townscapes and technology in a truly dissident tradition.’ Elena paused, unsure if this was entirely good or not. ‘Khudiakova’s work shows the current loosening of state attitudes is making clothing as artistic expression as well as utilitarian product gradually acceptable.’ She stopped again. ‘But James, they not said I designed Pierre Cardin exhibition in Moscow.’

‘I didn’t know you had,’ I said. As usual, in Moscow, I was not entirely sure if I was being told the truth.

Klokov nodded. ‘It’s true. Elena helped organise an exhibition of his designs. She made the sets. It was a big success. That is why she was part of the Soviet delegation in Paris.’

In my mind there was a faint memory of the first time I had met them both. Hadn’t Klokov said she was allowed to travel because she had a boyfriend who was a party official?

‘So, you see James,’ Elena said. ‘I know prestigious people in the fashion world. So does Sergei, he is friends with Cardin.’

If I had learned anything about Klokov it was that there was always more to learn ; even so discovering that he was acquainted with the most famous fashion designer in the world at the time was unexpected.

‘How did you meet Pierre Cardin Sergei?’

‘I had a friend who worked at Architectural Digest.’ Klokov’s usual boastful tone had softened. He seemed sad, a state alien to my conception of him.

‘Richard Napier,’ said Elena. ‘He handsome man, gifted. He died of AIDS.’

I really wanted to ask Klokov more about his lunch with Francis but he declared it was time to eat. Marina busied herself directing us to the table which was laid out with the ubiquitous Russian salads and pickles. Klokov declared he was getting more vodka. As he disappeared into the kitchen, he gestured for Elena to join him.

I sat next to Bob who had overheard our conversation.

‘They were very close,’ he said quietly, helping himself to salad. ‘Klokov was shattered when Richard died.’

‘It seems an unlikely relationship,’ I whispered, aware that Klokov could come back at any moment. ‘Klokov and a gay Western designer.’

‘Not at all,’ said Bob. ‘He’s very well connected in that world. Klokov has important friends in the Paris fashion scene too. He knows Hubert de Givenchy and Philippe Venet.’

I knew that Klokov had several gay friends and could veer towards the camp on occasion but he clearly had plenty of girlfriends too. Klokov’s appearance was unusual, even in Moscow, and if he was attractive it came from his power not his sexuality. He certainly surrounded himself with beautiful women and as an onlooker it appeared that they were prepared to go to bed with him because they wanted the favours that only he could grant.

Looking out of the window, at the drab Moscow evening beyond our dinner party, I could understand that a night with Klokov might be a price worth paying for some luxuries, but it seemed a desperate state of affairs. And what did he get, other than the obvious? For Klokov, sex was currency as much as passion. This was true of many people in Moscow. Elena told me that women used sex to bribe the police or jump to the front of a housing queue. Swapping sex for favours was standard practice in a city where there was nothing else to swap. Even Lea & Perrins could be used as sexual currency. Klokov’s strange request made sense now. Elena also told me that there were so few condoms available that abortion had effectively become the main form of contraception. In such a macho, patriarchal society I am sure it was advantageous for Klokov to be seen as the sort of man who had sex with beautiful women. Klokov had the manner of someone who had placed himself above his desires and appetites and called upon them only when it suited him to do so.

Was Klokov a bad man? Was he immoral or amoral? I came to understand that he saw all the things he encountered, particularly other people’s desires and foibles (including my own), as opportunities to serve his ambition, as a route to getting what he wanted. And what did he want? Simply to be recognised and acclaimed, to be, in his own way, a star. The system he served would never allow that kind of success but he served it anyway. Communism and Klokov were joined together ; if the state fell, so would Klokov.

He came back into the room with the vodka and Elena. ‘Poyekhali !’ he declared — let’s go ! — the words uttered by Yuri Gagarin before blasting off in 1961. ‘Poyekhali !’ we echoed.

In these circumstances, I had to see Klokov as a friend, and as I got to know him better I came to admire his apparent genius for pushing things just about as far as they could be pushed without incurring the wrath of the Communist Party. Klokov had the knack of judging what could qualify as acceptable under the Soviet system. He also took me seriously, which I responded to, and he was happy to consider the largest and most unlikely projects. This struck a chord with me. We were both, in our different ways, ambitious and I wanted to give the Russians the opportunity to see a different version of the world through art. It might sound foolishly idealistic now, but I believed it with complete conviction and I saw Klokov as the man who would help me make it happen.

