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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  “Christmas?” I asked.

  “Yes, Christmas is now on Vissarion’s birthday.”

  Many of Vissarion’s followers were former minor bohemians, actors, rock musicians, painters. They were educated, but now they mostly read Vissarion’s works. Vissarion had written a New New Testament, in which he had united all the different religions (Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Judaism) into one meta-story. Just as Surkov had gathered together all political models to create a grand pastiche, or Moscow’s architecture tried to fit all styles of building onto one, Vissarion had created a collage of all religions. His followers would study transcendental meditation in the morning and whirl like dervishes in the afternoon. Vissarion also provided them with textbook drawings to explain everything from reincarnation to evil (see diagram, page 180).

  On Christmas day Vissarion came down from his house, perched highest on the mountain, to meet his followers. He was dressed in flowing velvet robes, like he was playing “Jesus Christ Superstar” in an amateur production. He sat down at the front of a great wooden hall and answered questions. Someone was having problems with his wife; Vissarion told him to listen to her more. Had they tried talking about their childhoods to each other?

  “Can’t you see his wisdom? Isn’t he the heir to the new consciousness?” his followers asked me.

  We weren’t the first, or the last, to film Vissarion. Camera crews from around the world went up and down the mountain near Abakan regularly. Every few years Vissarion would announce the coming of the apocalypse. When it didn’t come he would tell his followers it was thanks to their prayers and efforts. No one from the Abode of Dawn protested at this. They enjoyed it. And the TV crews coming to the mountain only confirmed their sense of self-importance.

  Closer to Moscow, Sergey, Grigory’s “wizard,” took me to meet Boris Zolotov, his guru and the author of The Golden Way. We drove for miles out of Moscow into the murmuring Russian forest. It was night when we arrived. “The Golden Way” was painted (in English) on the road, illuminated briefly by our fog-lights. An arrow pointed the way to a disused holiday resort for Soviet factory workers: a few low, prefab buildings fenced in by concrete walls and spiky wire. We headed for the largest building. In the green corridor was a huge pile of shoes: dirty sneakers, high heels, winter boots, sandals. We left ours, too. Through the double doors I could hear laughter and little shrieks.

  Inside was a disused gymnasium. It was bright. Most people in the room were lying down, and everywhere was the smell of unwashed feet; people had been here for days. They lay in a half-moon shape around a stage, upon which, on a swiveling armchair, sat a round, grey-haired man. He wore a yellow shell suit. This was the teacher—Boris Zolotov. He spoke, and the people in the hall repeated the words back to him:

  The energy of time and matter were put into the earth’s core, forming an energy track in the base matrix of the planet, creating the path of circumstances into a state of light.

  Where Vissarion spoke in plain, almost childlike Russian (to followers he considered children), Zolotov’s idea was to remake language to re-create consciousness. He had been a theoretical physicist in the USSR, and he spoke in a montage of science and mysticism about the “materialization of dreams” and “redividing reality into segments you can travel through.”

  Zolotov’s “method” was to stage experiments in which his followers would penetrate to the new level of consciousness: sweating orgies where the old, ugly, young, and beautiful rub and kiss and caress each other in a communal bliss. They spent whole days talking to each other in grunts, howls, meows, and belches. And always Zolotov sat in the middle, conducting the sweaty chaos. Many of his pupils had been with him since the early 1990s; when the Soviet floor gave way millions of Russians just kept falling and falling, deconstructing reality to the point where they thought they could see the very core of the universe.

  “The new consciousness could only appear here,” Zolotov would say, “in this country which is the graveyard of all ideologies.” This idea united all the post-Soviet sects: all the suffering, all the shocks Russia had gone through made it the place where the new man, the future, could be born. And the sects also tapped into an even deeper myth: the idea that Russia will be the birthplace for a new, messianic consciousness. In the fifteenth century, when Moscow became the capital of what would become the Russian state, it pronounced itself the last bastion of Orthodox Christianity, the true faith of Christ: Europe was mired in the heresy of Catholicism, Byzantium had fallen to the Turks, but Ivan III’s Muscovy was to be “The Third and Final Rome,” the inheritor of holiness from St. Peter’s Rome and Byzantium. Russian literature and thinking brims with the messianic. Dostoevsky’s heroes profess that Russians are the only “God-bearing people” and that the second coming of Christ will take place in Russia. Berdyayev said that Russia was the bearer of a “vigorous messianic consciousness” rivaled only by the Jews. International communism was the most geopolitically ambitious expression of this idea: Moscow as the shining city on the hill of socialism, the churning forge of the new era to end all eras. Stalin built his seven great Gotham skyscrapers, which dominate and define the circumference of the city, to echo the Seven Hills of Rome. Any idea, not necessarily religious, finds itself magnified here to an iconic extreme: The Russian white supremacist will see Russia as the last bastion of white-ness in the world; the Russian nihilist will become the nihilist; Surkov’s triumphant cynic-mystic becomes post-Soviet superman, the political technologist who can see through all ideas to the “heights of creation.”

