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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  As I am coming out of TNT toward evening, the neon lamps on the sushi bars are already lighting up dark mountains of dirty acid sludge: the chemicals the city puts in grit burn the paws of stray dogs. You can hear them whimper as they huddle by the warm pipes along the buildings. Two pork-faced cops, whom Muscovites have taken to calling “werewolves in uniform,” patrol the corner. I try not to gawk and walk past in the Moscow style, face down and furious. The main thing is not to catch their eye—one of my many registrations has expired. But they can still smell the fear on me—belching out the phrase that is their mark of power: “Documents: Now!” I know the script. They shepherd me toward the darkness of a courtyard. Then comes the ultimate Moscow transaction, the slipping of the bribe, a 500-ruble note already placed that morning among the pages of my passport (the rate has been going up as the economy worsens). But never offer money directly. Paying bribes requires a degree of delicacy. Russians have more words for “bribe” than Eskimos do for “snow.” I use my favorite formulation: “May I use this opportunity to show a sign of my respect for you?” “Of course you may,” the werewolves say, smiling suddenly, and slip the cash under their policeman’s caps. All they ever wanted was some respect.

  And though I still tremble quietly at the act, I have become good at this.

  MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAMS

  An advertisement hangs on huge billboards over the city: a single, handsome, male eye staring out of a dark room through a crack in a door, both spying on the passersby and imploring them to release him. The advertisement is for one of Grigory’s companies, office furniture (black sells best) to fill up the just-built offices of the new Moscow. At thirtysomething, Grigory is one of Moscow’s young self-made multimillionaires, one of the boys who became rich in a blink during the 1990s, when being an entrepreneur, and not a bureaucrat, was the thing to do.

  Moscow knows Grigory best through his great parties: oases where we escape the barons and werewolves for a night. Tonight’s event is in honor of Grigory’s marriage. He has taken over a mini-Versailles-like palace for the occasion. Near the entrance to the park teams of makeup artists from Moscow’s film studios dress up the guests in motion picture costumes: tonight’s theme is “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The same crowd follows Grigory around from week to week, re-creating itself for his latest whim. Inside the park trapeze artists on invisible ropes swoop down and through the trees; synchronized swimmers dressed as mermaids with shining silver tails flip and dive in the dark lake. Geysers shoot up from the water: as the droplets fall they’re lit up to create a rainbow in the night. Everyone wonders: Where are the bride and groom? A spotlight illuminates the lake. Grigory and his bride appear on opposite sides, on separate little boats made up like tortoise shells, both dressed in white. The tortoise shells move magically toward each other (pushed, I later learn, by frogmen). The boats meet in the middle; the lovers join hands and step barefoot on the water. They do not sink. Suspended on the lake, they turn and walk across the water toward us, their path illuminated by lasers. We gasp at the miracle and all applaud. The effect is achieved with a secret walkway installed specially under the lake, but it is still divine.

  But when Monday comes Grigory will return to a world of corrupt officials demanding bribes. The world of businessmen is shrinking. Even the poster for Grigory’s company seems to suggest a secret social edge: Is the eye peeking through the door a reference to “Big Brother is watching you”?

  I first met Grigory through an old university friend, Karine. Back home I’d remembered Karine as wearing sandals and tie-dyed skirts, forever getting her curls in her eyes. Then she went to Moscow and was transformed: her hair up, back bare, designer heels replacing Birkenstocks. She’d changed after meeting some Russian guy. That was Grigory. When I first came to Moscow she introduced us. He was living in one of the new skyscrapers, his penthouse perched over the erupting city. The apartment had been specially designed for Grigory and was featured in glossy architecture magazines: open plan, all-white, a lot of plastic. A vision of the future—or maybe a lunatic asylum. Grigory would pace it with the walk common to many of Moscow’s newly rich: a confident strut with the odd, sudden alarmed glances. He was small and lithe, with the eternally young face of a choir boy.

  Looking around, I noticed the apartment seemed to have no signs of personal history: no old books, clothes, silverware, photographs. As if Grigory had emerged out of a void.

  With time I found out more about him.

