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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  “The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried,” Anna, a friend who used to work with TNT and now makes entertainment shows at Ostankino, tells me when we meet for a drink in a bar called Courvoisier. “Spiritual stuff is always good to keep people distracted. And the ratings will be good—our people love some mysticism when things are bad. Remember the 1990s.”

  Eventually even Kashpirovsky makes a return to mainstream television, hosting an eleven-part documentary series about immortality, ghosts, and “bending time.” And while I am still editing my material about the Rose, I find out that the Lifespring movement in Russia is gathering strength. The largest of the Ostankino channels has created a pilot with another life trainer (much more successful and slick than the Rose of the World’s) in which the humiliations and transformations from the trainings are turned into a show. The head of Ostankino loves the format. All the tears and conflicts make for great TV.

  THE CALL OF THE VOID

  “You look tired, Piiitrrr.”

  “You should take a holiday.”

  “You’re too, how shall we say. . . . ”

  “You’re too emotional about this story.”

  I’m at TNT to talk about the edit of the models’ story, and it’s not going well. The curly haired, redhead, and straight haired producers are too nice to say it, but I think they think I’ve become obsessed. They’re not altogether wrong. I’ve spent so much time deciphering what happens at the Rose, it’s all I think and talk about. Whenever I pass a high-rise I think of those girls and how they felt before they ran and leapt.

  The project is so late that no one even mentions the deadline any more.

  “We did say we don’t want too many negative stories.”

  “You know we need a happy ending.”

  “Where are the positive stories?”

  “How soon can you find them?”

  I say I will do my best.

  • • •

  “How long are you going to keep making films with TNT?” asks Anna, the friend who has moved from making shows at TNT to the big leagues at Ostankino. “It’s child’s play. If you want to make real films you have to come and work with Ostankino. When can you come for a meeting?” TNT’s success has meant many who work there are being wooed by Channel 1: the spiky comedians, the presenters, the “creative producers” are all getting contracts.

  I had barely been inside Ostankino since my first visit almost a decade earlier to meet the political technologists who defined reality on the upper floors. But the great spire of the television tower had always acted as a compass for me, guiding me whenever I would be lost in town, always due north and steady among the sudden candle-flame domes of just-built cathedrals, glowing red stars of Stalin gothic towers, the erupting skyscrapers, turning cranes, and swinging wrecking balls that give a sense of perpetual movement to the horizon.

  My meeting was scheduled for late, after 10:00 p.m., but the flat, wide train station of a building was still blazing with light when I arrived. In a country of nine time zones, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, comprising one-sixth of the world’s land mass, where television is the only force that can unify and rule and bind—the great battering ram of propaganda couldn’t possibly ever rest.

  The lobby had been given a gleaming tile and glass makeover. The old grubby cafeteria was gone, and there was a coffee bar with the full range of beverages. Green tea with jasmine, cappuccinos, and cognac served with a slice of lemon. There was a banging coming from something being built to the left of the main doors: a new Orthodox chapel, I was told.

  I was met by an assistant, and as we rode up in the elevator the doors would open, and every floor was a different civilization. The doors open once, and you find yourself on a floor with a black chrome news studio as new as a private jet. The doors open again, and you’re back in 1970-something, with beige corridors and mature women with bleached hair up in a high bun. Another floor is under reconstruction, another bright blue. Ostankino is renovated piecemeal, the whole great thing split up into a thousand little fiefdoms, each carrying on at its own rate of history.

  Then it’s our floor, and the corridors begin. Left, right, left, down some stairs. As I walk I realize I’ll never find the way out again. All those doors. All the same.

  My meeting is at Red Square Productions. It wins the commissions for the big factual entertainment shows for Channel 1 and is owned by the wife of the head of Channel 1. There’s a small anteroom before you enter the personal office of Red Square’s creative director. I’m asked to wait. I have CDs of my latest programs in my hand, and I shuffle them. I wait over an hour. I’m pissed off and want to go out for a cigarette, but I’m worried I won’t find the way back. It’s nearing midnight when I finally go in.

  The door is heavy, and inside the office are wooden shelves with lots of books and a long table and beyond that, wide windows looking over the Moscow night. On the other side of the table sits a thin, pale, young man in a light suit with floppy black hair. He never stops smiling. This is Doctor Kurpatov, Russia’s first self-help TV psychologist. He has made a fortune with his show, on which people come to cry and be told how to change their lives. He can teach you anything, from how to conquer your fears to how to have good sex to how to love your child or make a fortune. He is a master of neuro-linguistic-programming and hypnosis, bereavement counseling, and philosophy. All along the walls of the office are his self-help books. And now he’s not just a star with his own show, but the creative director of the production company closest to the head of the most important channel. Now he has to choose the programs that will keep the whole nation calm, happy, overcoming its fears.

