Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

by Peter Pomerantsev

  The result was an epic, six-hour miniseries, The Spets (literally “The Specialist”), and when it was ready the gangster auteurs had their own ideas about managing distribution. They would walk into local TV stations with a copy of the series and tell the managers to show it—or else. No one argued. The sound was all over the place, and some of the shots didn’t match. But overall Vitaly had cracked it. There was plot, action, drive. It was a sensation. He became a Siberian star.

  When I first met Vitaly he was at the height of his fame and had come to Moscow to appear on talk shows and look for money for his next big film. I was working as an assistant to an American documentary director, and we were trying to persuade Vitaly to let us make a documentary about him. We set a date in one of the new Moscow cafés. Pastel lights diffused through a gentle indoor fountain. Muzak played softly in the background. Tall and lean and shaven headed, Vitaly looked uncannily like the President’s meaner, taller twin. He wore a designer tracksuit, pressed flat. He drank cappuccinos, dabbing his lip with a tightly folded napkin, careful that no trace of froth remained. “Capp-ooo-she-knows,” he called them, enjoying the word. He told the waitress off for giving him a dirty spoon.

  “Did you always want to be a gangster?” we asked.

  “I always knew I could be more than other people. Run faster, jump higher, shoot better. Just more.”

  He talked in a way that was ever so statuesque, with silences between each short sentence. Everything about him seemed so contained. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and told me off for swearing. He used to be a junkie, but he quit. He laughed in a hoarse, slow way, and at the oddest things (the word “latte” he found hilarious). It had taken weeks to set up this little meeting; he first arranged dates, then broke them off at the last moment, leaving us fretting and exhausted. With time I learned this was his way, a little tactic to wrap you around him.

  “What made you want to make movies?”

  “I’d spent eight years in jail. You watch a lot of TV in jail. There were all these cops and robbers shows. They were showing my life, my world. But it was all fake. The fights were fake. The guns were fake. The crimes were fake. What can an actor know about being a gangster? Nothing. Only I could tell my story.”

  Vitaly’s TV miniseries showed his life of crime in scrupulous detail. In his violent pomp he had been a modern Dick Turpin, a real highwayman. He would hide in the bushes by the side of the motorway, waiting for a coach-load of brand new Mitsubishis or Toyotas just brought in from Japan. Then he would pull a kerchief over his face, draw out his sawn-off shotgun, and walk out into the middle of the highway. He would stand legs apart, gun pointed out from his hips, alone in the middle of the road, facing down the oncoming truck. They always stopped, and the cars were all his. If the driver struggled, Vitaly would beat him. The TV series reveled in these moments of violence. The dialogue was sometimes stilted (Vitaly wouldn’t let his crew swear on screen), but when it came to kicking, stomping on, and humiliating, the gangster actors were in their element, their faces lighting up with joy and anger.

  “But what about your victims—did you ever feel sorry for them?” asked the American.

  Vitaly looked nonplussed. He turned to me:

  “Of course not. No one who does what I do feels sorry for the victim. You’re either a dope or a real man, and dopes deserve all they get.”

  The central scene of Spets involved Vitaly killing another mob boss. In the film he calmly walks up and shoots his rival, then calmly walks away again. The whole thing happens so fast I had to rewind and replay to double check what had happened.

  “How many have you killed?” I asked when the waitress left.

  “I can only talk about one time. That was revenge for my brother. I served time for the killing, but after that no one messed with me.”

  “Can anyone be a killer?” asked the American.

  “No. When I was in prison there were men who regretted what they’d done. They wept, went to church. Not everyone has the inner strength to do it. But I do.”

  “And would you ever return to crime?

  Vitaly smiled: “Nowadays my life is all about art.”

  We persuaded him to take us down to his hometown and let us film him shooting a scene for his next project. We’d have an exclusive with the gangster director at work, and he’d have a promo to help raise money.

  “Usually you’d be one of my victims,” he said matter-of-factly. “But in this case we’ll be partners.”