As we sat at the table that evening, Paul talking to Johnny Stuart and Elena next to me, I mentioned to Klokov an idea I had had : might it be possible for the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude to wrap the Kremlin? In September 1985 they had covered the Pont Neuf in Paris in bronze-coloured man-made silk, a project that attracted three million visitors. Imagine what the world would say if they wrapped the Kremlin in Russian Red? I wasn’t being entirely serious but Klokov considered the suggestion as if I were in deadly earnest. He waved a finger around, grunted, pulled a face and then declared, ‘Yes, why not wrap the Kremlin? It would announce perestroika to the world. Anything is possible !’ We cheered and applauded, as indeed anything did seem possible in that moment.

Even Johnny Stuart, usually urbane and contained, was caught in the mood of excitement. ‘It’s happening already,’ he said. ‘Sotheby’s are going to have an auction of early Soviet art and they’re letting the contemporary guys take part. There’ll be avant-garde pictures in the auction too.’

I had read the Sotheby’s auction announcement. It was to be the first official art sale to take place in Moscow since the Revolution. Klokov knew about this already of course.

‘It will bring influential people to Moscow,’ Klokov said. ‘The world will be looking at us and they will still be looking in September when we have the Bacon exhibition.’

The Bacon show was a radical departure from the norm but still recognisably within the parameters of the Soviet worldview, part of the state’s remit to bring culture to the masses. In theory, anyone could queue up and buy tickets for Bacon in Moscow. However, the Sotheby’s auction was an expression of pure capitalism and in stark contrast to official Soviet ideology.

‘Will it be low key?’ I asked.

‘I doubt it,’ laughed Johnny. ‘The whole circus will come to town. There’ll be Western dealers, international journalists, agents for wealthy bidders. I’ve heard Elton John and David Bowie are interested. And I guess there’ll be some big nobs from the Politburo.’

‘What about the Russian artists?’ asked Paul. ‘Won’t they be there?’

‘They’re letting them in,’ said Johnny. ‘I think they are going to stand at the back and watch from behind a rope, but there won’t be any mingling. The dissident artists will only be allowed a glimpse of capitalism.’

I knew enough to recognise the implications of the auction. It commodified an aspect of human existence that Marx and Engels had argued, in those long meetings above the Red Lion, would prosper through communism — man’s innate artistic creativity. Sotheby’s were the out-riders of a coming counter-revolution.

Did Klokov realise this? What calculations was he making? Which bets was he laying off in the months before the Bacon show? As we talked and laughed that evening, I found myself freshly intrigued by him. His great knowledge, his occasional naivety and, of course, the ominous pressure he was subject to. Occasionally there would be a hint of a darker, more terrifying Russia just behind the city of empty shops and threadbare hotels we were encountering : the Soviet hinterland where Klokov also lived, with the long shadows of interrogations, prison camps and executions.

Marina cleared away the dinner things. It was, as usual, hard to engage her in conversation because Klokov always intervened. Any offer of help on my part was rejected out of hand. Paul asked about the number of beggars, many without arms and legs, he had seen in the underpasses beneath the city’s streets.

‘Afghanistan,’ Bob interjected. ‘They’ve been fighting there for nine years.’

‘How come?’ asked Paul.

Bob looked to Klokov, as if requesting permission to continue.

‘Please,’ said Klokov. ‘Go ahead Bob. Give the Western imperialist version of our act of good neighbourliness in aid of our socialist brothers.’

‘Well,’ Bob continued. ‘The act of good neighbourliness began with an invasion in 1979 that was intended to prop up Afghanistan’s teetering communist regime. It has developed into a pretty terrible and costly conflict against the mujahideen, the fundamentalist Sunni Muslim guerillas, and it continues. The mujahideen fight with unabashed cruelty, as do the Soviets now.’ Bob’s tone had become a little less jaunty. ‘The Soviets have helicopter gunships and tanks, the mujahideen have shoulder-launched rockets sent by the West and Saudi Arabia. Thousands of young conscripted Soviet troops have been killed or maimed, it’s their Vietnam War. The truth of it is, Afghanistan is hidden from public view here ; however, the state can’t hide the young men without arms and legs you have seen begging in the streets. It is a national disaster.’

