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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  The day of his big shoot Vitaly took over a whole market. The scene had the young Vitaly and his gang being busted as they extorted money from the market traders. The traders played themselves, and cops had been hired to play cops.

  “Isn’t there a problem that you’re working for a gangster today?” we asked the cops.

  They laughed. “Who do you think we work for anyway?” (The new mayor of Vladivostok was a man nicknamed Winnie-the-Pooh, a mob boss who had previously served time for threatening to kill a businessman.)

  Vitaly’s set had a cast of hundreds, and it should have been chaos, but I’d never seen a film set so slickly run. His gangster crew was the production team. Who would dare to be late on set when professional killers are running the show? Vitaly was a natural. Cap pulled low, long finger tapping against his mouth, he set up every camera position unerringly. Though there was no script on paper, he never got lost, giving terse, tight instructions to all the players.

  “It’s just like setting up a heist,” he told me. “Everything’s got to be exact. Not like one of your little documentaries.”

  Every detail of the clothes, the guns, and the items the market traders were selling had been reproduced just as they were in the late 1980s. But for all its detailed accuracy, the way Vitaly shot his films was more like a cheesy B-movie than documentary-style realism. Every shot of Vitaly was a glamorous close-up. He wiped his sweaty brow, sighed like a pantomime hero, looked intently into the distance, and escaped death to the sound of the Star Wars sound track. This was how he saw himself, his life, his crimes. All the pain and death he had caused and suffered were viewed by him through the corny music and cloud-machine smoke of a bad action movie.

  “What sort of films inspire you?” we asked.

  Vitaly paused.

  “Titanic. That’s a real film. With DiCaprio. That’s real life. That’s the sort of thing I aim to make if I get my budget. . . . ”

  That was the last time I had seen him, three years before. But I was still reminded of him often. There’s a little scene that gets played out on the Ostankino channels every week. The president sits at the head of a long table. Along each side sit the governors of every region: the western, central, northeastern, and so on. The president points to each one, who tells him what’s going on in his patch. “Rogue terrorists, pensions unpaid, fuel shortages. . . . ” The governors looked petrified. The president toys with them, pure Vitaly. “Well, if you can’t sort out the mess in your backyard, we can always find a different governor. . . . ” For a long time I couldn’t remember what the scene reminded me of. Then I realized: it’s straight out of The Godfather, when Marlon Brando gathers the mafia bosses from the five boroughs. Quentin Tarantino used a similar scene when Lucy Liu meets with the heads of the Tokyo Yakuza clans in Kill Bill—it’s a mafia movie trope. And it fits the image the Kremlin has for the President: he is dressed like a mob boss (the black polo top underneath the black suit), and his sound bites come straight out of gangster flicks (“we’ll shoot the enemy while he’s on the shitter . . . ”). I can see the spin doctors’ logic: Whom do the people respect the most? Gangsters. So let’s make our leader look like a gangster; let’s make him act like Vitaly.

  But while the country’s leaders were imitating gangsters, word went out from the Ministry of Culture and Ostankino that the Kremlin wanted positive, upbeat films. Russian gangster movies, which should theoretically have rivaled the greatest in the world, were phased out. Actors who had primed themselves to be the Russian De Niros suddenly had to revamp their images and star in rom-coms. It’s the reverse of the situation in the West, where politicians try to act like upstanding citizens while films and TV shows are obsessed with the underworld; here the politicians imitate mobsters but the films are rosy. Whenever I pitch a gangster program to TNT, they stare, aghast: “We make happy things, Peter. Happy!” I supposed Vitaly never found money for his blockbuster. I was a little worried for him.

  • • •

  Vitaly was at the station to meet me. He was wearing his usual ironed tracksuit; it had been a while since I’d seen anybody wear one. He greeted me warmly. I sensed he was genuinely glad to see someone from the “old days.”

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “You live in D— now?”

  “I’m lying low. I avoid Moscow: too many cops wanting to check your documents. Everyone back home has been put away, the last of my crew. I wouldn’t have anyone to film with even if I could raise the money.”

  I sensed Vitaly was flirting with his old profession, but I thought it best not to pry. We walked over to his car: a brand new four-by-four (of course). No plates. Vitaly had a freshly pressed shell suit hanging in the back.

  “I’m living in the car while I lie low. I’ve always preferred it to apartments anyway.”

  “Whatever happened to your film project?” I ask.

  “I met some Moscow producers. They wanted me to show them a script. Do they think I’m stupid? I know they’ll just steal it.”

  “But Vitaly, that’s how it works here. You’d have a copyright, guarantees.”

  “That means nothing. You can’t trust producers, they’re all crooks. I tried to get money from my own people, mob bosses. People you can trust. But none of them wanted to invest in gangster movies. ‘Not the future,’ they told me.”

  It turned out Vitaly wanted me to shoot a short interview with him. He was planning a documentary about himself.

  “None of you TV people could capture me right in your films. Did you bring a big camera? Good.”

  We shot the interview in the car. Vitaly put on his most statuesque look, part reptilian, part Romantic, speaking ever so slowly.

