Making art, writing, painting. making music is like making love. It is something that can be hindered, but not stopped, even less can it be ruled and controlled by somebody, be it kings, popes or party secretaries. These people have often been jealous of artists for themselves, deny them the freedom to make love to whom they will, to write and to paint what they wish. They confine women and artists to harems, restricted areas where they are taken care of, where they have nearly everything they could wish for, except freedom. In a harem you must make love to your master and you cannot do so with anybody else. a harem is a restricted area which you cannot leave.
The Communist world was such a harem for most of its inhabitants, and artists were no exception. the Party and the KGB jealously hived them off, away from pernicious Western influences. and only the most loyal and faithful obtained permission to visit the "Capitalist world". Even there they could not easily escape Big Brother's watchful eye. At the most they could travel abroad only in groups which always included KGB officers and their informers. It reminds one of the way women from the Sultan's harem were able to leave it and go into town, accompanied and guarded by eunuchs.
Paradoxically enough, the artists felt they were important. the meticulous censorship, the special attention the KGB, the Party and other bureaucrats paid to them were clear signs that they were important. The writer's pen the and artist's brush had some power: otherwise the powerful state would not have mobilised its secret police and many other officials to guard them. The well-known bulldozing of an unofficial exhibition in a park in Moscow in 1974 was a major disaster. The artists whose works were destroyed nevertheless felt comforted by so much attention. The harem ladies knew that they would have some influence on the Sultan and his dignitaries.
With the collapse of Communism everything changed. The doors of harem were suddenly left wide open and every woman could leave it. In fact, they were forced to leave, because nobody cared for them any more. The powerholders couldn't afford to have harems and they had to send the ladies away. Where could they go? Some happier ones had skills in something other than the art of love; they could earn some money with handicrafts or music. Some had relatives who took care of them. Some became simply beggars. Many became prostitutes. It is not a long way from harem to brothel, at any rate, the way from harem to freedom is much longer and harder.
In the past, we were forbidden to make love to the rich men from the corrupt West. Now we complete for their favour and gifts. We go and sleep with them as soon as we receive a telephone call. We call-girls and call-boys of the Western world are the luckiest of the post-comunnist prostitutes. Many of our former harem mates envy us. We are busy, we have to make love to many people, life has become much more expensive and insecure. Sometimes, waiting, exhausted at a large airport in the brave new world of freedom, we ask ourselves what freedom in fact is, where freedom is to be found, the freedom we believed in and some of our comrades died for. We ask ourselves, what is the real difference between a harem and a brothel, an odalisque and a call-girl. Is not the world that opened itself to us simply a much much larger harem with many sultans and emirs who want us to make love to them? After all, there is one difference: they now have a much greater freedom of choice.
From "Estonian Literary Magazine",
No. 6, Spring 1998.