We looked to Klokov, waiting for him to challenge Bob’s account of the war. But he simply said, ‘I served for a year and a half with the army in Afghanistan.’ Now the television was blaring out political commentary but the mood in the room had stilled.

‘What did you do?’ I asked, regretting it as an inexcusably direct question as soon as I had said it, but Klokov replied, ‘I operated a flamethrower.’ He appeared unmoved.

What had I expected him to say? A job at headquarters, right-hand man to a general, perhaps with a fancy uniform to match, or a post in the quartermaster office redirecting the supply of armoured cars for his own purposes? I struggled to imagine Klokov, who was a creature of the city, a strategist in move and countermove, an expert in subterfuge, operating such a terrible weapon.

‘My God, Sergei,’ I said. ‘A flamethrower?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We would arrive in a village, surround someone’s house and then I would burn it down. I remember the smell of burning flesh and the sand that stayed in your mouth. It could be hard to breathe.’

I was horrified. Two years ago in Paris, I had signed up for an unlikely art adventure with a roguish diplomat on a cultural mission. But this new Klokov wasn’t roguish. I wondered how many people had watched him approach how many villages with his flamethrower ; he must have been a vision from hell.

Although the conversation continued to flow, I was struck by how unmoved the Russians were by this story ; the air between us all had grown heavy. It felt like an ethical lobotomy. Briefly the room, the huge flickering television, the plates of bread and pickle, the half empty glasses of vodka, were visited by the shades of other places. If I had felt warmed, up until now, by a sense of comradeship and conviviality, Klokov’s narrative also brought into focus the profound differences between us. He was not like me after all. I looked into his black eyes. Perhaps I was hoping for a spark of mischief, a laugh, a declaration that it was just a joke, albeit of the darkest kind. Alternatively, if it was the truth, a sign of recognition, an admission of horror about what he had been part of. But I saw nothing.

Although I knew that Klokov was not immune to fear himself, I was often surprised by what did scare him. After the Afghanistan story I felt the need to lighten the mood and stood up and went over to my bag and pulled out Dan Farson’s article in the Daily Mail. I had thought that he would be delighted with the publicity and with his mention. Farson had quoted Klokov’s observation to me that the Bacon show would bring in more people than Lenin’s tomb. But Klokov cursed my naivety, I had put him in danger. I didn’t understand.

‘These kinds of remarks can have serious repercussions in USSR,’ he said. Didn’t I realise that a gag at the expense of the revered Lenin could still get someone put on the first train to Siberia?

The party broke up shortly afterwards. In the taxi on the way home, Paul asked Bob why Klokov had not avoided front line service, as children of the elite usually did around the world, regardless of the political system.

‘It’s simple. Because he was KGB,’ Bob said. ‘They wanted you to do time in Afghanistan because it is part of your training, getting used to killing people.’

Paul shook his head. ‘It’s all so fucked up.’

‘Relax Paul,’ said Bob. ‘It’s just a typical night out in Moscow.’

Paul later admitted to me that he had looked in his bathroom mirror before he went to bed and said to himself aloud, ‘God, am I really here?’

In contrast, despite the horror of Klokov’s story, I found myself much more at home on my second visit. Perhaps I was getting used to the huge contradictions and complexities of Moscow life and perhaps, I realised with pleasure, I was falling a little in love with Elena. Paul and I both slept late the next morning and missed breakfast. We were hungry and a bit fuzzy when we set off to the Central House of Artists complex, opposite Gorky Park. If he was to choose the right number and size of pictures, Francis needed to know the exact dimensions of the gallery rooms.

Measuring up is an unglamorous and fiddly business, especially if you are hung over and the tape keeps springing out of your hands and shooting across the room. But it is also the point of no return where you pass from planning a show to actually thinking deeply about the hang. This was the moment I had visualised for months ; Bacon in Moscow had left my imagination and become real.

