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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  She began to get to know them. It turned out everyone here had the same recurring dream: they were trying to call someone and couldn’t get through. She had that dream every night: trying to call Alexey on his cell phone but he was out of area. It was a relief to know everyone had the same dream.

  Her cell was for first-time offenders. Half were twentysomething girls, virtually all in for drugs. They didn’t know what to do with themselves. They didn’t know how to have a proper conversation; they just watched MTV and TNT and gossiped, but when Yana talked to them they all began to say how much they missed their parents. They had never had a relationship with them and now they missed them. There was an eighteen-year-old, Lara from Ukraine, who had been busted for a sack of weed her boyfriend had given her to take over the Ukraine-Russia border. She followed Yana everywhere. “What should I do with myself?” she would ask, over and over. At night she would come and stare at Yana lying in her bunk. Yana would wake and ask: “What are you doing?”

  “I tried to read but I keep on getting these thoughts in my head.”

  The other half of the women were in their forties and accountants; they were in for white collar crimes like Yana. The elder women would fuss around the twenty-year-olds: “Make sure you wash the cups” and “don’t swear.” Most of the older women had worked in small businesses: estate agents, travel companies. It wasn’t the thing to do to ask what exactly others were in for, and of course they all said they were “innocent,” but after a while a couple of them told Yana what had happened. The companies had been fiddling taxes, but the male bosses fled the country in time to avoid getting caught, and it was the female accountants who went to prison. After all, their signatures were on everything. The women had been doing nothing more illegal than any other business in the country, the same double bookkeeping every small company needed to do if it wanted to survive. But either the tax police needed to fill some arrest quotas, or they wanted to scare someone else, someone bigger, and needed to make an example, so they had gone after these companies. Still other women were sure the hits on their companies had been ordered by rivals or bureaucrats who wanted to bankrupt them and then take over their companies. This was called “reiding” and was the most common form of corporate takeover in Russia, with more than a hundred recorded cases a year. Business rivals or bureaucrats—they have long become the same thing—pay the security services to have the head of a company arrested; while they are in prison their documents and registrations are seized, the company is re-registered under different owners, and by the time the original owners are released, the company has been bought and sold and split up by new owners. These raids happened at every level, from the very top—where the Kremlin would arrest the owner of an oil company like Mikhail Kho-dorkovsky, then hand the company over to friends of the President—right down to local police chiefs taking over furniture stores. It was the right to do this that glued together the great “power vertical” that stretched from the President down to the lowliest traffic cop.

  Yana suspected this was what was happening to her. Of course she had heard of other companies being victims of “reiderstvo.” But she had always assumed they must have been guilty of something to be attacked. They must have done something wrong. Something. She felt stupid now to have fooled herself that way.

  The usual way out was a bribe. There was a whole network and industry of payoffs. Good “lawyers” were not those who could defend you in court—the verdicts were predetermined—but those who had the right connections to know whom to pay off in the judiciary and relevant ministry. It was a complex game; pay off the wrong person and you just wasted money. You had to find the real decision maker. And quickly a whole mass of middle men would begin to appear who want to persuade you that they, and only they, know how to pay off the right person. Yana knew her parents were looking for that person on the outside. They had found a “lawyer” who said he could help—he suggested she admit to the charges, and then he could get everything sorted. Meanwhile he told Yana’s parents to sell their apartment to pay for the bribe, which would be near a million dollars. She smelled a rat. Something was wrong. Her company had done nothing wrong; shouldn’t she stick to that? And what exactly was she meant to own up to? That she had traded what she traded? Own up to absurdity? If she even started to negotiate, it would be like giving away a part of her sanity, letting them own and dictate what the truth was. And then everything would start to slip.

  She asked for another lawyer. He said the same thing. These were the rules. She understood the rules, didn’t she?

  It was Galya who first made Yana think there might be something bigger going on, more than just a case of common “reiderstvo.” She had first met Galya at Petrovka 38, before her initial trial. She had been pushed into the cell, plump and trembling with tears. Over fifty. The sort of woman you see selling vegetables or hosiery at train stations. She was crying and spoke with a Ukrainian accent.

  Galya, it turned out, was a cashier at a pharmacy. There are little pharmacies at train stations. One morning the FDCS had come and arrested her for selling food additives. Food additives! Yana’s interest was piqued.

  “What’s your name?” asked Galya.

  “Yana.”

  “Yana Yakovleva?”

  How could she know her name? Yana had heard of stool pigeons. Was this one?

  “When I was arrested,” Galya explained, “the cops were talking to each other and said I was being taken down under the same law as Yana Yakovleva. They’re all talking about you.”

  • • •

  Though she was only just starting to work out the full picture, this was why Yana was in prison.

