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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  She met Alexander at a club (though no one can remember whether in New York or in Moscow). He was one of the handsomest Russian tycoons on the scene, and she fell blissfully in love.

  Luba, a former Miss Chelyabinsk, knew her during the affair. Luba’s Moscow apartment is drowning in her collection of cuddly bears. A little pug yaps throughout our conversation. “I never had toys when I was small,” says Luba. “Now I’m making up for it. I have over two thousand bears. Every city I visit I buy new ones.”

  She tells me about Alexander.

  “He’s not that young, but he is gorgeous. Girls drop at his feet. He’s been with so many of my friends. All of them perfect.”

  Friends, experienced models like Luba, warned Ruslana not to fall in love. But she was certain this was the real thing. She wanted marriage, children, a steady home.

  “That was the thing about Ruslana,” says Luba. “There was something childish about her. She believed. And she liked that he was older, she missed her father.”

  Ruslana told friends Alexander wanted to marry her. Introduced him to her mother. They lived together.

  When Alexander dumped Ruslana she kept on texting him, hoping for an answer. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Lost weight. She would ask friends to persuade him to change his mind. Her Facebook page was full of poems of unrequited love:

  I gave love and forgave hurt,

  Hid pain in my heart in anticipation of the miracle.

  You left again, leaving in return

  A castle of pink dreams and ruined walls.

  And:

  Don’t be silent my love, don’t be silent.

  My soul yearns for you.

  Turn back. Glance back.

  My bright little sun.

  I can’t breathe without you.

  In the end Alexander’s assistant contacted her and told her not to bother him again.

  And just as suddenly as Alexander dumped her, Ruslana’s career stalled. The calls dried up.

  “She couldn’t understand,” says Luba. “Suddenly she was one of a thousand girls. A no one.”

  She went back to New York to look for more work in the last months before her death. There was a new boyfriend, Mark, a Russian luxury car dealer in New York, but better known as a guy who parties with all the models.

  “I’m probably the only girl Mark hasn’t had an affair with,” says Luba. Ruslana had fallen for another playboy, though this time a much poorer one. “That was Ruslana’s problem,” repeats Luba. “She believed.”

  • • •

  Elena Obukhova used to be a model. Now she’s a psychologist. “Look at these girls, they’re all lost. Moscow is full of them. I’d have lots of clients: it’s a very specific journey. I would understand them better than a regular analyst.”

  Elena too was discovered by chance, on the street in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where, like Ruslana in Kazakhstan, she was one of the blonde ethnic Russian girls left after the empire fell. We walk through a spring Moscow, all the men looking around at the giant blonde beside me.

  When we come to shoot the interview she’s different than the younger girls I’ve interviewed: she has a language to talk about herself in, stares down the camera instead of searching in the air for words.

  “I was fifteen and I remember listening in at the kitchen door. The scout was trying to convince my parents to let me go to Milan. I couldn’t understand why he had chosen me, just like that on the street. I thought I was too tall, ugly, everyone at school would tease me. And now I was listening in at the door, just praying my parents would say yes. Italy! I hadn’t been to Moscow, let alone Italy. And my poor father, he couldn’t understand what was going on, he thought a model and fashion designer was the same thing.”

  Her parents let her go eventually, though only after she had finished school. She was sixteen going on seventeen when she reached Milan.

  “Oh, I was so confused. People were nice and nasty at the same time. I mean, they talked nicely but said nasty things. I had thought everyone would be fascinated by me, I would be like a movie star. But it’s the opposite. No one cares about your personality. You become a picture. That was hard, because growing up I had been used to talking about myself, gesticulating, shouting, laughing. The first thing you learn in modeling is to put on a mask, strike an array of poses, pouts, smiles. And before you know it you’ve lost the ability to talk normally, laugh naturally. But you’re sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, everything inside is boiling over, but your profession is all about suppressing that.”

  “And the men?”

  “Oh the men. They flock around. You’re a prize—but they’re sleeping with the girl on the photo, not you, and you begin to become your image and just become even more lost. And then there is a very common type you come across whose life is dedicated to making models fall in love with them. They’re these pseudo-romantics, who imitate a tortured inner world and con models into romances, one after another, which no doubt makes them feel a little more self-worth. It seems all perfect with cars and private planes and flowers and you begin to think it’s real, and when you hit reality you are just dashed to bits. And you get to this point where you’re so confused as to who you are, what’s real and what’s fake, that, and I realize this sounds odd, but you begin to feel the only way you can become real again is to kill yourself. My method was hanging. I stood on the windowsill and jumped off. The rope must have given way, and I came to hours later bruised but alive. I just felt shame, so much shame.”

  But when I put forward that love and career were the catalyst for Ruslana’s suicide, her friends and mother all turn to me and say in a chorus:

  “Not Ruslana!”

  “She wasn’t like that!”

  “She wouldn’t kill herself over some guy!”

  “She was looking forward to university, didn’t care if modeling was behind her. None of that mattered to her!”