  He grew up in Tatarstan. His dad was just another Soviet oil worker, a small cog in the great state energy machine. Growing up the young Grigory excelled at math and physics, the type of quiet boy who would spend hours on the toilet reading chess books, forgetting where he was, learning grand masters’ games by heart. (I played him once; he beat me in ten moves.) His talents were quickly spotted, and in the 1980s he was dispatched to a special math and physics college in Moscow, to be taught by Nobel Prize winners, with others being crunched and molded into crack intellectual troops to glorify the Soviet Empire. It was perestroika, and the Soviet Union was creaking, swaying. Films and books and music from the West were starting to seep into the new black markets. Everyone pieced together his own version of the West, his own collage of freedom. Grigory got into Freddy Mercury, later films by Pasolini and Jarman, Dadaists, Greenaway—as far away from Soviet Tatarstan as you could possibly go. He was finishing his studies as the Soviet Union collapsed. For an older generation, for men like the President, the collapse of the empire was tragic. But for a twentysomething like Grigory, it meant that suddenly anything was possible.

  Grigory began by making his own computers. They sold well. Soon he had a team of other students working with him. Got involved with banking. Then came the new world of threats, bodyguards. At the parties, people would whisper he was lucky to have made it through alive.

  “The worst is when people owe you money,” Grigory told me once as we drove through the woods outside of Moscow in a new, silver, sports car. “As long as you owe them, they’ll never kill you. But if they owe you they’d rather kill than pay. I dream of being able to go outside without bodyguards. A normal life.” (The bodyguard’s Jeep was visible in the rearview mirror as we drove.)

  “What is it you want from Moscow, Peter?” he asked me another time, as we were drinking bright blue cocktails.

  “Well, you know, it’s a booming city. It’s up and up and up.”

  “Only a foreigner can think that. This city devours itself.”

  And then once, when he was thinking of resuming his studies, but this time in political economy: “There must be some way of working out how to make Russia work. Must be!”

  Whenever I see Grigory he is accompanied by Sergey, who directs the human scenery around his boss: he brings artists, directors, actors, and foreigners so Grigory feels he’s at the center of a bohemian feast. A personal tailor makes Sergey’s clothes: capes, knee-high boots, tweed breeches, the cultivated getup of a twenty-first-century necromancer. He has a way of making his pupils shrink and dilate in hypnotic pulsations. He drives a green vintage Jag (whose very appearance is some sort of wizardry in this black-Jeep-and-Hummer-dominated town).

  Sergey and Grigory studied together at the math and physics college, shared rooms. But after school, while Grigory had become a millionaire, Sergey had tried to be an artist. He discontinued that and joined a cult. He returned talking mystic riddles about the “materialization of dreams” and “re-dividing reality into segments you can travel through.”

  “I’m Grigory’s healer, his wizard,” Sergey likes to say. “The parties are mystery plays.”

  Sometimes Grigory smiles at Sergey’s mystical obsessions, but with every week he seems to need him more, waiting for Sergey to take him by the hand and escape to a better world straight out of the movies they grew up on.

  One evening Sergey delivers an invitation for another Grigory party. Guests are told to prepare for
the art project of the year. The impossibly fashionable boys are all dressed in black this time. Grigory enters, and his court photographer (he has a stutter and is the only one here drinking as heavily as me) puts down his cocktail and scampers over. A burst of photographs: this is the Moscow way—all the rich have their own photographers. They take them on holidays, to parties, to family gatherings; you’ve only made it when your life becomes a magazine.

  Grigory comes over and we toast the evening.

  “Tonight is when we reveal the true face of Russia,” says Grigory. “I present Sklyarov!”

  A light comes on, illuminating a stage at the far end of the club. A man with a face like a gargoyle sits on a throne, dressed in tsarist robes. Rocking, he spits and mutters. A bulge on his forehead sticks out like a small, second head, pushing the eyes down into dark slits. The eyes dart around the room like a trapped animal’s. This is Sklyarov. Sergey had picked him up outside a railroad bar in a polluted provincial town. Sklyarov was the local madman and a prodigious scribbler: conspiracy theories, nonsense political utopias, frenetic sketches of the ideal city. When Sergey showed Grigory the scribbles, he was inspired: this was the true voice of the new Russia. They flew Sklyarov to Moscow (he’d never flown before and soiled his seat), put him up in the best hotel on the highest floor, and told him people in the highest echelons of power were interested in his ideas. Tonight they are launching Sklyarov’s book, his mendicant vision for the future of the country. Sergey introduces the mendicant as a great Russian prophet, a future leader of the nation.