We climbed to the second floor and a technician opened the gallery doors for us. The space was huge. The six inter-connected rooms immediately reminded me of a shabbier version of London’s Hayward Gallery. I was struck by the height of the walls, probably sixteen feet tall. Artificial light flooded through ceilings made of glass panels. Despite the support of the Soviet State it was to prove impossible to ensure that all the light bulbs worked at one time throughout the exhibition. The light parquet flooring gave the room some warmth. Images of Francis’s work flashed through my brain like a slide show. At this point we didn’t know what the final selection would be but it was incredible to think of the Screaming Pope hung alongside a portrait of John Edwards, or the triptych of George Dyer shaving hung opposite the self-portrait of Francis leaning on a basin, or Figure Study II hung next to Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III. I felt that Francis would be happy that the rooms were tall enough, light enough, big enough. Conversely, despite the darkness that people perceived in Francis’s art, the rooms’ bright expansiveness would set off his work and illuminate his world very well.

As we worked, members of the Union of Artists’ staff stopped to watch the two strange Westerners who were calling out numbers to each other and sketching a floor plan in an A4 pad. Almost all activities in Moscow used far more people than were required for the job. The city creaked under a system of bureaucracy and over-staffing that slowed everything down but guaranteed mass employment. This led to a certain turpitude ; on the whole people did not whizz round exuberantly with measuring tapes.

We were grubby and tired but also exhilarated when we met Bob, Elena and Klokov for lunch at the National. It was a remarkably good meal, everybody was relaxed ; we had achieved what we had set out to do and Elena, I think genuinely interested, asked me why Bacon was so important and I tried to tell her, as best I could.

‘He rescued figurative painting. After the war everything went abstract, all drips and splodges. No one cared about the human form anymore. Francis went against that and he created something much more profound than the abstract painters, he caught something about the mood of the age.’

‘What age do you mean James?’ Elena said intensely.

‘You know, the age of death. World war, holocaust, nuclear Armageddon. Fear, existential dread, why are we here? What are we doing? That age Elena.’

However, Elena had made it clear that she was less interested in an explanation of his pictures than she was in a sense of his reputation and, through that, the influence Francis could exert.

‘I don’t think Francis is really interested in influence Elena,’ I said, slightly bemused by her notion of how an artist might seek to influence others — uniformly not the case, in my experience.

‘Everyone is interested in influence and in power James,’ interjected Klokov.

Elena made a particularly Russian exclamation, a sort of ‘pfft !’ then said, ‘What will Bacon do in Moscow? He will want to meet prestigious people.’

‘I don’t think Francis will want to do that at all.’ I laughed.

‘Then what will he do?’ Elena demanded.

‘He wants to look at the Rembrandts in the Hermitage with his friend John.’

‘His boyfriend?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Is that a problem? I know it’s illegal here.’

Elena made another ‘pfft !’ and flicked the problem aside with a swatting gesture. ‘It’s not issue,’ she declared. ‘It’s much easier for these men. Being gay is fashionable in Moscow. There is a big men’s room at railway station where they all go for sex.’

‘A cottage?’

‘A cottage James?’ Elena looked quizzical. ‘Like a dacha?’

So, as we finished lunch, I explained to Elena just what the difference between a cottage and a dacha was.

That evening we were once again going to eat at Klokov’s apartment and Marina was going to cook for us. I was aware that she never joined us for lunches or suppers at restaurants but I was informed this was because her job at the State Historical Museum by Red Square was very important and time consuming. Bob said it would be good form for us to provide supper. So, Paul, he and I went in search of ingredients in the afternoon. It was a dispiriting task. Moscow’s shops were a dirty testament to the system’s inefficiencies. The only fish we could find was off and the smell drove us out of the store. A meat counter offered cuts of pork that were nearly all fat, hacked apart with what looked like an executioner’s hand-axe. We did find a shop stuffed with breads and pastries. This was the famous Filippov bakery built in the Art Nouveau style, and there was a long queue to get in.

A man behind the counter hit each loaf with a small hammer : if it didn’t bounce off then the bread was fresh. Finally, armed with bread, pastries, the few edible cuts of meat we could find, some vegetables and whisky we arrived at Klokov’s at 7 p.m. ready for a feast.