  Back in the United States the drug tests we sent out have returned: Ruslana had no signs of illegal drug abuse over the last months. But neither had she been drugged with anything that could have knocked her out.

  But the more Ruslana’s family and friends interrogate the police account of her death, the more skeptical they become. Why didn’t the police look in the actual building that she jumped from? Why didn’t they specify the actual place she leapt from? How could she have jumped 8.5 meters? How? She wrote incessantly—why no note? She’d hinted to friends she was owed money from old contracts; could one of those have led to some sort of conflict?

  I help the mother find a postmortem expert to go over the evidence again. He asks for samples of Ruslana’s organs: histology tests will show whether her organs had stopped functioning before she hit the ground. He will reinspect the autopsy to see if it yields fresh clues.

  • • •

  A few months pass. I get a call. Another model has killed herself, this time in Kiev, Ukraine. She was Ruslana’s friend; her name was Anastasia Drozdova. She too threw herself from a high-rise block of flats.

  Luba knew both girls well. She chain-smokes backstage at a fashion show, chews her lips: “First Ruslana, now Anastasia. I’m wondering which of my friends will be next?”

  I phone TNT: “There’s been another suicide. I’m on my way to meet the parents now.”

  The producers at TNT are cautious. “Two suicides is a little depressing for us. We need positive stories. Please keep that in mind.”

  I sit with Olga, the mother of the second girl, in a Kiev café. She’s slight, a former ballerina. A waitress takes our orders, the process torturous: how to decide whether you want extra cream when you’ve just lost your daughter?

  “I got home late. She wasn’t there. I found a note: ‘Forgive me for everything. Cremate me.’ I ran to the police station. A cop said casually: ‘You the mother of that girl who threw herself from the block of flats?’ I di
dn’t know what to say. They showed me a bag with trainers. They were hers. Then there could be no doubt.”

  Back at the mother’s apartment she shows me home video of Anastasia as a child. The apartment is in a regular 1960s panel block, but inside it’s done up nicely with new floors and a European, open kitchen. Anastasia paid for it as a present to her mother. When she was growing up they had shared bunks in the dormitories where dancers were housed by provincial ballets. The father had left when Anastasia was young. The mother had sent Anastasia to ballet school.

  “At least she would have one profession to fall back on,” says Olga. “During the USSR being a ballerina was a steady job. That’s less the case now.”

  The home video shows Anastasia practicing ballet when she was fourteen. She’s taller than the others, awkward, trips during her pirouettes. Olga winces at her mistakes; she herself is petite, every movement light and exact.

  “She was a little uncoordinated, too tall and gangly to be a dancer. She was picked on by teachers; it was all one long humiliation. But everyone would tell her she should try modeling, her lankiness would be perfect there. She would nag: ‘Let me try, let me try.’ I made her wait until she graduated and then I couldn’t hold her back.”

  In Moscow Anastasia placed in the top five of the Elite Model Look competition. Her ballet training meant she had ideal posture and movement. She was flown to the all-European tournament in Tunis, and ranked in the top fifteen.

  When Olga saw her get off the plane from Tunis, she knew that was it, her daughter was a different person now: “She had seen a new world, yachts and cars and wealth I could never give her. What can you say to a child who’s set to be earning more than you? What could I teach her?”

  In the first years Anastasia would return home bubbling over with stories about Europe, all the people she had seen and all the parties that she’d been to. She decided to make Moscow her base. And slowly she changed.

  “She began to be more, how shall I say, materialistic,” says Olga.

  The mother’s friends are less gentle on the daughter:

  “‘I need a man with money, with a top car, who can give me a house and holidays,’ that’s how she began to talk,” says Rudolf, a former Ukrainian high-jump champion and Olympic bronze medalist, who dated Olga. “She could be very specific in her desires. But in a way I could understand her. A model is like a sportsman. You have to grab everything when you are young.”

  Anastasia was trying to play the Moscow game. She had affairs with wealthy married men who promised to house her in smart places on Rublevka. Anastasia would tell friends she was “made.” Her favorite phrase was “I’m going to cling on in Moscow, cling on!”

  But she wasn’t any good at playing that game at all. She kept falling in love, wanted to be the only focus of a man’s attention. But she was in relationships a priori based on other rules. And so she was always in a muddle and getting hurt. Her relationships with married men kept breaking down; she would be housed in some penthouse and then would find herself out again, crashing with friends or sharing small flats with other girls. Her modeling career went sidewise. It wasn’t a disaster, but neither did she become a cover girl. By the time she was twenty-four, the age of her death, she knew her career in modeling was ending.

  In the last year of her life her behavior started to change radically. She became aggressive. On her last trips to Milan, in the spring before her death, she would miss castings, get into fights with other girls. Her agents would get calls from their Italian partners complaining about her behavior. They couldn’t understand it; she had always been professional.

