He looked at her like she was an idiot.
Everyone who grew up in the Soviet Union had a moment when they woke up. That was my mother’s. And as she began to look at the world around her, she slowly saw how everyone was pretending, was faking belief, being one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon. But scared, too. Fear and irony together. And so many voices at the same time. One you in the morning at the Komsomol. Another you in the afternoon reading Solzhenitsyn. One you at work being a good socialist and another listening to the BBC in secret in your kitchen, yet everyone knowing you listened because they were all listening themselves.
Whenever I ask my Russian bosses, the older TV producers and media types who run the system, what it was like growing up in the late Soviet Union, whether they believed in the Communist ideology that surrounded them, they always laugh at me.
“Don’t be silly,” most answer.
“But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?”
“Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them. And then straight after we would listen to ‘Deep Purple’ and the BBC.”
“So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?”
“No. It’s not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There’s like several ‘you’s.”
Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the “transition” between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshiping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease—a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the “orthodox” oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism—and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.
And as I walk around this fog-asphyxiated Moscow, I see how the city’s topography articulates these splits: the bullying avenues with their baron-bureaucrats, bribes, and werewolves in uniform, where the only way to survive is to be as corrupt as they are, and just a few meters away the gentle courtyards with an almost bucolic mood and small-town ideas of decency. Before I used to think the two worlds were in conflict, but the truth is a symbiosis. It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you’re always split into little bits and can never quite commit to changing things. And a result is the somewhat aggressive apathy you can encounter here so often. That’s the underlying mind-set that supported the USSR and supports the new Russia now even though the USSR might officially be long gone. But there is a great comfort in these splits, too: you can leave all your guilt with your “public” self. That wasn’t you stealing that budget/making that propaganda show/bending your knee to the President, just a role you were playing; you’re a good person really. It’s not so much about denial. It’s not even about suppressing dark secrets. You can see everything you do, all your sins. You just reorganize your emotional life so as not to care.
And always the buildings express this mind-set. In the fog above my head, balconies stick out seemingly suspended in the sky. Russians put all their shit on balconies, detritus on show. Satellite dishes, jars of gherkins, broken toys, punctured tires—all on the balcony. The English stack their sentimental junk and dirty secrets far away in the garden shed; the Germans have “Keller,” basements, deep underground to hide all their dark memories. But in Russia you just throw it on the balcony; just as long as it isn’t in the flat itself, who cares if the neighbors see? We’ll deal with all that rubbish some other time. It’s not even part of us.
But it’s not everyone who can, or who wants to, pull off this psychologically acrobatic self-division. At some point in the 1970s, during her late teens, my mother had laid down on a bed and thought she was losing her mind. All those people she was meant to be, without any center. She could feel herself splitting up into little bits. Then began her journey to find the small bands of Soviet dissidents. They had their own vocabulary. They talked about “poryadochnost,” “decency,” which in practice could mean not being an informant. About “dostojnstvo,” “dignity,” which in practice could mean not making films or writing books or saying things the Kremlin wanted but you hated. And for many in the 1970s the only way out was prison or emigration. And sometimes it still is.
• • •
I’ve been keeping the windows shut against the peat smog, but it still penetrates through everything. My clothes, hair, glasses, and camera are all full of the smell. I wash the clothes over and over, but still can’t get the smell out. I shave off my hair. But it’s in my scalp, my fingers. A national emergency has been announced. The Kremlin youth groups, the Nashi, are shown in the papers putting out the fires with a great hose; then it turns out those shots were faked, too. On the Ostankino news they say the President has the crisis under control, but the emergency services fail repeatedly: the fire engines haven’t been repaired for years and break down. People have started putting out the fires themselves, vigilante groups with buckets fighting great screaming fires in the crackling forests of middle Russia.
I have told TNT I can’t find their positive stories. I have run out of money. Maybe I could beg them for more, but the truth is I don’t want to. Another director will come in and finish up the work, splice in the positive stories. They are better at it than I am, and they will do it much faster than I ever could. I’ve fucked up. I’ve failed. The three producers, the curly haired and the redhead and the straight haired, are angry at first, and then they pity me.
The little TNT island of happy neon is shrinking. There’s less and less factual, even “factual entertainment,” on the network. Sitcoms are the thing now. They’re brilliant; but they have nothing to do with any Russia I have encountered. A hospital comedy is set in a hospital so spotless and shiny it could almost be teasing the viewer. And always that canned laughter. The more asphyxiating the country gets, the more canned laughter TNT erupts in.
I have told the people at Ostankino I won’t take up their offer. “Ostankino will only give you this chance once,” they tell me. They say that to everyone.
I just need to leave. I need to go back to London, which is measured. Where you don’t have to split yourself up into little bits. Where words mean things. Looking around I notice how many of my friends have left. Grigory. My first producer from TNT. Even Vladik, the performance artist, lives in Bali now. Before he left he wrote a public letter asking the President to resign: “It is time to save millions of people from this simulacra of power.” What role could there be for a performance artist, where to watch a piece of grotesque performance art you just have to switch on the TV? Vladik had been outdone.