  In 1950, in Leningrad, near the port, Viktor Cherkesov was born into a family of dock workers. A working-class kid, he joined the army straight out of school. It is there he is suspected to have joined the KGB; with no connections, it was a way up the ladder. The KGB sent him to study law at St. Petersburg University, in the same class as the young man who would become the President, who became his friend. Like the President he studied poorly. In 1975 Cherkesov joined the fifth department of the Leningrad KGB, which was in charge of arresting dissidents and nonconformist thinkers. For some KGB men, working in the fifth department was considered an embarrassment, compared to the heroics of real espionage. In the 1970s Cherkesov worked on cases rounding up, breaking, and jailing members of underground religious and feminist groups. He became head of the department. In 1982 he personally headed up the investigation of the Soviet Union’s first independent trade union, SMOT. Vyacheslav Dolinin was one of those he interrogated:

  Cherkesov was a gray, dim man. His only strength was he could lie without blushing. When a superior would come in, he would leap up instantly, he was very obsequious and dependent on them [remembers Dolinin]. He would threaten us: “we’re not beating you, though we can use such measures.” But he was not especially vicious and not a great detective. He didn’t manage to find out the bulk of my dissident activities.

  Igor Bunich was a witness in several of Cherkesov’s cases between 1980 and 1982:

  During interrogation Cherkesov followed the principle laid down by Alexander Shuvalov, the head of the secret police under the Empress Elizabeth in the eighteenth century: “Always keep the accused confused.” At the start of an interrogation Cherkesov would lay out three pieces of paper on the table in front of a dissident. Each was a law the dissident could be charged with—all worded in a very similar way but carrying quite different punishments:

  Law 190, “spreading anti-Soviet ideas,” usually punishable with an enforced stay in a psychiatric ward;

  Law 70, on “anti-Soviet propaganda,” usually carrying five years’ imprisonment; and

  Law 64, on “treachery to the Soviet Union,” which carried the death penalty (firing squad).

  If the dissident cooperated and snitched, his case would be registered under Law 190, with a suspended sentence. If
you didn’t cooperate you would be charged under the other laws.

  Other dissidents he interrogated described how Cherkesov’s daughter would call during interrogations. He would pick up the phone, smile gently, and change his tone: “My pet, I’m interrogating now,” he would say. He had that ability all KGB men have, to split his personality at will.

  But Cherkesov was also a poor judge of history. In 1988, with perestroika in full swing, he launched an investigation into the new “Democratic Alliance,” a group of activists who were calling for the end of the USSR. It was the final case ever tried in the USSR under the antidissident “Law 70.” Cherkesov called a press conference saying he had discovered an important anti-Soviet conspiracy. The thing was a farce: the young activists were soon deputies in the Duma, and the law itself was rescinded. Within two years the USSR didn’t exist.

  After 1991 Cherkesov became head of the St. Petersburg KGB, supported by his friend, the future President, who was deputy head of the mayor’s office. When the young President moved to Moscow to become head of the FSB (the successor to the KGB), Cherkesov moved with him and became his deputy. The rumor in Moscow was that when the President was inaugurated, Cherkesov expected to become head of the FSB. But he was overlooked for Nikolaj Patrushev, also a graduate of the 1970s St. Petersburg KGB, but from the much more glamorous counterespionage department. The president gave Cherkesov the FDCS, the least important of the security organs. Starting in 2006 the FDCS launched a series of moves to capture the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries. Overnight a whole host of chemicals had their status changed from industrial or medical to narcotic. Pharmacies that traded in food additives were raided, veterinarians who gave ketamine to cats and horses were marched into police stations, and the heads of chemical companies like Yana were suddenly informed they were drug dealers. The plan was to “break” these industries. Yana was meant to swing from the gallows by the edge of the road, a warning to everyone of what would happen if they disagreed with the FDCS.

  • • •

  She had been there four months. Most of the time she would tell herself: “This is a game, a test”; that’s how she coped. But once every two months they would wake her at 5:00 a.m. and take her down to the basement to await her trip to court to see whether she would be granted bail.

  “Yesterday was the worst day,” she wrote in one of the letters to Alexey she never sent. “The worst point is when in a dark, concrete, completely closed space 20 people start smoking at the same time. It’s horrible. Waiting for the van and its cages, concrete, darkness, metal, handcuffs, smoke, smoke. It’s very hard to make yourself feel this is all a game and everyone around you are just actors.”

  After two hours they put the women into a prison van and drove them, as if in a school bus, to various courtrooms around Moscow. When she saw Moscow everything suddenly became real.

  “We drove along the Garden Ring. I could see people walking along the street, hurrying about their own business. And inside I screamed: ‘I will return. This world can’t survive without me. I will return and forget all that has happened. I will cross it out.’”

  And even more strongly she wanted to scream: “Pedestrians! Citizens! Stop! Help! Can’t you see me? I’m here.” Though of course she never did. And all passersby ever saw was a small prison van with dark, barred windows.

  At the court they put her in a cage again. Her parents were always there, but the last time Alexey hadn’t come. Her mother would always wear her best dress, which was a way of showing that their spirit hadn’t been crushed. They looked good, and thus they were strong. Yana would repeat to the judge that she had no idea why she was in prison; none of the charges made sense. The judge would nod and give her another two months, and they would bundle her out again.