  The flight to Ussuriysk, Vitaly’s hometown, took all day. Vitaly just lay back, smiled, and slept the whole journey. I chatted to another former gangster friend of his, Sergey, who wrote the music for The Spets. A former power-lifting champion, Sergey took up two seats on the flight. He had quit being a gangster when he found God: a bullet that should have killed him miraculously passed through his body. Afterward he had seen the light (with the help of an American evangelical sect that helped nurse him back to health after the shooting). He was a laughing, jolly, blonde bear of a man, with questioning, kind, light blue eyes. Previously he had dealt heroin and smuggled girls from Ukraine to Europe.

  “How does the new, religious you make sense of the past?” I asked.

  “When I was baptized all my sins were washed away,” answered Sergey.

  “But do you feel guilt for what you used to do?”

  “I was a demon, but I was still fulfilling God’s will. All my victims must have deserved it. God only punishes bad people.”

  On the flight Sergey was trying to write a film script. It was to be a modern spin on the old Russian fairy tale of the “three bogatyri,” huge knights of unnatural strength who traveled old Russia taming dragons and invaders. In Sergey’s version the “bogatyri” were former gangsters.

  When we finally landed in Vladivostok (the nearest airport to Ussuriysk) I expected to see the orient; we were, after all, 1,000 km east of Beijing, where Russia meets the Pacific. Apart from Vitaly this region is famous for its tigers. But instead it looked like more of the same Russia, the same green-brown blur of hills and thin, unhappy trees. We might as well have been in suburban Moscow. Vitaly’s crew were at the hanger of an airport to meet us: young, polite men with darting eyes, shell suits, gold medallions, tidy haircuts, and neat nails. One brought Vitaly a new Jeep, a vassal fetching his lord a new, stolen steed. No plates. We drove in a spread-eagled cortege across both lanes of the highway, so fast it made me first scared and then ecstatic. Vitaly ignored the first traffic cop who waved at him, then stopped for the second one. When the cop saw who it was, he waved him on.

  “They know better than to mess with me,” said Vitaly.

  Vitaly didn’t need to stop. It was all just demonstration, just to let everyone know: he’s back.

  We sped into Ussuriysk itself, past the oversized, windy central square, designed with military parades and not human beings in mind. The cinema, town hall, and swimming pool were all in the same stiff Soviet classicism. Wide avenues led to nowhere, stopping abruptly at the endless taiga. You find the same towns throughout the old Soviet Empire, all designed in some Moscow Ministry for Urbanism, awkward and ill at ease.

  The town was clean. Quiet.

  “Us gangsters keep this town disciplined,” said Vitaly. “There used to be druggies, prostitutes. Teens with long hair. They wouldn’t dare show their faces now. We showed them who’s boss. I don’t even let anyone in my crew smoke cigarettes. If anyone of my boys were to get drunk in public, I’d give them such a beating.”

  Vitaly was a celebrity here. When we walked down the streets teenage girls with large shoulders and short skirts stopped to have their pictures taken with him. When we paused by a school the kids saw him through the window and came running out, mobbing Vitaly and thrusting forward their math books and homework pads for him to sign, the teachers smiling benignly.

  His new film was to be about his teenage years, in
the late 1980s, when the first gangsters emerged together with the first businessmen. The next day Vitaly was casting teens to play his younger self. A crowd gathered in front of the Palace of Culture and Leisure, the old Soviet theater. Fathers had taken their sons out of school and brought them to try out for the parts of the Young Vitaly and his first gang.

  “I want my son to learn about our history,” said one of the dads. “The gangsters hold this town together, keep it disciplined.”

  Vitaly did his casting in a rehearsal room. On the walls were pictures of Chekhov and Stanislavsky, the great Russian inventor of method acting. Vitaly had the boys walk up and down the room:

  “You need to walk like gangsters, like you mean it. Don’t look to the sides. Don’t look tense. Imagine everyone’s looking at you. Slowly. Walk slowly. This is your territory.”

  He picked out a few of the boys. They were thrilled. He lined them up against the wall, scanning the line, choosing which one would play him.