  But if Moscow is the place where the Messiah will return, then of course it has to be the place where the devil will come to challenge him. Bulgakov envisioned the devil coming to Stalin’s Moscow, strolling down its boulevards as if they were his own. It’s as if the only way the city can make sense of itself is in the messianic; it has to envision itself as the place of the great battle of good and evil.

  It was an idea that I again saw expressed while watching a theater production of Surkov’s Almost Zero at the Stanislavsky Moscow Arts Theatre. It had been nearly impossible to find a ticket; black market ones were going for thousands of US dollars. In the end, I managed to obtain entrance for two bottles of champagne and a promise to one of the theater’s leading ladies to let her use my parents’ London home rent-free. It turned out that the fee wasn’t even worth a proper seat. The ushers let me in after the lights were dimmed. They gave me a cushion and told me to sit on the floor by the front row. My head spent the night knocking against the perfumed thigh of some model, her bald partner seeming none too pleased. The audience was full of these types—the hard, clever men who rule the country and their stunning female satellites. You don’t usually find them at the theater, but they were there because it was the thing to do. If they ever bumped into Surkov, they could tell him how much they liked his fascinating piece. But it was soon apparent that the staging of Almost Zero had transformed the novel. In passages that were added in, the actors talked straight at the audience, accusing it of being at ease in a world of killing and corruption. (The hard men and their satellites stared ahead, unblinking, as if these provocations had nothing to do with them. Many left at the interval.) And the Egor in the play was nothing like the Superman of the book, but rather a man wracked by self-loathing, miserable in his shiny life with its casual humiliations. A man in hell.

  “Isn’t it obvious Moscow is the Third Rome? The holy city?” asks Rustam Rakhmatullin.

  I sit opposite Rustam in a café: a little wooden building with neon soft drink signs that reflect in our Lipton tea and Rustam’s glasses. I order chicken soup, but it’s just cold bouillon and I leave it standing to the side. Through the windows I can see a roundabout of two motorways, so heavily congested that black smoke hangs above the cars. Above the little wooden café are 1970s apartment buildings, the blocks of concrete naked, as if someone started building them and got bored halfway through and left. Rustam looks like a
n insect with thick glasses. He talks like a computer.

  “Moscow is a perfect web, if you take the map of Moscow,” he says. “Spin it around and you can see how it matches up perfectly with Jerusalem. Take a map of Rome, and Moscow matches onto that. This city is an expression of God’s thought.”

  Rustam is no city madman. He is a scholar, a columnist in an establishment newspaper. We are talking about his new book, The Metaphysics of Moscow, which will go on to be a best seller and win highbrow literary prizes. He will later host a show on TV. He teaches the “metaphysics of the city” at a local university. The book is a kabbalah of Moscow’s streets, where nothing is accidental: the yard where in the eighteenth century a feudal lady killed fifty of her serfs, two hundred years later becomes the home of a saintly prison doctor who sacrifices everything to improve the lot of prisoners, thus “cleansing” the original sin. And so on for five hundred pages.

  Rustam is one of the good guys. He works with Mozhayev to save old houses, campaigns against corruption in city government. But he catches the broader zeitgeist, the growth of the associative, irrational, and magical. For if the likes of Zolotov and Vissarion were provincial oddities, now as Moscow becomes ever more full of its own uniqueness, as it watches itself transform with new money as fast and as strangely as looking down at your own body and seeing it change from flesh to gold in one sweep under your very eyes, so the center of the capital begins to swirl with mystic, messianic clouds.