  She had a new lawyer, Evgeny Chernousov. They had found him after he defended a few veterinarians in Yaroslavl against the FDCS. The vets had been charged with dealing ketamine, a drug they used as a painkiller for cats. Evgeny had managed to raise enough noise for the charges to be dropped. But there he had just gone up against provincial FDCS guys out to make a few quick bucks. Now he would be going against senior officials in a much bigger case. The plan was to make so much fuss it would become unprofitable for the FDCS to hold Yana: this was the opposite to what most prisoners did, which was to keep the case as quiet as possible and pay off the right person. Chernousov told Yana he would activate the human rights NGOs, business associations. He was a former cop himself, and he took on cases no one else would. He used to catch criminals, and now he liked to catch cops. He had served in Afghanistan and Ossetia, and it had done something to his head. More than anything he loved a fight against the odds, and he seemed tipsy a lot of the time. He told Yana not to lose hope.

  She was almost happy when they brought her back to prison after these excursions into reality. She knew that outside her parents and Chernousov were trying to change the world for her, but beyond giving direction to the overall plan there was nothing she could do from the inside. Her task was to stay sane. She had half a dozen fitness “students.” They would exercise in the morning, and then again in the afternoon during their “walk.” They would take old plastic bottles, fill them with grit, and use them as weights. They were getting better, slimming down. A couple had even stopped smoking. As the “trainer” she had a certain status, was allowed into the showers first. She even managed to convince the others to sometimes change the channel from TNT and MTV to the news. The trick was to keep herself busy all the time. Writing letters, reading newspapers, learning English, doing push-ups. Never a moment to spare. She had almost perfected this.

  There were several big NOs for all prisoners: never cry; never talk about the future or release; never, ever, talk about sex. But sex was on everybody’s mind. Tanya, an accountant on the bunk opposite her, would cut out pictures of men from magazines and put them beneath her pillow:

  “Maybe I’ll dream of one,” she would say quietly.

  Yana dreamt of Alexey every night. She would dream of his eyes when he had come to the FDCS headquarters to bring her bag. In her letters she worried he would forget about her: “Does that make me an egoist?” she wrote. “But the only way I can keep myself together is to know there’s someone waiting for me.”

  When she went into the yard for exercise she became aware, in a way she never had been when she was free, of smells: “In summer the two little trees in the yard smelled of heat and bread. Before I would go to a forest and not notice anything. Here there are just two thin trees yet how many impressions!”

  One time she was exercising in the yard with Sasha. Sasha owned a travel agency. She was a little younger than Yana, and they started talking about how they wanted children. They weren’t supposed to talk about things like that, and Yana wasn’t even sure how the conversation started. Sasha wanted two. Yana told her about Alexey and how she thought it was time to start a family, take a break from work. Sasha looked at her and said: “You’re thirty-five; it’s too late for children. There’s no way they’ll give you less than five years, that’s the very minimum. Once you’re in here that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty. Forget about kids. . . . ” Yana switched off and stopped listening to her and started doing star jumps so fast Sasha couldn’t keep up.

  Of those charged in Russia, 99 percent receive guilty verdicts. The women in Yana’s cell would return after their trials broken, all found guilty. Their sentences were worse than anyone could have imagined: five years for possession of one gram of cocaine; four years for faking a prescription; eleven years for working as a cashier at one of the country’s top construction companies whose owner had fallen out with someone in the Kremlin. They were often set up by their own lawyers: the lawyers would take the bribes, then use that as “evidence” that the prisoners were guilty (the bribes would then disappear). Yana’s prosecutor, the one who had told the court she was dangerous and had been in hiding, had a reputatio
n for being the fiercest.

  “I’m stronger than him,” she wrote to herself.

  She would scour the news for reports about herself. Chernousov had told her they were writing letters to Duma deputies; there had been meetings and small pickets where human rights activists had defended her. But in Russia you can protest all you like; it won’t change anything. You can scream and scream, but no one will hear you. There was one tiny paragraph about her in a liberal newspaper, and that was it.

  Every day new white collar prisoners were brought to the cell. The last was a woman who had just won an award in Cannes for having Russia’s best travel agency. “Soon,” wrote Yana, “prison will become like a University get together. Now I’m afraid again. What should I be preparing myself for? For the worst? Should I be saying good-bye to everyone? Time is passing and nothing is changing. I’m the same as the others. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor. This system grabs people off the street, from work, from home, and eats them up. And no one knows when it will happen to them.”

  Then one day, as they were watching the news, she suddenly saw a report about herself. Not on one of the Ostankino channels, but on a slightly smaller one with an “opposition” reputation though actually owned by one of the President’s oldest friends. There were five hundred people on Pushkin Square protesting against her imprisonment. There were posters with her face on them that said “freedom to Yana Yakovleva.” A relatively famous musician played a resistance song on a stage. Chernousov was making a speech. The reporter said: “The FDCS appears to be arresting people who have nothing to do with drug dealing at all.”