  Sklyarov begins to read extracts from his book. His hands tremble as he holds it; it’s the hands that are the most appalling, caked with layers of factory soot, dirt, blood, the scum of railway toilets. The book opens with a description of life in his hometown, which in tsarist times had the most apt name of Yama, literally “the pit.” Sklyarov, frightened at first, reads fast:

  The psychological situation in Yama has become critical, acts of psychological violence are on the increase. The violence takes place on the pathological, material, political, moral, financial, and other levels. There is an increase in corruption among bureaucrats aimed at destabilizing the psychological arsenal of the people.

  The thing works like a nonsense satire of Moscow. The impossibly fashionable boys and girls start to relax, applaud, congratulate Grigory on the art project of the year. Sklyarov reads on; the next chapter deals with his autobiography:

  As regards the story of my own life, in all its facts, numbers, events, trials, tortures, pluses, minuses, flights, falls, ravelings, unravelings, realities, realisms, points of view, versions, dark, light and colored phases: I was born at four o’clock and twenty minutes, in the year 1972, in the town of Yama, in the then-Soviet Union. I was raised in the tradition, order and instructions of Communism, though my soul always rebelled against them. On October 28, 1979, I was made into a Young Pioneer. I took my Young Pioneer badge and flushed it down the toilet with the words: “Maybe you, toilet, can be a young pioneer.”

  Grigory stares up at the gargoyle. As the mendicant tells his story I start to notice how uncannily he and Grigory reflect each other: born in the same period, both children of one system they disbelieved, now in conflict with a new system ruled by corrupt bureaucrats. Grigory feels that he lives in an asylum, rebuilds his penthouse to look like one. Sklyarov spent all his formative years in real ones—his asylum diary takes up the bulk of his autobiography.

  Sergey is as ever on Grigory’s shoulder, smiling with his success. After the event the three link arms and pose for photographs; in this city they rhyme.

  But every week Grigory seems to need rebirths ever more intensely. Every time I see him he is wearing a new costume, transforming himself for another of his fancy dress evenings—one night an elf, then Hitler, Rasputin—escaping, changing, and mutating, clipping his hair short, growing it longer, brushing it to the side, then forward. (Only the bodyguards stay the same. Their boss is an eccentric, and I can never tell whether they hate or love him for it.) Sergey consults lunar calendars, arranges parties to match zodiacal principles. When Aquarius is in the sky he makes a deal with those who run the Moscow zoo and takes over the dolphinarium at night, the partygoers diving and swimming between slippery, pretty girls and dolphins. When the moon is new the theme of the party is “White.” Grigory, carrying a white rabbit in a cage, announces “tonight is all about my rebirth, a new me.” One week Grigory works as a waiter in a café (“I want to find out what it’s like to be a normal person,” he tells me), the next he’s writing plays, flying so fast no role can stick to him, and all around him the city is churning, the demolition ball swinging, and Gotham-gothic towers erupting. And now the bully bureaucrats and Chekists are closing in, and on the news there is always the same message: “Our great President has brought stability.” But all I see happening is that the brilliant boys like Grigory are being eaten.

  Television is also increasingly affected. Originally TNT’s formula for success was to remake hit Western reality shows like The Apprentice or Dragon’s Den. They were successful across the world—why not here? But when TNT made Russian versions, they flopped. The premise for most Western shows is what we in the industry call “aspirational”: someone works hard and is rewarded with a wonderful new life. The shows celebrate the outstanding individual, the bright extrovert. But in Russia that type ends up in jail or exile. Russia rewards the man who operates from the shadows, the gray apparatchik, the master of the politique de couloir. The shows that worked here were based on a different set of principles. By far the biggest success was Posledny Geroi (“The Last Hero”), a version of Survivor, a show based on humiliation and hardship.

