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

by Peter Pomerantsev

  But though the old master may be dead, the system he begat is growing, mutating, swelling now out of Moscow and flowing through many offshore, tax-free, beneficiary-disguised archipelagoes in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and Monaco and from there into Mayfair, Belgravia, Sloane Street, White Hall, Central Park West. For the President’s men and those who fear him, for the bully-bureaucrats and the gangsters-turned-oil-traders, for the real entrepreneurs and the Russians who just want to get out and live a normal life. For everyone the pattern is the same. Make, steal, siphon your money off in Russia. Stash it in New York, Paris, Geneva, and especially London. My Moscow has landed.

  • • •

  I have been working on a TV show. My nine years in Russia are a bit of a black hole in my résumé, and I’m back at the bottom of the pile again: officially a “producer” (the word has lost all meaning), but actually an assistant with no editorial control, on a glitzy, trashy, documentary entertainment series for an American-English cable channel. Meet the Russians is about the new, post-Soviet rich in London, and the ad promises to take the viewer “into a world of wealth he has never before witnessed.”

  There’s the pop star married to the steel tycoon who has spent $2 million on her career, including albums, winning Mrs. World (the husband bought the rights to the competition the year before she won) and starring in a Hollywood B movie with Stephen Dorff (the husband financed the movie). She keeps a falcon in their home. The home is decorated to copy a seven-star Dubai hotel she once stayed in. She takes baths in champagne to keep her skin smooth.

  There’s the footballer’s wife who has spent over a hundred grand on Louboutins (“I can’t walk on anything less than 5-inch heels!”) and thinks that English women are frumpy (“They don’t even look like women!”).

  There’s the ex-wife of the entrepreneur whose partner fell foul of the President and now can’t go back to Russia; she poses for us in her $180,000 fur coat.

  And as the nine-part series rolls out, we see how those who have been in England for a while learn their Ps and Qs, learn how to spend righteously, not vulgarly, learn about charity and the virtues of flat shoes. Become, and I seem to hear this word a lot as I work on the program, “classy.”

  The show rates well and feeds a double appetite. The local audience get to titter and feel pleasantly superior to the new rich they are selling parts of their country to: “Meet the most vulgar reality characters ever on TV,” explains the Daily Mail. But beyond this there is a deeper comfort in the thought that though the new Russian rich might be wealthier than any English person could ever hope to be, though the Sunday Times rich list is topped no longer by the queen but by Abramovich, Usmanov, and Blavatnik, at the end of the day these global nouveaux all yearn to fit into “our way of doing things.” Instinctively, out of habit, the editorial producers on Meet the Russians reach for some version of Vanity Fair, My Fair Lady, the myths the English grow up with. The Victorian compromise, the traditional marriage between new money and old class, is extrapolated to the era of globalization. The new global rich, the myth goes, all yearn for our culture, law, schools. Civilization.

  Except I’m not entirely sure that’s what is happening at all.

  • • •

  Sergey is a character in Meet the Russians. He grew up in a Russian family in Estonia. In 1999, when he was thirteen, his parents took him on a holiday to London. He had never been abroad before. They took the ferry over and booked into the small, three-star Earls Court Hotel. Sergey was crazy about basketball, and he had never seen real black people before. They were all wearing the Nike Air Jordans that were his dream, and his head was already bursting with all of this, when his parents sat him down on the edge of the bed.

  This was not a holiday, they explained. They were asking for asylum as Russians discriminated against in Estonia. This was his new life.

  They moved to Kent. His father became an alcohol delivery driver. Worked hard. Bought a semi. On weekends Sergey would sneak up to London. First he organized underground raves in North London. As he turned eighteen, the Russian wave of money was just cresting: Abramovich was buying Chelsea, Lebedev the Standard and the Independent. The English were retreating, pulling out of their own post codes of aspiration, out of Mayfair and Belgravia and Knightsbridge, selling up and moving out to Oxfordshire or Tuscany or Norfolk, leaving behind the polished stucco squares and gated gardens to be inhabited by the new heroes of sudden wealth from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, India, Krasnoyarsk, Qatar, Donetsk.

  Sergey has found himself a niche.

  He’s the artful dodger of this world. The Mr. Fixit. Need a Mayfair penthouse? A Warhol? A live flamingo for your party? Sergey’s your man. He’s got different business cards for all his different roles, but his main one is as “club promoter.” But that just means he knows everyone in the golden triangle between New Bond Street in the east, Sloane Street in the West, and Berkeley Square at its tip.