We were a happy party. Johnny Stuart joined us once more and we had brought the rest of the magazines for Elena, i.D. and Arena this time. She was delighted with them and quizzed Paul and me endlessly about every designer, group and street style that they featured. She particularly loved The Grey Organisation, a group of grey-suited, shaven-headed art activists who staged interventions in galleries. This appealed to Elena’s appetite for artistic notoriety without the need, necessarily, for a time-consuming body of work to be completed first. Klokov was also happy. Any of his fears about the Daily Mail piece had, apparently, quickly evaporated. I could only guess what might have eased his concerns. Had he performed a service for an influential party official that week? Had someone let it be known that he was still in favour? Perhaps a politburo member, maybe even Gorbachev, had been given the cutting in his weekly report and laughed at Klokov’s allusion to Lenin, and word had got back to Klokov? Whatever it was, his brief anger with me had been forgotten.

‘I have been showing the article to my friends,’ he told me.

Klokov then proposed the first toast of the day. In yet another weird contradictory Moscow moment, Paul found himself drinking to the health of the Daily Mail, an odd thing to do behind the Iron Curtain.

As we celebrated the completion of the measuring up and Klokov’s new-found media recognition I marvelled at his ability, when inclined, to lift the mood of the people around him. Even Elena, although she was standing apart, was smiling. I took her a drink.

‘Here Elena, let’s make a toast.’

‘To what James, the exhibition?’

‘Yes, to the exhibition. Do you think your family will come?’

‘My family is not so good.’

‘Why?’

‘I have never loved my mother. We are unalike, James, that if you to see us together, you won’t believe we were mother and daughter.’

Elena was dark and tall ; her mother, she said, was ‘small and blonde’. Eventually I did meet her mother and found she was not small and blonde at all, but just like Elena. But by then, I had learned that Elena was unable to tell the truth. Perhaps I was being given a glimpse of darker things to come. If so, I failed to realise ; I felt as if I were among friends and increasingly comfortable in Elena’s presence. Later when Misha, a little worse for wear, leant over to me and said, ‘Watch out for Elena, James. She has a broken brain,’ I brushed it aside.

Our third day in Moscow, 5 June 1988. We were going to see the studio of Grisha Bruskin, the potential star of the contemporary section of the Sotheby’s auction. Misha and Elena were due to pick us up from the hotel. Elena arrived but Misha didn’t appear. This wasn’t unusual in Moscow, people often failed to show up. Unexpected absence was an everyday event, largely because travel was so difficult unless you were one of the Politburo members in the ZiL limousines that swished down the reserved lanes in the centre of Moscow’s highways. Untroubled, Elena strode out into the street and flagged down a passing car which took us, in exchange for five of my cigarettes, to Bruskin’s studio near Gorky Boulevard.

The studio block smelt terrible in the distinctive way that most Moscow blocks did. Rather than vodka, there were empty whisky bottles on the stairs which, I suppose, denoted a degree of privilege within the ambience of desperation. We climbed to the top of the block and entered Bruskin’s studio. One of Johnny’s colleagues, a valuer from Sotheby’s, was already there and so was Bruskin’s wife, who told us Bruskin was too ill to see us. His work was ranged all around the studio. I liked it immediately and admired how he gathered groups of small figures together and arranged them in such a way that they may, or may not, have been mocking the proletarian heroes of officially sanctioned Soviet social realism. If my mind had not been on Francis and the show, I would have tried to buy something there and then.

After failing to meet Bruskin himself we hailed a taxi to go and see Leonard Berlin. His paintings were in the traditional Soviet realist style but his drawings, even though cartoonish, were witty and anti-state. It was another inkling of a more openly subversive mood abroad in Moscow. A world away from the work I had seen on my first visit. Afterwards we went to the Mezh, which in a few weeks’ time would fill with a flamboyant cast from the international art market in town for the Sotheby’s auction.

After lunch I decided to make a serious attempt to buy a picture from Bruskin. On my behalf, Bob called from one of the Mezh’s phone boxes, but Bruskin’s wife said he was still too ill to discuss it. Cynical of us, perhaps, but we didn’t believe this, reckoning instead that Bruskin was waiting to hear what the Sotheby’s estimate would be. Our cynicism was justified, it turned out he was smart. One of his pictures was to sell for £400,000 at the auction a few weeks later. After that it would be too late to get a bargain. Bruskin was the star of the bidding, and a glittering life in the West awaited. But how could anyone who had just climbed the stinking steps to his studio have foreseen that?

We walked across Red Square, past Lenin’s tomb, to meet Klokov and Marina at the bar in the National. Elena was a little ahead of me. As she crossed the road a car slowed and the driver said something to her through his window. She answered with some venom.