  “Ever since I was a child I knew I could be more than other people. Run faster. Jump higher—” Suddenly, mid-sentence, he broke off and burst out of the car. He started screaming, spitting at a crumpled bum with wildly swollen eyes drinking from a bottle in a plastic bag behind the car. The bum crawled away. Vitaly got back in, still breathing hard, but the anger switched off like a light.

  “You wouldn’t want him in the same shot as me. He’d make it ugly.”

  Then Vitaly shot an interview with me. He had all my words written out already; I just had to memorize the script.

  “The first time I met Vitaly he struck me as the most talented dangerous man, and the most dangerous talented man, I had ever encountered. . . . ”

  It was a long speech, and I kept fluffing my lines. But Vitaly was a patient director, and by the fifth take we got it right.

  After the shoot Vitaly leaned into the back and brought out a pile of hardcover books.

  “These are for you.”

  They were novels, written by Vitaly.

  “I’ve taken to writing books. They’re selling pretty well. I’ll be honest, the first one was ghostwritten. But since then I’ve learned how to write myself.”

  Most of the early books were based on Vitaly’s life of crime. But in the last book he had changed genres. It was a satire of Russian politics, about a bully, gangster state that uses its giant reserves of fart gases to manipulate the countries around it into submission (at the time Russia was threatening Ukraine with shutting off its gas supply).

  “I often think now I should have gone into politics,” said Vitaly. “I just thought it boring, I didn’t realize they used the same methods as us. It’s too late now, though. I’ve dedicated myself to art. If I can’t film, I’ll write. And you know what the future is, Peter? Comedy. Set up a meeting for me at TNT; they might want to televise my fart-book.”

  I told Vitaly I’d do my best. He insisted I take a stack of thick, black glossy books to show people. I couldn’t say no and carried them in two plastic bags back to town, the sharp edges of the books tearing through the plastic and spiking against my legs with every step.

  At TNT I went through the motions of helping Vitaly and gave
the scripted comedy department a copy of the book.

  “No idea whether it’s any good, but I promised,” I explained, almost apologizing. And thought that would be the end of it.

  But a few weeks later I walked into TNT and there was Vitaly, sitting in one of the little glass meeting rooms with a couple of producers, wearing his shell suit and cap. He noticed me when I came in, stood up, took off his cap, and waved. “Hi, brother,” I could hear him calling, the words low and distorted through the glass. Suddenly I wanted to turn away, ignore him, pretend I’d never met him and didn’t know him. ‘Brother!’ he called again, waving his cap in ever larger motions. And the only way I could override the sudden desire to run away was to play up and call out even louder: ‘Brother! Brother!’ until everyone in the office could hear and was looking at me.

  “Is he for real?” the women in the drama department asked me afterward. “It all seems a bit of an act.”

  “Oh, he’s quite real. You actually interested in his book?”

  “It’s well written. We need to think about it.”

  One of the areas TNT specializes in is satire. If the USSR drove humor underground and thus made it an enemy of the state, the new Kremlin actively encourages people to have a laugh at its expense: one TNT sketch show is about corrupt Duma deputies who are always whoring and partying while praising each other’s patriotism; another is about the only traffic cop in Russia who doesn’t take bribes—his family is starving and his wife is always nagging him to become “normal” and more corrupt. As long as no real government officials are named, then why not let the audience blow off some steam? Vitaly’s sense that his satire would work inside the Kremlin’s rules was right.

  When I tried to follow up on the meeting with Vitaly, he had disappeared. Sergey told me that another warrant had been issued for his arrest, and he was lying low again, sleeping in his Jeep, and keeping well out of any cities. But I guess he’s okay; every year I see a new novel of his on the pulp fiction shelves in bookstores, most of them comedies.

  RUSSIA TODAY

  Western ex-pats first arrived in Russia as emissaries of the victorious party in the Cold War. They were superior and came to teach Russia how to be civilized. Now all that is changing. Russia is resurgent, the teachers have become the servants, and I’m not even sure who won the Cold War after all.

  I first got to know Benedict in Scandinavia, a favorite restaurant of those ex-pats come to school Russia in the ways of the West in the decades of glorious afterglow after the end of the Cold War: “magic circle” lawyers, “big five” accountants, investment bankers. It’s just off Tverskaya, Moscow’s central drag, in a little courtyard of large green trees. It’s owned by Swedes, and when it first opened everything was imported from Stockholm: the waiters, cooks, burgers, fries—all flown in. In the early 2000s the guests largely spoke English; it wasn’t opulent enough for Russian oligarchs and was too expensive for “ordinary” Russians. The westerners would come here like to an oasis, before they got drunk and courageous enough to explore the Moscow night. It felt like the descendant of an old colonial club in an age that prided itself on being past all that.

  The Scandinavia set were tanned and spoke earnest schoolbook English. They discussed compliance, corporate governance, and workouts. Finding somewhere to go jogging, the consensus went, was a nightmare in Moscow. As was the smoking. And the traffic. When they got tipsy they made jokes about Russian girls, unless they were with their wives, in which case they discussed holiday plans. They had white teeth. Benedict had yellow teeth, drank wine at lunch, and smoked long, thick Dunhills. He was slight and moved like a cricket, waving his smoke away from others in mock apology. He was Irish, but of the Shaw or Wilde variety.