OFFSHORE
London. Chancery Lane. The Court of the Rolls: a squat new glass-and-steel building just behind the gray spires of the Old Bailey. Court number 26. Next door runs the humdrum affair of Plenty of Fish Media vs. Plenty More LLP. Across the hall a case dealing with a toilet paper patent. Nearly empty courtrooms with fluorescent lighting and IKEA desks. But court 26 is crammed to overflowing with oligarchs, political technologists, Chechen ministers in waiting, wannabe revolutionaries, and God knows how many security guys. Unidentified stunning females enter, glancing this way and that: gold diggers dropping in on the trial to meet a potential Forbes. It seems like the whole of the Russia I have spent a decade among is crammed into this little English courtroom. I spot Grigory, the young Moscow millionaire who threw the Midsummer’s Night parties. He’s wearing orange trousers and a peacock blue cardigan. “I thought I’d drop in to h
ave a look at them all,” he says. “You could never get so close to so many of the powerful in Moscow. Only in London.”
This is the largest private litigation in history: $5.8 billion. Boris Berezovsky, the “Godfather of the Kremlin,” the original oligarch, the man who created the Russian system and molded the President before being exiled by his own creation and fleeing to London—versus his protégé, Roman Abramovich, the “Stealth Oligarch,” who outgrew the old master to become one of the President’s new favorites. And who has also moved to London, though not to seek asylum, but to become one of the UK’s richest men, a timid, unshaven, baggy-suited herald of the twenty-first-century Russia that buys up sports clubs, castles, German ex-chancellors, and newspapers. Abramovich owns Chelsea Football Club. He owns the largest private yacht in the world. He’s worth $9 billion.
Berezovsky served the writ on Sloane Street, Knightsbridge. He was shopping at Dolce and Gabbana and saw Abramovich at Hermes next door. He ran to his Maybach, grabbed the writ, bustled past Abramovich’s bodyguards, and threw the paper in Abramovich’s direction: “This is to you, from me,” the shop assistant heard him say. Now when Berezovsky arrives at Chancery Lane he skips and struts into court, a whirr of jokes and gesticulations, always in the center of an entourage of pretty women, chin-stroking advisers, giant Israeli bodyguards. In the morning before testifying, when he sees a traffic policeman outside the court ticket his Maybach, he calls out with a laugh: “Stop—we can do business together!”
“This is a very Russian story,” says Berezovsky when he takes the witness stand, “with lots of killers, where the President himself is almost a killer.” The ostensible cause of the complaint is Sibneft, an oil company. It was privatized for $100 million in 1996, and by 2005 was worth $13.5 billion. Berezovsky claims Abramovich and he were co-owners until Abramovich “acted like a gangster” and took Berezovsky’s share away, when he was on the political ropes, threatening to jail one of Berezovsky’s friends unless he gave up his part of the company. Of course there’s nothing on paper to prove the company was Berezovsky’s, but didn’t everyone know they had a verbal deal? Hadn’t the press always described Berezovsky as co-owner? (They had, and I have spent so long in Russia I think it perfectly normal for the actual beneficiary to never appear on paper.)
“I know it’s hard for you to imagine a world where two men shake on it and that’s it,” explains Berezovsky, patiently, to the judge, Elizabeth Gloster, “but this is Russia.”
Berezovsky delights in explaining how he acquired the oil company in question, using his Kremlin influence at a privatization auction, negotiating furiously in the corridors, getting one rival to bid lower in return for favors, another to withdraw if he paid off his debts.
Abramovich’s lawyer, Jonathan Sumption, who in his spare time writes history books about medieval wars and is described in the papers as “the cleverest man in England” (he is being paid a reported record $12 million for this case), rocks backward and forward and moves in for the kill:
“You made a collusive agreement with one of the bidders and bought off the other: would it be fair to say that the auction was stitched up in advance?”
“It’s not fixed,” insists Berezovsky. “I just find the way through! In my terminology, it’s not fixing.”
Abramovich, bottle of cold water pressed to his temple against a headache, explains that it was not he but Berezovsky who was the gangster, the political godfather he would have to pay extortion money to when Berezovsky was vizier in the 1990s Kremlin. But as soon as Berezovsky lost his influence, he lost his access to money. Thus the President and his network find it so hard to leave the Kremlin now; the minute he retires, they might lose everything. There are no Western-style property rights in this system, only gradations of proximity to the Kremlin, rituals of bribes and toadying, casual violence. And as the trial wears on, as court assistants wheel in six-foot-high stacks of binders with testimony and witness statements until they fill up all the aisles between the desks, as historians are called by both sides to explain the meanings of “krysha” (“protection”) and “kydalo” (a “backstabber in business”), it becomes apparent just how unsuited the language and rational categories of English law are to evaluate the liquid mass of networks, corruption, and evasion—elusive yet instantly recognizable to members—that orders Russia. And as I observe the trial from my cramped corner among the public seats, it takes on a dimly epic feel: not just a squabble between two men, but a judgment on the era.