‘What was that?’ I asked on the pavement outside the National.

‘I called him a pig. Да пошёл ты, скотина !’ she said, still angry. ‘He asked how much I was.’

Misha was already in the bar when we arrived, released from whatever task had kept him away that morning. He ribbed me for my summer suit, a Comme des Garçons number with fantastically wide shoulders, in fact the only summer suit I owned. He claimed that the rather conservative Russian bureaucrats at the Union of Artists were outraged by it. There were other Westerners in the bar, and I watched Elena as her eyes fell upon them. She drank in their difference and she wrapped herself in it. I felt a wave of pity for her. She had such a strong desire to make a mark on the world and more than enough talent as a designer to do it. Klokov had told me that her designs could never achieve success in Moscow, people simply were not interested in re-imaginings of old constructivist imagery — they were looking to the future not the past. The irony, I knew, was that in the West people really had an appetite for this style. It was such a paradox. New Order and other bands were playing with this kind of imagery across record covers and fashion and merchandise. Here people mistook her for a prostitute in the street. In the West, who knew what she could achieve?

Years later I would meet Elena’s friend Larissa Kouznetsova, who had studied at MARCHI, the Moscow Architecture Institute, where Elena had also studied some years ahead of her. Getting in to the school, Larissa said, was a major achievement. ‘MARCHI is very, very prestigious. It’s so difficult to get in there, you either have to be very talented or you have very good connections. In order to get in you had to provide a portfolio and you had to pass very rigorous, very strict entrance exams. The teaching was exacting too. Elena had to learn to draw for seven years before she could apply oil on canvas. She was very talented.’

So here was Elena in Moscow waiting, and hoping, that Gorbachev would open the door to the rest of her future. Perhaps I could offer her an escape route. I knew that an arranged marriage was an accepted way out of Russia for many people. I felt giddy with the idea that I could rescue Elena and change her life. So out it came, almost unbidden.

‘Elena,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we get married?’

Elena scowled at me. ‘You’re joking James !’

Perhaps I was only half-joking but now I had asked, it sounded like a reasonable idea. It was a practical solution but at the same time felt like a romantic thing to do.

‘I’m serious Elena. Marry me and come to the West.’

Elena turned to Klokov, ‘Sergei, James wants me to marry him. Should I do it?’ Klokov barely paused to consider this question. There was none of the usual pantomime of finger wagging and humming. Paul’s jaw dropped. He was speechless.

‘Marry James? Of course ! You must ! A toast !’

So we all drank to the marriage of Elena and James before Klokov and Small Marina excused themselves and left.

It was only after their departure that I realised Klokov had appeared unsurprised by my proposal, he almost seemed to have anticipated it. And that technically, it had been Klokov and not Elena who had said yes. Strangely, I had no physical impulse to touch Elena and I made no effort to kiss or hug her. Even as I said it I felt uncertain of our future together. Perhaps Misha sensed my unease for he was now determined to make the most of the moment.

Filled with slightly suspect bonhomie he declared, ‘Now back to my apartment friends. We will have a party. But first James and Bob, we will need whisky.’ So, we picked up whisky from the Belgrade and then went back to his wife Olga’s flat. Olga was a biochemist by profession and the daughter of a general, which made her one of the elite, and she had her own flat separate to Misha’s. We drank whisky-laced coffee and ate cake. As Bob addressed the company in his bad Russian, Elena took me aside and asked if I was serious about marrying her.

‘James, when you came to Moscow first time, you touched my soul.’ I could hardly think of a more Russian scene. I pushed my fears away. Elena was happy. That, in itself, was enough to make me happy too.

That evening would also mark the beginning of a real friendship with Mikhail Mikheyev. Misha was a remarkable man and, as we drank, he told me much of his life story. He had been born in Moscow in 1945, the son of a Communist Party official.

‘As a teenager I drifted from job to job, then spent three years in Siberia in the Red Army,’ he said. ‘When we were young conscripts in Siberia we were not allowed to drink. So, we would dip bandages in a bucket of vodka and then wrap them around our feet.’

‘To stop frost bite?’ I asked naively.

‘No James, to get drunk. The alcohol would be absorbed through our skin and into the bloodstream. We’d be standing up on parade, swaying, and the sergeant would come right up to our faces and yell, “Breathe out !” But he couldn’t smell any alcohol on our breath.’

