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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  The waitress brought more tough, smoked mutton. We were having dinner in the Sosruko restaurant, the town’s most famous, named after a local mythical hero, a sort of Hercules. The restaurant, twenty meters high and concrete, is in the shape of the head of a medieval knight, with helmet and huge moustache, perched on a hill above the town and lit up in neon green, the only building well lit aside from the new mosque.

  “When my pupils go to Moscow they have people on the street tell them to go home. But yet we’re part of the Russian state. Not immigrants. So what does that mean: ‘go home’? Meanwhile there’s no work here for the young,” continued Anzor, “and only the Wahhabis spend time with them.”

  The next morning I could finally see Nalchik clearly. The center was neat, with perfect beds of bright flowers in front of government buildings in Soviet elephantine neoclassicism. Mount Elbrus loomed over Nalchik like a bully threatening violence at any moment. The celebrity I had come to meet was one Jambik Hatohov, at the time the biggest boy in the world. Seven years old, he weighed over a hundred kilos. Tabloid hacks and television crews would fly in from across the world to take his picture.

  I drove out of town to his mother’s apartment in a suburb of Soviet matchbox blocks standing crooked on uneven dirt roads (the local FSB following, to make sure I wasn’t meeting jihadists on the sly). The staircase was dark, the green paint peeling. The mother, Nelya, opened the door for me. Inside the apartment had been refurbished in the IKEA style, paid for by Jambik’s media appearances. Jambik was in the bath when I arrived. I could hear him splashing and squealing and snorting. I went in to say hello. He was so overweight his penis was covered by flab, and his toes and eyes barely peaked out. He grunted rather than breathed. There was water all over the floor, and he was sliding up and down in a bath he could hardly fit in, splashing water everywhere. He charged me when I came in, and I was slammed against the door.

  “He never had a father,” said Nelya. “He needs a man in his life.”

  We went into town. It was the “day of the city,” the state-sponsored party to instill local pride. There were fairground rides and sporting events. Jambik was known by everyone; he was a star. “It’s our Sosruko, our little warrior!” locals would cry as we passed through the festival. Everyone gave him food: shashlik, smoked mutton, Snickers, pizza, Coke. They let us on rides for free. Jambik ate all the time, grunting. When Nelya tried to stop him he would scream like a burglar alarm and hit her with the full weight of his hundred-and-something kilos.

  We stopped to watch a wrestling competition. There were fighters from several North Caucasus republics (Dagestan, Balkaria, Ingushetia), who represented themselves rather than “Russia.” There were Olympic champions; the North Caucasus produces the greatest wrestlers in the world, and it’s always a problem for the local wrestlers to feel they win their golds for “Russia.” But for many young males the choice is between jihad and wrestling. Nelya hoped Jambik would grow up to become a wrestler, though the local trainers all told her he was too slow. Nelya thought he might make it in sumo.

  After a while I noticed Jambik’s speech was slow and slurred.

  “How’s he doing at school?” I asked Nelya.

  “Oh, he’s such a star they let him pass into the year above without taking any exams,” said Nelya.

  We flew Jambik to Moscow, where he appeared on Russia’s number one talk show and pushed a Jeep for the cameras. He auditioned at Russia’s top children’s TV sketch show.

  Meanwhile concerned doctors met with Nelya: Jambik was not a warrior, they explained, but a very sick child who needed help or he would die. She needed to put him on a diet, change their lifestyle. Nelya didn’t want to know: he was her bloated, golden goose and their ticket to another life. I felt for her; I had seen what happened when she tried to deny Jambik food.

  “God has willed him to be this way,” she insisted.

  When we parted Jambik hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. Later I heard that he had received an offer to study sumo in Japan. That had always been Nelya’s dream for him. But the sumo never did work out for Jambik. Soon the family was back in Nalchik. A couple of years later an even bigger boy was born, in Mexico, and some of Jambik’s star allure was lost. At the age of eleven he weighed 146 kilos.

  • • •

  “Switch on the news,” said the text message form one of my producers on Hello-Goodbye. “The fuckers wrecked our set! Our set!”

  A suicide bomber had blown himself up in the arrivals hall of Domodedovo international airport, where we had earlier shot Hello-Goodbye. On the news CCTV footage showed a blurred figure walking across the hall, then the shot was filled with a burst of blinding bright light, and when we saw the hall again it was full of blood. Thirty-seven people died. One-hundred-eighty were injured. A mass of worried messages jammed my phone: I was nowhere near the airport at the time, and the series had been scrapped long before the bomb went off.