  He asks me to sit down and tells me how much he likes my work. I know he’s lying, but he’s just so nice, nodding and agreeing at all the points he should be and engaging just enough to make me feel he’s genuinely interested. He says it must be odd for someone from London working inside Russia. I say “oh yes!” and tell him so many of my adventures and misadventures I don’t even notice half an hour has passed and all my discomfort at being at Ostankino has quite gone.

  The next day his assistant phones to say Dr. Kurpatov really liked me and Ostankino wants to make me an offer. Whatever personality test that meeting was all about, I have passed. Would I like to helm a historical drama-documentary? With a real, big, mini-movie budget for actors and reconstructions and set designers? The sort of thing you make when you’re right at the top of the TV tree in the West and that TNT could and would never even dream of making. The genre is new in Russia, and it’s only now with Ostankino so flush that it can afford to do this. I’ve been wanting to emigrate away from straight observational documentary for a while, to think more about costumes and camera angles and a little less about funerals and sects and suicides.

  The story is to be about a World War II admiral who defied Stalin’s orders and started the attack on the Germans, while the Kremlin was still in denial about Hitler’s intentions and hoped for peace. The admiral was later purged and largely forgotten. It’s a good story. It’s a really good story. It’s the dream project.

  I tell her I need time to decide.

  She says no rush.

  • • •

  The models project is so late, I’m so over budget, and the advance is so long spent that I’ve been asking for money from family to keep production going. With the end of the oil boom, places like SNOB have long stopped paying. I have had to move out of my old place with its grand view of the Moscow River into a smaller, grubbier, lower apartment. It’s right by one of the markets where traders from the North Caucasus sell replica designer suits and stolen phones. At night they get into fights with racist football fans underneath my windows. People in this part of town wear plastic Chinese slippers and carry their things in plastic bags. The warm little stores sell herring from open containers with a film of filth. The smell of the herring swells down the street, infu
sed into the heat.

  One morning I wake with the taste of burning in my mouth. There is smoke everywhere. I run to the kitchen to see whether the stove is on fire, but it’s fine, and now I look up and notice the smoke is outside on the street, too. Thick and prickly, green and yellowish, rubbing up against the closed window, pouring slowly through the open one I never shut in summer. It seems like the whole street is on fire. I push out onto the little balcony and see that it’s not just the street but the whole city. Buildings and sickly trees and the fly-over of the third ring-road are all half lost in haze. The smoke stings my eyes. It smells of fire and pine and forests, but mixed with gasoline, with traffic jams and perfume and something industrial. And it smells of peat. The peat fires are back.

  This happens some summers. The peat fields around Moscow catch fire, and the smoke blows into town. Smoke so thick you can wrap it around you like a coat. Asthmatics, old people, and children are rushed away to relatives in the country. But then the smoke will go there, too. And they have to travel farther and farther, toward Petersburg or Bryansk or Monaco.

  Out on the street the city seems abandoned. You almost push your way through the smoke. The first sign of another life-form is the sound of something going clack-clack-clack. At first the sound is startling. Then I realize: high heels. A girl goes by, dressed in heels, a bikini, and a dust mask. It’s that hot. And then more and more people emerge and disappear back into the smoke: a wedding party with the confetti being thrown up into the haze, where it seems to be lost forever. A cop looking quite lost. Couples kissing.

  I buy beers and return to the apartment. The camera, the old beaten metal-cased Z-1, the picture resolution of which is past its sell-by date since the arrival of hi-def, is on my bed. There are tapes all around it with castings and tasters from my search for TNT’s positive stories. Many of the tapes are about Alexander: a blind football player, the star of Russia’s first blind football team. I had hoped his story would be inspirational. He’s someone who has overcome things: blind since childhood and now a potential para-Olympian.

  On the tapes he looks like a Viking god with his long, red hair. He talks loudly and goes everywhere with his girlfriend, a quiet girl who teaches music to small children. When they walk she guides him gently beneath the elbow, around pillars and through doors. She’s part blind herself, with glasses as thick as the bottoms of bottles, but she can see more than Alexander.

  Blind boys usually go out with girls who are partially sighted. The boys, especially the football players, act tough, but it’s the girls who are in charge. They can see. The blind boys are always worried their girls are looking at someone else. Or even kissing and touching someone else in the same room.

  Alexander supports Dynamo Moscow. Every weekend he takes his place in the stands among the hard-core supporters behind the goal. He doesn’t listen to radio commentary, as most blind supporters do: he tells me he can feel what’s going on during the game with an inner football vision.

