On Dec. 24 a small room of the offices of the Free Culture Foundation in the famous artists' building at 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa was packed with veterans of what used to be known as unofficial art. People who once formed a tight and integral community gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first legal exhibition of unofficial art.


Twenty years ago this week, following the breakthrough of the legendary bulldozer exhibition in Moscow, the Leningrad artistic underground made its first bold and daring step into the open. For five days the rooms of the Gaza Palace of Culture in the city's industrial outskirts displayed the works of 52 artists. As much as its Moscow counterpart, the show at Gaza acquired a mythical status even before it was closed.


Along with the next year's even bigger show at the Nevsky Palace of Culture, it gave birth to a special term, Gazonevshina, or Gzonevskaya Kultura. Since then and until 1982, until the unity born at Gaza and Nevsky was formed into an organization, exhibitions of this scale were impossible. Growing pressure consolidated the artists into a union. In a grotesquely simplistic black-and-white world very little was needed for a feeling of unity. Being "other" than officialdom was enough. This was the only uniting factor. Otherwise you could be a surrealist, an abstract expressionist, a cubist, a primitivist or even a tongue-in-cheek socialist realist.


Granted, there were no efforts spared to control and curb the movement. About half of the original participants of the Gaza exhibition, the founding fathers of the Leningrad underground, were forced to emigrate, or died here.


The unity that seemed cement-strong in the decades of dictatorship started to creep apart as soon as artistic censorship was lifted. The organization, TEEI, or Association of Experimental Exhibitions, fragmented into dozens of smaller groups. Some of the artists -- like Mikhail Chemyakin who emigrated even before the Gaza exhibition -- have become world class celebrities and now prosper in the West. Others made more or less successful careers. For others nothing changed -- as much as 20 years later they live in the same communal apartments and exhibit their works once a year.


There was a gruesome symbolism in the more than modest festivity of the celebration. The city administration refused to take the anniversary under its auspices and the event was forced into small unheated rooms of dilapidated 10 Pushkinskaya.


With Chechnya invaded like Afghanistan 15 years ago, with the same insecurity, the same vodka and the same stubbornness on the same aged faces -- who knows, maybe indeed nothing has changed.