  Slowly Grigory, like thousands of other Russians, starts to discreetly shift to the safety and serenity of London. Every year he spends less and less time in Moscow. Away from Russia he settles down. Has kids. He posts photos of his new life on his Facebook page: at trance festivals in Arizona, among the snows of Iceland, in the Scottish highlands. Grigory now feels calm enough to ditch the bodyguards. And though he has all the money in the world he likes to travel across west London in big red public transport buses.

  • • •

  For all their restoration hedonism, there can be something so forced about the glittering whirligig of the grander, gaudier Moscow nights. One time there is even a “Putin Party” in Heaven, one of the clubs where Oliona does her hunting. Strippers writhe around poles chanting: “I want you, Prime Minister.” (The President is briefly Prime Minister at the time, though still actually in charge, still the real President, just dressed up as the Prime Minister as at a masquerade.) The mood at the “Putin Party” is a mix of feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony: the sucking up to the master completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated, twenty-first-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross him, we would quite quickly be dead.

  So, midway during nights in the baroque clubs with their Forbeses and girls, at around 2:00 a.m., I tend to take my leave, pull on my coat and scarf, and slide and stumble across black ice to one of Mitya Borisov’s bars. In earlier years I went to his little basement bar on Potapoffsky, then later to his one-room place on Herzen Street. There might be many of the same faces I’d seen earlier at the more glamorous events: Borisov’s bars aren’t “underground” places, and they’re not particularly cheap. The food ranges from okay to abhorrent, the booze is warm and often the wrong bottle. Borisov himself may well be there, but he has been drunk for so many years that his puffy, drooping face stares past you when you walk in even if you once swore friendship. He’s too tight ever to have installed air-conditioning, and the bars are such a smog of sour Russian cigarettes it makes a chain-smoker choke. Even so, as soon as you are through the door you can breathe more easily than in all the other places.

  Borisov’s bars tap into the only unbroken traditi
on in Moscow, that of Soviet dissidents and nonconformists, a tradition that started off in Soviet kitchens and didn’t have to reinvent itself after 1991 because it had never pretended to “speak Bolshevik” beforehand. It just continued out of the kitchens and into Borisov’s bars. Borisov’s father, a literature professor, served time (he’ll tell you the story around 4:00 a.m.), and his first venue was an old apartment where you brought your own bottles and read your own poems. The clientele now range from an older generation in their sixties to their children and grandchildren. There’s no face control, but Borisov might threaten to throw you out if you can’t tell a decent rhyme from a bad one.

  During the night I make my way from one of Borisov’s bars to the next. He’s put a bunch of places on one street so you never have to leave this world. There’s Kvartira 44, decorated like a 1970s dissident apartment, with the same books you would have found in your parents’ homes. (We’re back drinking in kitchens—though now you have to pay for the experience.) There’s Jean-Jacques, themed as a French bistro, John Donne as an English pub. But they don’t feel like hollow pastiche so much as witty acts of imaginary emigration, like visiting a White Russian émigré locale in 1920s Paris or a nineteenth-century London pub full of exiled antitsarists. Between darkness and dawn we all want to escape from the President’s Russia.

  And if the mood is still with me the next day, I like to head down to the big yellow concert hall on Herzen Street and order a large Armenian brandy from the bar in the grand, scuffed marble foyer, with a little slice of lemon on the side (always insist on a fresh one). I avoid the stalls and stride right upstairs and take my seat among the gods with the pale, intense conservatoire students and the slight spinsters, usually music teachers, whose breath smells of brandy and who are quite convinced these concerts are just for them. And when I get to my seat and finally look around, I notice something unusual, namely the light. Most classical concert rooms only have artificial lighting. But here on Herzen Street there are great, arched windows that show the sky. Only the sky; you don’t see any roofs. And if your timing is lucky it will just be approaching sunset and the sky will be turning brandy-tinted. As the music starts I always have the sense the concert hall is somehow lifting. And if the wind is blowing and the clouds are moving fast, you get the extraordinary feeling that you’re flying on a zeppelin powered by brandy, lemon, wind, sky, and music.