  In the compound of the Night Wolves, the Russian equivalent of the Hells Angels, ships’ connecting rods have been refashioned as crosses ten feet high. Broken plane parts have been bolted to truck engines to make a giant stage; crushed Harley-Davidsons have been beaten into a bar; boats’ hulls have been molded into chairs; and train parts have been made into Valhalla-sized tables. The crosses are everywhere: the Night Wolves are bikers who have found a Russian God.

  “We only have a few years to rescue the soul of holy Russia,” Alexei Weitz says. “Just a few years.” Weitz is a leading member of the Night Wolves. There are five thousand of them in the country, five thousand Beowulf-like bearded men in leathers riding Harleys. It’s Weitz who has done most to turn them from outlaws into religious patriots, riding through Moscow on Harleys with icons of Mary the Mother, of God and Stalin.

  “Why Stalin?” I ask. “Didn’t he murder hundreds of thousands of priests?”

  “We don’t know why he was sent by God. Maybe he had to slaughter them so the faith could be tested. It’s not for us to judge. When you cut out a disease you have to cut out healthy flesh too.” As we speak Weitz is changing from his office clothes into leathers. The biking movement in the USSR sprang up in the late 1980s, utterly anti-Soviet, pro-freedom, pro-Steppenwolf, and by association pro-American. In the 1990s it remained a fringe subculture, though connected to biker gangs in Europe and beyond. The patriotic shift came late. The legend goes that Aleksandr Zaldostanov, the Surgeon, the Night Wolves’ leader, met a priest on the road who told him he needed to change his life, help save Holy Rus. Weitz, whose day job is as a leader of a Kremlin-funded political party, a “Just Cause,” helped give that impulse form. The Night Wolves are a top-down organization: if the Surgeon and Weitz say they are now Orthodox, everyone follows suit.

  Weitz drops six lumps of sugar into his goblet and tells me his story. “I trained as an actor. I received the classic Stanislavsky method acting training. My teacher used to say I can be both tragic and comic at the same time. It’s a rare gift.” He breaks off to quote a line from a Russian movie version of The Cherry Orchard, replicating the original perfectly. He pauses, waiting for me to clap. “My breakdown came in 1994. I was starring in The Cherry Orchard, we were on tour in London—we were staying in a hotel at Seven Sisters. You know it? Nice area—and I just couldn’t take it anymore, there were just too many roles. Too many ‘me’s.”

  “You mean too many theater roles?”

  “Oh no, that was fine. I’m a professional. Something else. For a while I’d been seeing visions, religious visions. I could see devils and angels on people’s shoulders. I could see serpents wrapping themselves around people as they spoke, their true souls. I could see the things others can’t. People’s auras, the colors around them. . . . You’re looking at me like I’m crazy. I just have gifts. I was finding my way to the true faith. I couldn’t be both an actor and a man of God.”

  When he came back from London, Weitz gave up acting. He became more devout. But he still needed a job, so a friend found him a position at a new political consultancy. Using the Stanislavsky method he started training politicians “to manipulate public consciousness” with “verbal and non-verbal forms of influence.” “I applied the principles of method acting. First they had to decide where they were headed. What they wanted. . . . Where are you headed, Peter?” he suddenly asks.

  I don’t know.

  “You’re headed to death. We’re all headed to death. That’s the first thing I would make them realize. . . . That’s the thing about us bikers. We live with death every day. We’re a death cult. We know where we’re going. Russia is the last bastion of true religion,” continues Weitz. “Stanislavsky used to say: ‘Either you are for art, or art is for you.’ That is the difference between the West and Russia. You are imperialists, you think all art is for you and we think we are all for art. We give, you take. That is why we can have Stalin and God together. We can fit everything inside us, Ukrainians and Georgians and Germans, Estonians and Lithuanians. The West wipes out small peoples; inside Russia they flourish. You want everything to be like you. The West has been sending us its influencers of corruption. A Russian who is trained in a Western company starts to think differently: self-love is at the root of Western rationality. That is not our way. You have been sending us your consumer culture. I don’t think of Washington or London as being in charge. Satan commands them. You have to learn to see the holy war underneath the everyday. Democracy is a fallen state. To split ‘left’ and ‘right’ is to divide. In the kingdom of God there is only above and below. All is one. Which is why the Russian soul is holy. It can unite everything. Like in an icon. Stalin and God. Like everything you see here in the Night Wolves, we take bits of broken machinery and mold them together.”