  “Too short. Too fat. Too loud. You. You’ll do. But you’ll have to cut off that forelock.”

  The kid he chose was the quiet one (and the best looking). His name was Mitya. He studied history at the local college. He seemed entirely emotionless at the idea of acting out Vitaly—or maybe he was just in the role already.

  Vitaly drove him to the local park for a lesson on how to play him.

  “See those kids over there? The ones drinking beer over by those benches? I want you to go over and tell them to leave. And get them to pick up their litter, too. Act like you own the place. Talk quietly. Firmly. Instruct. Let them feel you’ve got numbers behind you. Imagine that you’re me.”

  The kid did well. His menace came in the pauses between the words. He told the drinking boys to pack up. Just as they were leaving, he threw in the little humiliation: “Don’t forget your rubbish.” That touch was pure Vitaly: always looking to jab you with a put-down. (“That camera you use is so small Peter, don’t you have a real camera?” he liked to ask me, or “you don’t know how to interview; am I going to have to teach you?”)

  Mitya seemed a good boy, who would finish university and probably go on to a career in a state corporation. But his behavior, his style, was already pure gangster.

  “Do you think Mitya could be as good a gangster as you?” we asked.

  “He has potential,” said Vitaly, “but he would need to toughen up a bit. By his age I was already serving my first term in prison for racketeering.”

  We went to see Vitaly’s parents. I had hoped they would help explain the way he is, but I was disappointed. Vitaly’s father was a hard-working factory man, used to soldering parts on tanks. He was small and shy and talked about fishing. Vitaly’s mother, slightly tipsy but polite, kept a neat home. They seemed frightened of Vitaly themselves, and he was so disdainful of them he wouldn’t even enter the apartment.

  “He had been a tear-away at school,” said the dad. “We so hoped prison would help calm him down. That he would come out and get a normal job at the armaments factory. But when he came out of prison you could tell he was a big boss already.”

  Prison was Vitaly’s alma mater. This part of Siberia was full of them. Everywhere you looked were barbed wire, watchtowers, and concrete walls. We shot an interview with Vitaly as he gazed toward where he had first served time.

  “Everything I learned was there,” he said. It was the first time I’d seen him even vaguely sentimental. “You have to prove you’re a real man and not a chicken straight away. You don’t cry, you don’t blabber, you don’t let anyone tell you what to do. Only say what you mean, speak slowly, and if you promise something, keep it.”

  Vitaly had served five years that first time. He had first gone inside in 1988. When he came out in 1993 the whole universe he had grown up in was transformed. The Soviet Union had disappeared. Everyone who had previously been someone was suddenly a nobody. The teachers and cops and judges went unpaid. The factory workers were making fridges and train parts no one needed. The war heroes were penniless pensioners. When he had been first put away, men like Vitaly had been destined for a life on the margins; they were shpana, scum. Now, suddenly, he sensed this was his era.

  “Why would I work for pennies in a factory like my dad? That would be crazy.”

  The only values in this new Ussuriysk were cars and cash. The gangsters could access these things the fastest, with the most direct methods. But they didn’t just extort and steal. Businessmen called them in to guarantee deals (if one partner reneged, the gangsters would sort him out); people turned to them instead of the uninterested police to catch rapists and thieves. They became the establishment, the glue that holds everything together. In this new world no one knew quite how to behave: all the old Soviet role models had been made redundant, and the “West” was just a story far away. But the gangsters had their own prison code, which had survived perestroika. And this made the gangsters more than just feared bullies. They were the only people in this lost, new Russia who knew who on earth they were and what they stood for. And now in the twenty-first century, although many gangsters were out of a job, their way of behaving has become ubiquitous.

  As he prepared for his shoot Vitaly would often disappear, his usual trick of keeping us on tenterhooks. He designated a friend of his, Stas, to look after us. Stas had a Jeep with a little shovel screwed on at the front: the gangster’s sign. He had a girlfriend with him. She was a tall, pale, bored blonde who only lit up when she talked about her collection of hosiery: “I even have a pair of snakeskin tights at home,” she told me.