  Domodedovo is the newest of Moscow’s three airports. It’s all glass and light, swept marble floors, cappuccino bars, and bikini boutiques. When I made Hello-Goodbye I spent a lot of time in Domodedovo. I know every place the smoke alarms are dummies and you can have a crafty fag, when the best light floods through the glass walls to get the best shots, how to cut a deal with the customs guys so they go and buy you duty-free whisky. I know which flights bring in which type of passenger and what stories they bring with them. Our presenter, dressed in a bright orange shirt, would walk around the airport and talk to people parting or meeting: slow-kissing lovers parting as he leaves to work in San Francisco; funny lads off for a dirty weekend in Thailand; a secretary waiting for her boss, whom she is secretly in love with, to return from a business trip to London. A microcosm of the new, middle-class Russia, the first Russian generation that not only flies but even flies abroad as a matter of course, a generation’s aspirations under one high-domed roof, in this bright new airport in a bright new nation.

  So many of our stories were about women waiting for men. There was the fur-clad Anna, a former ballerina from Voronezh, who now danced at strip clubs in Zurich. Her Swiss banker boyfriend was coming to meet her family in Russia and her two children from previous men who had dumped her without leaving a penny behind. The banker wanted to marry her, but it was happening all too fast, and she wasn’t so sure. Two weeks later we saw them again; they parted frostily, then he flew back to Zurich. She wouldn’t tell us what went wrong, only: “Us girls called strip clubs Krankenhauser, loony bins, only mentally ill men go there.”

  And there was “the milkmaid,” whose story became a YouTube hit. A woman of uncertain age, with golden teeth, a huge permed haircut, bright pink lips, and a fur coat over mud-splattered, knee-high white boots, she was a milkmaid on a cooperative farm. She was waiting for her boyfriend, a teenage Tajik who helped clean refuse at the farm. Their relationship was the scandal of the village: not only was she old enough to be his mother, but worse, she was a white woman going with a “churok,” the insulting nickname Russians give to anyone from the Caucasus or Central Asia. The paranoia that men from the “south” will take away white women has grown into something of a Russian obsession: the “churok” women will blow us up; the “churok” men will take away our women; the “churki” will rebel and the Russian Empire will be no more.

  But the “milkmaid” didn’t give a damn about what the locals on the farm said about her lover. She reveled in all the details of their affair:

  “At work I wear this little white robe, shows off my legs, he likes that!” she told us.

  “I didn’t give it up straight away, I told him he’d have to give me perfume first. That’s what my mother taught me!”

  And now she was pregnant. She told him when he came off the plane, on camera. We caught all his emotions: shock (he couldn’t have been older than seventeen), anger, and then the joy as he hauled her up and twirled her: perm, fur coat, white boots, and all. Othe
r people in the arrivals lounge began to applaud and cheer. That was right on the spot where the suicide bomber would blow himself up.

  The arrivals hall was always the most difficult to film in. It has been under construction ever since I can remember. It has no natural light, is cramped and narrow. We had to drag and place contributors in front of a neon café sign to make the picture palatable. If they stood naturally the shot was awful, made positively ghoulish by the black-coated, grim-faced mob of illegal taxi drivers who leap on anyone coming out of customs and try to bully them into taking overpriced rides to town. Many of these taxi drivers are from the North Caucasus; the suicide bomber’s victims were compatriots and coreligionists.

  And as we shot Hello-Goodbye, there was always another reality just out of frame. For every London and Paris flight, there were far more from Makhachkala, Nalchik, Tashkent. Clans of gold-toothed migrants form the Caucasus and Central Asia squatted in the manicured halls, among hills of plastic sacks full of clothes and fruit they bring to trade in Moscow’s markets.

  “We don’t want to see them,” the producer at TNT would complain. “We’ve researched our audience. They don’t want to hear about the people from the Caucasus or Central Asia. They don’t relate to them. We need ethnic Russians.”

  Eventually, however, we had to deal with a serious story about Chechnya. One young couple we interviewed were parting for at least six months. The guy looked like a young Steve McQueen; the girl was spotty.

  “Why so long?”

  “There’s war on where I work. I’m a soldier. I serve in Chechnya. She can’t go there.”

  This is how they met. He was alone and bored at his post, a little brick hut high in the Caucasus. It was night, and he was drunk. He wanted to find a girl away from the front. He looked down at the serial number on his gun. Just for the hell of it he took out his phone and dialed the Moscow area code followed by the serial number. A sleepy girl answered.

  “Who is this?”

  He told her. She slammed down the phone.

  “I just liked her voice,” he said. “So I kept on phoning.”

  He called every day. Slowly she caved in. They sent each other photos of themselves on their cell phones. Two weeks before our shoot he had some leave and came to visit her. She was from a traditional family from the Caucasus, and he asked her father’s permission to marry her. The father agreed. Now they both wore rings. The wedding was planned for when he would return from Chechnya in six months.

  “This is my last tour of duty. I’m done with the army. In six months I come back and that’s it, no more war.”

