Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
Page 25
One time, on the boulevard ring at dusk, there was a protest leader on a stage addressing a crowd, holding up the old picture of Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe impersonating the President, and he was saying: “This is a portrait by our favorite artist Vladik and this is what we need to get rid of.” And by that he meant not so much the President himself but the whole culture of simulation that eats up everything and which Vladik tried to describe: ‘“One day we will reach into the cupboard, and reach for our clothes, and they will turn to dust in our hands because they have been eaten by maggots.”
Vladik himself has died. He was found floating in a pool in Bali. Death by heart attack. Right at the end an oligarch acquaintance had made him an offer to come over to the Kremlin side and star in a series of paintings in which he would dress up as the new protest leaders engaged in sodomy. Vladik had refused.
I’ve noticed something new when wandering around the protests and talking to the new Moscow dissidents. If once upon a time they used the word “the West” in general, and the word “London” in particular, to represent the beacon of what they aimed toward, now the words “London” and the “West” can be said with a light disgust, as the place that shelters and rewards and reinforces the very forces that oppress them. And so, in the classic Third Rome twist, the Russian liberal can become the last true liberal on Earth, the only one still believing in the ideas preached by Benedict and the international development consultants.
I hope I’ll be able to find Mozhayev, still searching for his Old Moscow, wandering and talking with a bottle of port in his pocket (he’s abandoned vodka). He never did emigrate, of course. I’ve heard he’s even managed to save a few buildings recently. But he could do nothing for Pechatnikov house 3, which was destroyed, and now only Mozhayev’s elegy of it survives. “This place was known as ‘the heart of Moscow,’” wrote Mozhayev in an essay I came across.
The yard was an odd sort of shape, leaning on the slope. There was a broken bench in the middle where I would like to sit. It was best to come here in the evening, when the lights were coming on in the houses, and you could feel time stopping: the ivy crawling up the open brick work, the sheets hanging out in the yard to dry, the children’s strollers by the open doors . . . they all seemed to belong to another time. Of course the sheets and strollers actually belonged to illegal migrants from Central Asia squatting in the houses, and many of the windows were boarded up and broken, and there was graffiti everywhere—but oddly the migrants gave the whole thing a sense of lived-in-ness. And there was one first-floor apartment, whose windows looked directly out onto the bench, which was pure Old Moscow, with a yellow low-hanging lampshade, and books stacked up to the ceiling where they seemed to be keeling over, and a big man with a big beard moving about with tea inside, and a cat that would fling itself repeatedly at the wood-framed windows.
We’re flying now. My daughter has the window seat she likes best. She’s bent right over, forehead pressed up against the cold glass, looking to glimpse the lights of cities between the clouds. The burning concentric rings of Moscow will soon be coming into view. One never really leaves places anymore. The whole “I went on a journey far away” yarn doesn’t feel quite real. Movement between Moscow and London has become so casual (eight flights a day including budget airlines, with the weekend plane nicknamed “the school bus”) that the two cities have become smudged in my mind. I walk into an underpass by Hyde Park Corner and emerge out on the Boulevard Ring and see many of the same faces I just saw off Piccadilly. Turn the corner of Prospekt Mira, and I am back walking along the Thames.
My daughter already finds these jump cuts between countries normal. Sometimes she likes to play a game in which she divides her face into the identities she gets to toy with: “This half of my face is Russian—and this half English. My cheek Jewish. My ear belongs to London and my mouth to Moscow, but I’m keeping my eyes for . . . ” And then she starts to laugh. Already a child of the great Offshore? And what will it turn out to be like? Almost Zero? The Street-of-All-Fridays?
And before I know it this trip will be over and I’ll be back in London, on my way to another of Grigory’s Midsummer’s Night parties, which he hosts in both Moscow and London now. It’s at the Orangerie in Kensington Palace. I try to get a costume at the last minute, but by the time I call the stores, all the Midsummer’s Night costumes in central London are already gone. I make myself a lame garland out of flowers plucked from some gardens near the subway. I’m running late, and for some reason I assume the entrance will be from the Knightsbridge end of the Palace, but then when I cross the park I’m told I have to go round to the other, Queensway, side. There’s no clear path, it’s getting dark, and I get lost. I’m scrambling through hedges and thorns, then turn off somewhere and find myself on the edge of Kensington Palace Gardens, which is the most expensive street in London, and the guards by the high gates are looking at me strangely. Then I’m back in the park, my trousers smeared with dirt, and hear the music and finally emerge by the right entrance. There’s a spiked black rail and a bouncer and a woman dressed as the god Pan with a guest list on her iPad. Beyond the gate I can see elf-girls in high heels and Queens of the Night in shining gowns, all talking in many languages and all disappearing beyond the corner of the palace to the party proper, which I can hear but can’t quite see. I say my name, but I’m told it isn’t on the guest list, and I’m late, and they won’t let me in. I try texting Grigory, but of course he must be busy with his guests and doesn’t answer. And I lean over the rail as far as I can go, with the blunt tips digging into my stomach, one hand holding my garland to my head, craning my neck to see if I can somehow catch a glimpse of him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book wouldn’t have been attempted without Paul Copeland, and it couldn’t have been completed without his generous help. He has taught me new meanings in friendship. I am always indebted to my parents, with this book more than ever, and to Aunt Sasha for being our guardian angel. I would like to thank Daniel Soar and Mary-Kay Wilmers at the London Review of Books, who gave me a chance; Tunku Varadarajan and Tina Brown for giving me some more; my agent and publishers; and Ben Judah, for the last-minute read-through. Also my producers at TNT: both for letting me make some exciting projects and for showing grace and kindness when I failed.
EXTRA READING
The biography of Surkov was informed by Zoya Svetova’s “Who Is Mr. Surkov?” in New Times Magazine (December 26, 2011).
Alena Ledeneva’s Can Russia Modernise? (Cambridge University Press, 2013) provides context for the battles among various Russian security agencies and “reiding.”
Yana Yakovleva published her book of prison letters, Неэлектронные Письма (Праксис, 2008).
A detailed account of architectural destruction in Moscow can be found in “Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point,” updated edition (SAVE Europe’s Heritage, Moscow Architectural Preservation Society, 2009).
Vitaly Djomochka’s latest novel is Газовый Кризис 2 (Gas Crisis 2) (Зебра Е, 2010).
Peter Pomerantsev is an award-winning contributor to the London Review of Books. His writing has been published in the Financial Times, NewYorker.com, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Daily Beast, Newsweek, and Atlantic Monthly. He has also worked as a consultant for the EU and for think tanks on projects covering the former Soviet Union. He lives in London.