‘And that worked every time?’

‘Well,’ Misha said ruefully. ‘Nearly every time.’

Coming back to Moscow he worked in a design studio, had played the trumpet in a jazz band. After a period of suppression of jazz in the early days of the Cold War, Soviet authorities had softened their attitude, Misha claimed, because statisticians predicted a fall in the working population and it was thought jazz concerts would lead to more pregnancies.

All Misha’s stories seemed to combine brutality with humour. Knowing him was as close as I got to understanding the real Russia ; the Russia that suffered the attentions of Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin and came out with a joke on the other side.

When he was still a young soldier in Siberia, he had realised that the only way to have any personal freedom in Russia was to move up the power structure.

‘I had to find my way up,’ he said. ‘I started at the Theatre Institute where I stitched together backdrops for the plays, then I managed to get a job in the State Copyright Agency. Each time you get a new job you move up a little, that’s how you do it.’

Arriving at the State Copyright Agency, Misha said he looked around and saw his path to a kind of freedom. ‘There were about 500 well-dressed persons with good ties pretending to protect the copyrights of Soviet writers, painters and composers.’ He was finally inside the Soviet bureaucracy, where all advancement took place.

In the same period Misha became the lover of the poet and writer Olga Ivinskaya, not to be confused with his wife, also called Olga. She had been Boris Pasternak’s mistress and the inspiration for the tragic heroine Lara in Dr Zhivago and was a lot older than Misha. In 1950 Olga had been sent to the Gulag for three years, an attempt by the authorities to stop what they saw as Pasternak’s anti-Soviet work. She was pregnant with Pasternak’s child when she was arrested and had miscarried. Pasternak won the Nobel prize for literature in 1958 after the world-wide success of Dr Zhivago, published uncensored in Italy to the rage of the Soviet authorities. He died in 1960. Olga was arrested again in 1961 and charged with assisting in the smuggling of the Dr Zhivago manuscript to Italian Communist publisher Feltrinelli. In fact, it was given to Feltrinelli’s agent, Sergio D’Angelo, in person by Pasternak. Olga spent four years of an eight-year sentence in the Gulag. This was the Russian state’s way of persecuting Pasternak, who was dead but unforgiven.

Ivinskaya was a risky lover for Misha. She was not officially rehabilitated by the Party until the 1980s when Gorbachev came to power. I felt, as we talked, that Misha was not completely in thrall to the system. He had an inner life and he was willing to take risks of a slightly different order to Klokov. They were born out of passion not personal gain. At the same time, he was an old-style Communist Party ideologue ; he both believed in and worked the system. It had certainly worked for him. In 1986 Misha was promoted to become the Minister of Propaganda and Art Promotion of the Russian Union of Artists for the USSR, putting him in charge of 10,000 people. He was vital to the success of the forthcoming show but as I was beginning to glean, he hadn’t quite had the power to initiate it. That decision lay with the shadowy Tahir Salahov.

Though he sometimes drove around in limousines and travelled the world, Misha was not motivated by self-interest but rather by survival. He was a good man, on the whole.

As he talked I found myself longing for a mixer with my drink, anything but another straight vodka or whisky.

‘James !’ Misha cried in triumph. ‘We have a bottle of Pepsi-Cola left over from the Olympics.’ I followed him into the kitchen where he searched through the shelves of tinned food until he pulled out a dusty bottle of Pepsi.

It was eight years old. I poured anyway, and it glugged out flatly into my drink. Misha beamed. Now that we were alone in the kitchen, he became remarkably open about the failings of the Soviet state.

‘James, everybody has got blood on their hands,’ he said. ‘Whoever you are in the Soviet Union, you have blood on your hands. If you have a good apartment and you want a better apartment you can tell the authorities, so-and-so’s not up to much, and they will be removed and then you move in. It happens all the time.’

‘But not you Misha,’ I said. ‘You are a good communist.’

‘Of course, not me. I am the people’s Minister for Propaganda for Art Promotion. But let me tell you a story about an official visit for the purposes of culture in the Soviet Union.’