“I was the first victim of President Putin’s regime,” pleads Berezovsky. “And then step by step he increased the number of victims.” And with a rising passion he reels off the names of all the jailed businessmen and women, murdered journalists, and dead lawyers.
And then Abramovich, speaking quietly, explains how back in the 1990s he would sell oil at base prices to his own companies in Cyprus and then to others at a market rate.
“If Russia in the 1990s was corrupt on a scale of four out of ten,” argues Berezovsky, “now it is corrupt ten out of ten. It is corrupt totally!”
Some $50 billion (sometimes more) is now moved illicitly out of Russia every year. Over the decades the tricks have multiplied: the state pipeline company, run by a friend of the President, buys pipes at inflated prices from a company that then turns out to be a shell owned by the state pipeline company’s management; state banks invest pension funds in companies that then mysteriously go bust. (The money just disappears! The banks deny all prior knowledge that the deals would sour.) The latest economic model is to create “hyper-projects,” which can act as vehicles for siphoning off the budget. The cost for the Russian Winter Olympics in Sochi was $50 billion, making it $30 billion more expensive than the previous summer games in London, and five times more expensive than any Winter Olympics ever. Some $30 billion is thought to have been “diverted.” There is also a “hyper-bridge,” which swings above the Pacific, connecting Vladivostok and South Sakhalin. There is nothing on South Sakhalin, the real economic benefits are almost zero, but the opportunities for graft are great. The new planned “hyper-project” is a tunnel between Russia and Japan. The USSR built mega-projects that made no macroeconomic sense but fitted the hallucinations of the planned economy; the new hyper-projects make no macroeconomic sense but are vehicles for the enrichment of those whose loyalty the Kremlin needs to reward, quickly.
But it was power, rather than money, that was always Berezovsky’s interest. The oil company the two oligarchs are fighting over was never more than a means to an end; he needed it to fund his control of television. He had been the first in Russia, in 1994, to understand that television could bring him that power. It was Berezovsky who introduced the “fabricated documentary” to Ostankino, inventing barely credible scandals about the President’s political opponents, his presenters brandishing random pieces of paper at the camera that “proved” corruption. In 1999 it was Berezovsky’s TV channel that created the new President, supporting his war in Chechnya and turning him from gray “moth” into macho leader. It was Berezovsky who invented the fake political parties, television puppet constructs, shells without any policy whose one point was to prop up the President. Russia’s slide from representative democracy to a society of pure spectacle was given its great push by Berezovsky. He created the theater I would later work inside, and which, after his exile, cast him as the eternal bogeyman: his old Ostankino channel blaming him for everything from sponsoring terrorism to political assassinations. And Berezovsky plays up to the role of Übervillain, claiming, once his influence was almost gone, that he was sponsoring attempted revolutions in Ukraine and Russia.
On Shrove Sunday during the trial, Berezovsky posts a confession on his Facebook page:
I ask for your forgiveness, oh People of Russia . . . for destroying freedom of speech and democratic values. . . . I confess for bringing the President to power. I understand confession is not words but deeds, these will soon follow.
> The Russian journalists covering the trial chortle in response. No one can believe a word he says. Berezovsky is not so much the opponent of the Kremlin’s system as its progenitor turned absurd reflection. The shape-shifter spun to the point of tragicomedy.
“I found Mr. Berezovsky an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be molded to suit his current purposes,” says Justice Gloster in her final judgment. “I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being deliberately dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events.”
Berezovsky is sitting just in front of me and begins to shake and laugh as the judge speaks. It’s a choking sort of laugh. In the hall outside the courtroom he paces up and down and then walks in circles for a while. He is still laughing when he goes outside to face the press.
In the following months he fades from view, for once refusing to give interviews.
The rumor is that he is destitute. The trial has cost him over $100 million. Six months later he sells a Warhol at Christie’s, one of 120 silk-screen prints of Red Lenin showing the Soviet leader in sun-touched yellow emerging from (or being submerged by) a canvas of blood red. It sells for $202,000.
Three days later Berezovsky is dead, hanging himself in the bathroom of his ex-wife’s Ascot mansion. I had assumed the Ostankino channels would gloat. Instead the atmosphere is mournful. The President’s press secretary sets the tone, announcing that the death of any person is a tragedy. Eduard Limonov, a former dissident émigré writer who transformed himself into the leader of the National Bolsheviks—a movement that started as an art project, became an anti-oligarch revolutionary party mixing Trotskyism and Fascism, and then transformed again to become a Kremlin ally—writes: “I had always admired him. He was great, like a Shakespeare character.” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist scarecrow used by the Kremlin to frighten voters, who normally spits and scowls when he speaks of Russia’s enemies, sounds almost tender: “I’d seen him a few months ago in Israel. He was tired, disillusioned.” An Ostankino channel shows black-and-white photos of Berezovsky as touching mood music is played. “After all this time,” the presenter says, “and all the roles he’s played, we never did find out who he really was.” It is as if the vast charade of Russian politics has suddenly paused and all the actors are turning to the audience to applaud a fallen player, welcoming in his corpse.
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Page 21