  When Anastasia came home that final summer she was unrecognizable. Terribly thin—her hips just eighty-two centimeters. Silent, with her head down. She looked like she knew some awful secret but couldn’t tell anyone about it. She had always been the buoyant life of any party; in restaurants she would laugh so loud people at other tables would turn around and stare. Now she wouldn’t leave her room. In 40-degree heat she sat scrunched up under a duvet. She complained of stomach cramps and switched off her phone. She didn’t wash her hair for a whole week. When she had an interview for a new job she broke down when she couldn’t decide what she should wear. She walked around the flat, rocking, repeating, “there’s no way out.”

  “It wasn’t her, it was some different person,” says Olga. “She’d always told me what was going on in her life. Now she was silent.”

  After Anastasia’s death her mother searched her room. It was strange walking inside without her there. She didn’t really know what she was looking for. A diary, clues, anything. She came across a folder she’d never seen before. There were two “diplomas” that looked like university diplomas, but the name of the institution caught Olga’s eye: the “Rose of the World.” The Rose of the World? What sort of name was that?

  One diploma was for passing the foundation course, the other for the advanced course. There were papers with Anastasia’s writing on them—saying how she must transform, change herself, become a different person. There were pages and pages on which she listed the worst traits in her personality: laziness, lack of aims, drugs, the wrong men. And there was a postcard, with a note addressed to Anastasia:

  “When you understand who and what you really are, then everyone around you recognizes you without a word of opposition. Anastasia: you’re on your way. Your lullaby is ‘winter’s end.’”

  What did it mean, “You are on your way?”

  Now Olga remembered the Rose of the World. A year and a half before Anastasia had mentioned that she had started to attend what she referred to as “psychological trainings” in Moscow.

  When Olga asked her what went on there, Anastasia was vague—something about remembering childhood experiences. Telling all your secrets. She explained that she had signed a contract promising not to tell anyone what went on at “the Rose.” But she explained that these courses would transform her, perfect her; if she could pass them she could do anything, anything at all.

  Olga told Anastasia she was a healthy girl and didn’t need any self-perfecting. She should stop.

  Olga thought little of Rose of the World back then, but now she wanted to know more. After the funeral she took Anastasia’s friends aside to ask whether they knew anything.

  Did Olga know Anastasia had spent another year at the Rose of the World? they asked. She’d been going until a few months before her death.

  No, Olga answered, she hadn’t known. Anastasia had told her she’d stopped going over a year ago.

  Did Olga know how much money she’d spent there?

  No.

  Thousands of dollars, thousands and thousands. And did Olga know Ruslana went there, too? They went there together. Ruslana stayed three months, Anastasia over a year.

  “We think it might be a sect,” said the model friends. “Though we can’t quite be sure.”

  Olga started to look online.

  “Trainings for personality development” is how the Rose of the World describes itself. “Our seminars will teach you how to find your true self, realize your goals and achieve material wealth,” its Web site states—lit up by photographs of happy, shiny people standing on the top of a hill, shot from the bottom up, their arms out embracing a strong wind so it looks like they’re almost flying.

  The Rose also specializes in corporate training.

  Olga went through Anastasia’s papers from the Rose. She found the names of two men mentioned there and matched their numbers to Anastasia’s phone (a gold-plated Vertu, given to her by some lover). One number didn’t answer; another did. When he picked up the phone and Olga told him who she was and what had happened to Anastasia, he was shocked. But, no, he didn’t think the Rose was that important. He couldn’t say exactly what happened there, he also had signed some papers, but he mentioned there was lots of crying. He had only finished the first basic course before he quit. An
astasia had stayed much longer.

  On Internet forums and in chat rooms there is some discussion, though not much, about the Rose. A couple of people write that it changed their lives forever and they are transformed. Others write that it’s a con. Still others write that they think it might be dangerous. The posts in the chat rooms are all anonymous.

  • • •

  When I tell my editors at TNT about the Rose they aren’t particularly excited.

  “Find out anything you need, Piiitrrr. But why should our audience care about life-trainings for Muscovites?” says one producer.

  “How much did you say they cost? 1,000 a go?” adds another.

  “How does that relate to a provincial single mother? Our audience? It’s not part of her world, nor is it anything she aspires to or understands. Keep it brief,” says the third.

  “But what if it is a sect?” I answer back.

  “Russian sects are crazed freaks on communes in Siberia. What do this lot do: corporate trainings? That’s not like any Russian sect we know. And Piiitrrr, we still need more positive stories.”

  • • •

  Everyone who has been at the Rose has pledged themselves to secrecy. I need someone to go in and blend with the girls there, make friends with the employees and those who have been there a while. There must be some gossip since two students have now died. I want someone Russian, preferably the same age as the girls.

  I approach an undercover reporter, Alex (not his real name), who is excited to help out. Alex is meant to be the best in the business, has penetrated gangs and corrupt state institutions. We pay just under $1,000 for the foundation course. It will last three days. After each day of the trainings Alex will meet with me and Vita Holmogorova, a professional psychologist and member of the Russian Association of Psychotherapists, to go through all the events and thoughts. Based on Alex’s testimony, recordings, and interviews I do with present and former adepts and the psychotherapist’s analysis, I slowly start to piece together what happened to Ruslana and Anastasia at the Rose.