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘Let’s say it was Alma Atar in Kazakhstan, for an exhibition of some old Kazakhstan painter. Let’s also say that the artist would be there with his wife and his pretty and very young daughter, and then an official would look at the daughter and say, “Well Yelena, do you paint? Oh, you paint, would you like some canvas?” and the father would say, “No, she doesn’t need any canvas, I give her canvas.” “Oh well, maybe you’d like some paint brushes?” “No, no, she doesn’t need paint brushes.” So, the official would say, “Maybe you need to come to Moscow for some extra culture?” And the father said, “No, no. She doesn’t need to go to Moscow,” and then the official would say, “Right, OK. Five years hard labour to the father for not being cultured.” So the father would go to the gulag and the daughter would go to Moscow anyway and it would be worse because the official would gain control over her in the end.’

I came to believe that Misha would not have used his power in that way, despite his fatal attraction to women. He did, though, have the unreconstructed attitude toward the opposite sex that many Russian men expressed. Some years later I stayed with Misha in Moscow. He had divorced Olga and was living with a new, younger woman, Sharafat. Misha, so drunk on one occasion that he thought I was his younger brother, said, ‘Sharafat, strip for us.’ She started to strip, and I begged her, ‘No, no, no, just stop ! Stop !’ I was so shocked and embarrassed. She did stop but showed neither anger nor amazement at her husband’s request.

Misha could amuse me too and often would in the years ahead. On 4 October 1993, a tank shot at the White House, then seat of the Russian parliament, during the attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin. This pretty much took place outside Misha’s apartment. I asked Misha what it was like.

‘James,’ he said, ‘It was a Sunday morning and suddenly all the car alarms went off, from the vibration.’ And Russian car alarms are pretty primitive. He said all he could hear was ‘beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep — it went on all day !’ This was when Misha realised that Russia as he knew it was on the verge of collapse and his circumstances were about to change.

Thanks to perestroika and glasnost, that change was already preordained in 1988. I could sense it around me, the feeling was palpable in the conversations I was having in the Union of Artists, at supper tables and in restaurants. In a comparatively short space of time, essentially between my two visits, the first in 1986 and now this one, a Sotheby’s auction was on its way, we were allowed inside our friends’ homes, and we were mounting the Francis Bacon exhibition. These events were a microcosm of much larger freedoms, the shifting tectonic plates of East-West relations. Change was coming.

For now, Misha was in a powerful position ; he could help or destroy the careers of thousands of artists, but arts administrators and cultural ambassadors were not the sort of men who would thrive in the new Russia that was coming with the promise of the Sotheby’s auction. While he couldn’t be its instigator it was Misha who made the bureaucratic wheels turn and the Bacon show happen. He was extraordinary and he really believed in me and in the whole idea of showing Western art to thousands of people in the Soviet Union. He didn’t really want anything from it for himself. As we went to leave the kitchen Misha stopped me.

‘This exhibition, Bacon in Moscow, it is important. I am glad it is happening and it has my full support. I think it might be something that we will remember as significant for a long time. But you must understand something James.’

‘Misha?’

‘Sergei is a manipulator. He only really does things that benefit himself. Be careful.’

The next morning was our last. Paul and I were worried about getting our tickets and passports back from our tour guide but they appeared in her hand as if by magic. We sat around in the hotel lobby with the rest of the tour group, who regarded us with a degree of resentment. We had taken no part at all in the group itinerary apart from arrival and departure. I could only imagine the lengthy repetitive unspontaneous tours of the Kremlin and other city sites they had endured. Misha picked us up in his Lada and drove us to the Union of Artists, where we chain-smoked our way through a meeting and went over a draft of the Bacon catalogue before I took the proof back to London. I felt a sense of achievement ; the date was set, we had the vital floorplan and the catalogue was underway.

As we waited to leave the hotel, Klokov assured me that he would be in touch about making the arrangements for Elena and me to marry. Throughout this last hour Elena was becoming increasingly agitated, perhaps because my attention was focused elsewhere. Her mood darkened and she said she had to go. We said a rather abrupt, formal goodbye and that was it. I regretted that I couldn’t say more but Elena had gone. Misha drove us to the airport. Throughout all this Paul Conran had been subdued. As we passed through customs, I asked him what he thought. After a pause, he said, ‘I have never known anything like it in my life.’ I knew exactly what he meant but at the same time I couldn’t help but be both excited and trepidatious of what lay in the future.