  “Do you still have the gun with her number?”

  “The gun? I’ll always keep that gun.”

  He blew kisses and she cried as he went through passport control. I have no idea what happened to them after that.

  • • •

  It was a while since I’d been back to the long, long bar by the train station.

  “How’s your show?” asked the girls.

  “It got scrapped.”

  The ratings for Hello-Goodbye had sucked. Part of the problem was that the audience wouldn’t believe the stories in the show were real. After so many years of fake reality, it was hard to convince them this was genuine.

  Dinara skipped up to me with a squeal. She bought me a drink. Her hair was longer. She hadn’t been able to get a proper job or resume her studies. Her face looked puffy.

  “How’s your sister?”

  “Great,” said Dinara. “Great.”

  “Is she still with the Wahhabis?”

  “The nightmare’s passed. I went back home and convinced her to join me here. Thank God, she loves Moscow, she doesn’t want to do jihad any more. Now we work together, we’re both pro-sti-tutes.”

  Dinara was delighted. Thank God. A story with a happy ending.

  THE HEIGHTS OF CREATION

  Though we are expecting Vladislav Surkov, the man known as the “Kremlin demiurge,” who has “privatized the Russian political system,” to enter from the front of the university auditorium, he surprises us all by striding in from the back. He’s got his famous Cheshire Cat smile on. He’s wearing a white shirt and a leather jacket that is part Joy Division and part 1930s commissar. He walks straight to the stage in front of an audience of PhD students, professors, journalists, and politicians.

  “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” he tells us by way of introduction. “My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and . . . ” here he pauses and smiles, “modern art.” He offers to not make a speech, instead welcoming the audience to pose questions and have an open discussion. After the first question he talks for almost forty-five minutes, leaving hardly any time for questions after all. It’s his political system in miniature: democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.

  As former deputy head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the President on foreign affairs, Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show. He claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential prodemocracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the President is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. The Ostankino TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for twenty minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind. They repeat the great mantras of the era: the President is the President of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the President is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the President as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.” The words trickle into the streets: “Our relationship is not effective” lovers tell each other when they break up. “Effective,” “stability”: no one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.

  One of Surkov’s many nicknames is the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz. They first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting antistate actors (anarchists in the nineteenth century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR. Their first clients were actually Russian modernizers: in 1996 the political technologists, coordinated by Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and the man who first understood the power of television in Russia, managed to win then President Boris Yeltsin a seemingly lost
election by persuading the nation he was the only man who could save it from a return to revanchist Communism and new fascism. They produced TV scare-stories of looming pogroms and conjured fake Far Right parties, insinuating that the other candidate was a Stalinist (he was actually more a socialist democrat), to help create the mirage of a looming “red-brown” menace.

  In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

  Living in the world of Surkov and the political technologists, I find myself increasingly confused. Recently my salary almost doubled. On top of directing shows for TNT, I have been doing some work for a new media house called SNOB, which encompasses TV channels and magazines and a gated online community for the country’s most brilliant minds. It is meant to foster a new type of “global Russian,” a new class who will fight for all things Western and liberal in the country. It is financed by one of Russia’s richest men, the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who also owns the Brooklyn Nets. I have been hired as a “consultant” for one of SNOB’s TV channels. I write interminable notes and strategies and flowcharts, though nothing ever seems to happen. But I get paid. And the offices, where I drop in several times a week to talk about “unique selling points” and “high production values,” are like some sort of hipster fantasy: set in a converted factory, the open brickwork left untouched, the huge arches of the giant windows preserved, with edit suites and open plan offices built in delicately. The employees are the children of Soviet intelligentsia, with perfect English and vocal in their criticism of the regime. The deputy editor is a well-known American Russian activist for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, and her articles in glossy Western magazines attack the President vociferously. But for all the opposition posturing of SNOB, it’s also clear there is no way a project so high profile could have been created without the Kremlin’s blessing. Is this not just the sort of “managed” opposition the Kremlin is very comfortable with? On the one hand allowing liberals to feel they have a free voice and a home (and a paycheck), on the other helping the Kremlin define the “opposition” as hipster Muscovites, out of touch with “ordinary” Russians, obsessed with “marginal” issues such as gay rights (in a homophobic country). The very name of the project, “SNOB,” though meant ironically, already defines us as a potential object of hate. And for all the anti-Kremlin rants on SNOB, we never actually do any real investigative journalism, find out any hard facts about money stolen from the state budget: in twenty-first-century Russia you are allowed to say anything you want as long as you don’t follow the corruption trail. After work I sit with my colleagues, drinking and talking: Are we the opposition? Are we helping Russia become a freer place? Or are we actually a Kremlin project strengthening the President? Actually doing damage to the cause of liberty? Or are we both? A card to be played?