The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, a monthlong extravaganza designed to revive Russia as a center of modern art, launched last week, the first such festival to be held in Russia since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. “Until the biennial actually opened, there were doubts that it would. Although the project was more than a year in the planning, its exhibitions were selected and installed in a desperate scramble, its organizers and curators having encountered innumerable obstacles, not the least the conservatism of Russia’s cultural bureaucracies.”