  Stas took us on a tour of Ussuriysk.

  The town was famous for its car market, one of the biggest in the whole of Russia. We were near the sea with Japan, and all the new Mitsubishis and Toyotas were traded here. The market was on a hill at the entrance to the town. As we approached, it gleamed silver like a magic mountain. Only when we got closer did we realize it was the sun glinting off the new Jeeps and other four-by-fours. Everyone here drove the latest models. They might have their toilets in wooden outhouses, and their apartments might be yellowing, but the big, black cars were always shining with a TV commercial sparkle. Stas took us to a meet at which locals showed off how they’d upgraded their automobiles. One guy had installed a Jacuzzi in the back; another had a movie theater. There was tenderness in how they showed off their prized possessions. These heavy men touched their cars so delicately. Stas took out a little toothbrush to clean the headlights on his Land Cruiser: he scrubbed it softly, patiently, like he was washing a toddler.

  Stas took us to the hills above the town so we could get the best view. The corroding factories still chugged smoke. Among the hills were the cemeteries with their black marble headstones. On them were engravings for young gangsters: “Buba the boxer,” “Boris Mercedes.” Their portraits were engraved into the headstones, depicting them in gangster pomp—one dangled the keys to his Mercedes, another posed with his mobile phone—like Egyptian pharaohs sent to the next world with their most vital possessions. Dates on the headstones often coincided; the young men had died on the same days in the 1990s. These were the dates of gang battles, a whole generation decimated.

  “You have many friends here?” I asked Stas.

  “Most of my class,” he answered, matter-of-factly. “Not just gangsters. Many were just caught in the cross fire.”

  In the evening we headed to a restaurant, The Miami. Outside was a twelve-foot, plastic palm tree. The plastic palm trees were everywhere around town; they were considered fashionable. The Miami had a parking garage out front and a massage parlor in the basement.

  “It’s compact,” explained Stas, “all you might want in one place.” The restaurant itself was done up with plush burgundy walls and black lacquer chairs. All the clientele wore ironed shell suits. The restaurant was Chinese owned; we were just fifty miles from the Chinese border, and rumor had it that a third of the population was illegal
Chinese immigrants.

  “The Chinks used to just walk anywhere,” said Stas, “but the gangsters sorted that out. Now they just keep themselves to the market and the suburbs. They need to know this is Russian territory. . . . But they do have the best restaurants.”

  With the meal there was karaoke. As the Chinese waiters brought the food, everyone at the restaurant sang “shanson,” the gravelly, syrupy gangster ballads that have become some of Russia’s favorite pop music. Shanson reflect the gangsters’ journeys to the center of Russian culture. These used to be underground, prison songs, full of gangster slang, tales of Siberian labor camps and missing your mother. Now every taxi driver and grocery plays them. “Vladimirsky Tsentral” is a wedding classic. Tipsy brides across the country in cream-puff wedding dresses and high, thin heels slow-dance with their drunker grooms: “The thaw is thinning underneath the bars of my cell / but the Spring of my life has passed so fast.” At the Chinese restaurant Miami Stas sang along too, but he seemed too meek, too obliging to be a gangster.

  “Me? A gangster? God no,” he seemed surprised when asked. “I’m just a businessman. The shovel, well that’s just for show. I like hanging around with Vitaly.”

  I asked him what their relationship was. He changed the subject fast.

  We asked Vitaly the next time we saw him.

  “Stas? Stas is one of the businessmen we used to extort money from.”

  “And now you’re friends?”

  “He does what I tell him to.”

  It turned out Vitaly had once beaten Stas to a pulp, and now Stas half worshiped, half lived in fear of him, helping Vitaly put on his coat and holding his phone for him. And everyone we met in the town seemed somehow crumpled, mumbling, black and white. Only the gangsters strode tall in glorious Technicolor. This was Vitaly’s town, the representative, cross-section town of Russia, the country where a third of males have been to prison, the sort of town spin doctors and TV men look at when they design politicians.