  Dynamo Moscow is known for having racist supporters, and I soon find out Alexander is no exception.

  “I can hear those darkies in the street. I can hear their language in the metro. My yard used to be full of the sound of Russian . . . when I hear those darkies I just come up and take a swing. Just like that.”

  When he fights he swings wide and wildly. But when he connects it’s powerful.

  “We believe Russia is a great empire that other powers want to tear away parts from. We need to restore our power, occupy our lost lands, grab Crimea from the Ukrainians,” the football supporters say, then in the same breath: “We want a Russia for Russians, all these darkies from the Caucasus and Central Asia need to go home.”

  This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger. There are more of them, hooligans and skinheads, lighting up the square opposite the Kremlin with their flares in marches of hundreds of thousands, chanting “jump if you’re not a darkie.” And when they jump together, the pavement trembles.

  All the positive stories I touch on seem to tumble into negativity. On my bed there are more tapes, about a girl called Katja who has told me she managed to quit injecting amphetamines after a near-death experience. But when I begin to film her it turns out she’s been lying to me and is smoking morphine boiled down from prescription painkillers (illegally bought from pharmacies paying a cut to corrupt FDCS agents). Katja is always asking me for money, claiming she’s just been mugged or has someone after her she needs to pay off.

  A bunch of girls from Kiev who call themselves Femen and who protest sex tourism by stripping down and running about naked at state events to highlight the sexism of the system sounded perfect for TNT. But suddenly they start protesting against the President. “The patriarchal is political,” they tell me when I call them. TNT would never touch them now.

  I am running out of money. And I am considering joining Ostankino.

  For every Call of the Void or blatant propaganda show Ostankino makes, there’s some edgy realist drama, some acerbic comedy. You can laugh and ignore the propaganda and watch the good stuff, and that’s what people I know do. There’s nothing bad about the film Channel 1 wants me to make; it’s a good story. And yet I realize that though my film might be clean, it could easily be put next to some World War II hymn praising Stalin and the President as his newest incarnation. Would my film be the “good” program that validates everything I don’t want to be a part of? The one that wins trust, for that trust to be manipulated in the next moment?

  But then again—so what if the other shows on Channel 1 are propaganda? Lots of good people make big shows and films for Ostankino, and no one holds it against them. We all have to carve out our little space. You make your own project, keep “your hands clean,” as everyone here likes to say, and the rest just isn’t your concern. It’s just a job. That’s not you.

  • • •

  Growing up I had never really thought too much about my parents’ life in the Soviet Union, why they had emigrated. The USSR was just someplace people left. My father was being arrested for spreading copies of Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Who wouldn’t want to leave that sort of suffocation?

  But what exactly was it that they were rejecting? I had always just assumed “dictatorship” but had never thought much about how the system really worked. Now I remembered a story my mother had once told me.

  She was fifteen. It was 1971. Their teacher at her very ordinary suburban Kiev school announced that today they would receive a very special visitor. He was from Radio Komintern, one of the propaganda elite who broadcast Soviet ideas to the West.

  The man was in his thirties and he wore jeans and a leather jacket. Only the coolest, most rebellious, yet best-connected (only the best-connected could afford to be rebellious) were able to get hold of jeans and leather jackets—they only came from the West, and it was a privilege to go there or even know someone who went there. This man was nothing like their square teachers. He sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk and smirked that knowing smirk that my mother would later recognize as the mark of the KGB boys, and that I now see on the President and the men around him. The smile of the men who know they can see through everything.

  The special visitor told the kids how Russia was surrounded by enemies, how they needed to be careful of Western agents and Western influences.

  Then he went to smoke in the corridor. The kids followed him. He gave them cigarettes, which they lit with trepidation, but their teachers were so in awe of the special visitor they didn’t dare stop them from smoking with him. He talked about how he had Beatles records at home (my mother had always been scared to even say the word “Beatles” in public). He told them he had even been abroad (no one in my mother’s school had ever been abroad). In 1968 he had been in Prague, pa
rt of the Soviet forces that had “liberated” Czechoslovakia from counterrevolution. He told the kids about how they would go drinking in the cafés of the old town (my mother tried to imagine “cafés in the old town” but struggled to form a picture in her mind).

  And he told them how one time, when he was sitting in a café, some Czechs ran in and started shouting, “Russians go home! Russians go home!”

  This struck my mother. She had always believed the stuff about the Soviet Union “liberating” Czechoslovakia. She believed the Soviet Union stood for global social justice.

  “You mean they weren’t happy to see you?” she asked.