  “I’m a lapsed economist,” he liked to tell people when they asked what he did.

  Benedict was an international development consultant. “International development consultants” are the missionaries of democratic capitalism. They emerged en masse at the end of the Cold War, at the end of history, marching out of America and Europe to teach the rest of the world to be like them. They work on projects for the EU, WB, OECD, IMF, OSCE, IMF, DIFD, SIDA, and other national and multinational bodies that represent the “developed world” (the donor) and advise governments, central and local, of the “developing world” (the beneficiary). They wear Marks and Spencer (or Zara or Brooks Brothers) suits, and under their arms they carry wide binders that contain the Terms of Reference (known as TORA) for their projects, which have names like “building a market economy in the Russian Federation” or “achieving gender equality in the post-Soviet space.” The TORA lay out “logical framework matrices” to achieve “objectively verifiable indicators of democratization.” Western civilization condensed into bullet points:

  “Elections? Check.”

  “Freedom of Expression? Check.”

  “Private Property? Check.”

  Underlying the projects is a clear vision of history, taught in the new “international development” departments of universities and taken as gospel in ministries and multinational bodies: postcommunism, the former Soviet states would pass through the temptations of “transition” to the plateaus of liberal democracy and the market economy.

  Benedict was still an economics lecturer in a small-town Irish university when he went to Russia for the first time. He gave a lecture on principles of “business and effective management” at St. Petersburg University. It was 1992. The students listened carefully, lapping up the new language: “SME,” “IPO,” “cash flow.” In the evening after the lecture Benedict walked back to his hotel. He took a wrong turn at reception and found himself in the middle of a wedding party. He tried to ask the way in English. The bride and groom were delighted a westerner had joined them and insisted he stay. He was a piece of exotica, a present in himself. They drank his health, and he stayed on drinking with them. At one point he went to his room and brought back a carton of Marlboros and some Imperial Leather soap as presents. The bride and groom were thrilled. They drank more, and everyone danced. Benedict felt that Russia would be like the West very soon.

  He left his job at the Irish university a few years later, swapping $50,000 a year in a provincial college for the tax-free, six-figure sums of the strutting new development industry. Benedict was offered a position as team leader on a project called Technical Assistance for the Economic Development of the Kaliningrad Free Economic Zone. He had no idea where Kaliningrad was; he had to look it up on a map.

  Kaliningrad used to be known as Koenigsberg, the capital of Eastern Prussia, the home of Kant. It lies on the Baltic Sea, between Lithuania and Poland, opposite Sweden. At the end of World War II it was captured by the Soviets, renamed, repopulated with imported Soviets from across the empire, and made into a high-security, closed-off military port. It was the most western point of the USSR. After the Cold War the Russians held onto it, though Kaliningrad has no border with Russia proper. It is now an exclave of Russia inside the European Union, a geopolitical freak. The EU recognized “the special position of Kaliningrad” but had “concerns regarding soft security issues”; that is to say, it was leaking heroin, weapons, AIDS, and a mutant strain of tuberculosis into the EU. Kaliningrad either had to change or risk having a wall built around it. There were no direct flights from Europe. Benedict had to fly all the way to Moscow, then double back and fly west to Kaliningrad. He was in his late forties and divorced, and he wanted a new start.

  It was almost painful to see the difference between the tired, elegant nineteenth-century houses of the old Koenigsberg and the postwar Soviet new-builds. The red gothic cathedral, home to Kant’s grave, was surrounded, on one side by shabby hordes of aggressive, concrete apartment blocks and on the other by a harbor full of rusting, resting warships. In the evening sailors would go drinking in the bars along the waterfront. I remember finding myself in such a bar on a brief visit to Kaliningrad. The light in the bar was a murky, B
altic Sea green. I ordered a cognac.

  “A local one?” asked the waitress.

  “What sort of grapes grow in Kaliningrad?” I asked, not disingenuously.

  “Why would you need grapes for cognac?” asked the waitress.

  The shot was poured. One gulp took me through thirty seconds of pure euphoria straight through to the worst hangover I have ever known.

  The Kaliningrad Ministry for Economic Development was a weighty Soviet palace on a central square. Benedict and his translator, Marina, passed through the low, heavy doors and into the world of Russian bureaucracy. Wide, dusty, empty corridors where everything happens as if under water. Telephones, installed in the mid-1970s, rang patiently without being answered. Stopped. Then rang again. Velvet curtains sagged. In all the offices hung photos of the President, smiling almost apologetically, with his head tilted to the side. The officials were mainly strong, stern women in their forties and fifties, the real foundations of the Russian state. There were fewer men, and they all seemed to be stooping. All called each other by their patronymics: “Igor Arkadievich” and “Lydia Alexandrovna.”

  Benedict’s opposite number was P, a midlevel official. He wore sagging suits and had a paunch that seemed to pull him downward.

  “You the man with the European technical assistance? We need computers,” said P when they met.

  Technical assistance, Benedict explained, did not mean technology. It meant schooling from Western consultants. Benedict’s interpreter tried to get the point across.

  “We need computers,” answered P.