DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Did that place really exist? The further it shrinks in the rear-view mirror, the more wholly improbable the Soviet Union seems, some feverishly over-imagined sci-fi comedy-horror, a fairytale of indecipherable meaning written by a madman.
James Birch’s rollicking book about late-80s Moscow, as he dreamed up the plainly ridiculous idea of holding a Francis Bacon exhibition in that peculiar place, pithily brings it all right back with bracing black comedy. As a fellow
