“Grey Zones” Between Official and Unofficial Cultures

Abstract This chapter examines “grey zones” existing in the post-Stalinist USSR—special forms of being public that were situated in the gap between sanctioned publication and practices of secret dissemination of texts or underground displays of artworks. Such “grey zones” were most often sanctioned “from above” at the initiative of the authorities or the security services; they could be the secret publication of “anti-Soviet” books or “youth cafes” where it was permitted to read poetry or exhibit pictures without the stern control of the censor. This chapter examines the history of Klub-81—a unique organization of unsanctioned writers created in 1981 in Leningrad under the direct control of the KGB—in some detail. Klub-81’s situation was ambiguous. Not all unsanctioned Leningrad authors joined it. A few writers and artists accused Klub-81 leader Boris Ivanov of collaborationism. At the same time, Ivanov and his like-minded associates (Boris Ostanin, Eduard Shneiderman, and others) insisted on the need to implement their own cultural agenda, primarily concerned with nonconformist art, within the framework of the club. This chapter analyzes the complex combination of cultural and political conditions that allowed this subversive task to be carried out successfully; participation in Klub-81 required ethical compromise, but taken as a whole, the club turned out to be not so much a trap as an “umbrella” for a large group of poets and prose writers in late-Soviet Leningrad.