  He stops for a moment. I must have been looking at him strangely, my goblet of tea held in midair. The switch from Stanislavsky to the kingdom of God had happened so smoothly that I didn’t have time to readjust my face. “Or at least I’m trying to piece everything together,” Weitz says, more quietly. “It’s a work in progress. Maybe we won’t be able to manage it.”

  But there is also a very practical side to the Night Wolves’ mix of politics and religion. In the 2000s international biker gangs began to consider spreading their influence in Russia. Most prominent among them were the Bandidos, originally American but now global, who offered to make the Night Wolves their local chapter. The Night Wolves want to rule by themselves, and to keep their own bikers in line they needed their own creed. So they started to build up a nationalist siege mentality. They changed their insignia to Russian and began to spread stories that the Bandidos wanted to flood Russia with drugs. It’s hard to fathom how real the foreign threat to the Night Wolves is. There are thousands of Night Wolves and no more than a few dozen Bandidos in Russia. But to hear Weitz speak of it, they are surrounded.

  When Surkov finds out about the Night Wolves he is delighted. The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s needed, helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protesters from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils, deflecting the conversation from the economic slide and how the rate of bribes that bureaucrats demand has shot up from 15 percent to 50 percent of any deal. They will receive Kremlin support for their annual bike show and rock concert in Crimea, the one-time jewel in the Tsarist Empire that ended up as par
t of Ukraine during Soviet times, and where the Night Wolves use their massive shows to call for retaking the peninsula from Ukraine and restoring the lands of Greater Russia; posing with the President in photo ops in which he wears Ray-Bans and leathers and rides a three-wheel Harley (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler); playing mega-concerts to 250,000 cheering fans celebrating the victory at Stalingrad in World War II and the eternal Holy War Russia is destined to fight against the West, with Cirque du Soleil–like trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle reenactments, religious icons, and holy ecstasies—in the middle of which come speeches from Stalin, read aloud to the 250,000 and announcing the holiness of the Soviet warrior—after which come more dancing girls and then the Night Wolves’ anthem, “Slavic Skies”:

  We are being attacked by the yoke of the infidels:

  But the sky of the Slavs boils in our veins . . .

  Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners,

  And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.

  And as I work on my film about the models and the Rose of the World, I start to notice how the new mysticism is seeping into everything on TV.

  On the Ostankino channels the President’s personal confessor, the Archimandrite Tikhon, dressed in a long black cassock and walking through Istanbul, is telling a prime-time tale about the fall of Byzantium, of how the great Orthodox Empire (to which Russia is the successor) was brought low by a mix of oligarchs and the West. Professional historians howl in protest at this pseudo-history, but the Kremlin is starting to use religion and the supernatural for its own ends. Byzantium and Muscovy could only flourish under one great autocrat, the Archimandrite states. This is why we need the President to be like a tsar.

  Even supposedly science-based programs are not immune. There is a spate of prime-time documentaries about “psychological weapons.” One is The Call of the Void. It features secret service men who inform the audience about the psychic weapons they have developed. The Russian military has “sleepers,” psychics who can go into a trance and enter the world’s collective unconscious, its deeper soul, and from thence penetrate the minds of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One has entered the mind of the US president and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the US had hatched has failed to come off. The message is clear: if the secret services can see into the US president’s mind, they could definitely see into yours; the state is everywhere, watching your every thought. The most expensive documentary ever shown on Russian television is called Plesen (“Mold”). It argues that mold is taking over the earth, that it has been doing so since the days of Moses. It is the devil’s weapon, mentioned in ancient mystic texts, an invisible but omnipresent enemy whose evil spores have been invading our lives, causing death and disease. When the film ends large numbers of fearful people go out and buy the “mold-cleaning machines” that were advertised in the film; its manufacturers were among the producers. Under siege from psychic spies and airborne fungi, audiences are kept in a constant state of panic and medieval ecstasies. The more rational critical language is pushed off TV, the fewer critical films are made about the past and present, the more the mystic narratives take hold.