  When we first meet he’s running nights at Baku, the Azeri place on Sloane Street, rumored to be owned by the Azeri president, Heydar Aliev’s, daughter, where the dance floor is decorated with $50,000 bottles of wine guarded by bouncers. Then there is Kitsch on Upper Burlington, where two Russians, Sergey likes to boast, came in and dropped $200,000 in one evening after they signed some epic deal. Now we’re having lunch in Selfridges, a few days after New Year’s, when the English are still asleep, but the store is packed with Arabs, Chinese, Russians. They’re the ones who bring in the profits.

  “When my mum and dad asked for asylum here they probably thought I would become English. British. Whatever,” says Sergey. “But in the world I work in, in Mayfair, Knightsbridge, Belgravia, I often end up speaking more Russian than English. The English aren’t the ones with the real money any more. They still might rule the other side of Sloane Square, down in Chelsea, but in Mayfair they can’t keep up. A good club night here brings in $180, 000. That’s three times more than out there.”

  At the tip of London the city breaks through and out of England and up into a different space, which is neither Europe nor the Middle East nor Asia nor America but somewhere altogether offshore.

  Sergey’s core clientele are the Golden Youth. The kids of Russian (and Ukrainian and Kazakh and Azeri) bureaucrat-businessmen (the roles are hyphenated), sent away to be educated at the prettier boarding schools and then on to international business schools in Europe and America. Wellington and Stowe, with their porticos and playing fields, are favorites. The more patriotic the Russian elites become, the more they sing hymns to “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Tsarism,” the more they damn the West—the more they send their children to study in England.

  In a previous age, when the English were the club you aspired to join, some new immigrants would change their names, from “Vinogradov” to “Grade,” “Mironov” to “Mirren,” “Brokhovich” to “Brook.” But that wouldn’t occur to the Golden Youth: why bother when the richest people in the city have non-English names now anyway? The parents of the Golden Youth send them to boarding schools not because they want them to become English, but because it’s the status thing to do, along with having a home in St. Tropez or a bank account in Switzerland. But neither do the Golden Youth I meet peg themselves to Russia. They don’t deny their roots. But their reference points run Hong Kong-Geneva-Fifth Avenue-London-South of France and from there to private yachts, private planes. Offshore. Having one nationality, whether American, Russian, or British, seems passé, a little twentieth century.

  “So what are you?” I ask the daughter of a Russian pop star (childhood in a gated community in Moscow, boarding school in Switzerland, and now college and clubbing off Sloane Square). “Where do you feel you belong to?” I ask two sisters, who went to boarding school near Cambridge, and whose father from Orienburg has bought them a boutique in Mayfair where they sell gem-studded Uggs.

  And they pause, think, and say: “We’re sort of in-ter-na-tio-nal.”
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br />   Sergey echoes this. “My clients are the internationals” (though large swathes of those at his parties are former Soviets).

  But when you press to find out what “international” means, no one can quite answer.

  Evenings start at Novikov on Berkeley Street. The same Novikov who created all the zeitgeist Forbes-and-girls restaurants in Moscow where Oliona used to do (maybe still does) her hunting. This is the first place to bear to his actual name, a name that has become a signifier for the New Moscow. And the New Moscow, it turns out, is now something to aspire to.

  Past the bouncers outside and the girls smoking long, skinny cigarettes, past the tinted glass doors and the jade stone Novikov has put in near the entrance for good luck. Inside, Novikov opens up so anyone can see everyone in almost every corner at any moment, the same theatrical seating as in his Moscow places. But the London Novikov is so much bigger. There are three floors. One floor is “Asian,” all black walls and plates. Another floor is “Italian,” with off-white tiled floors and trees and classic paintings. Downstairs is the bar-cum-club, in the style of a library in an English country house, with wooden bookshelves and rows of hardcover books. It’s a Moscow Novikov restaurant cubed: a series of quotes, of references wrapped in a tinted window void, shorn of their original memories and meanings (but so much colder and more distant than the accessible, colorful pastiche of somewhere like Las Vegas). This had always been the style and mood in the “elite,” “VIP” places in Moscow, all along the Rublevka and in the Garden Ring, where the just-made rich exist in a great void where they can buy anything, but nothing means anything because all the old orders of meaning are gone. Here objects become unconnected to any binding force. Old Masters and English boarding schools and Fabergé eggs all floating, suspended in a culture of zero gravity.

  But now it’s not just Moscow anymore where this style resonates. Over in Bernie Arnaut’s Bulgari Hotel, on the corner of Hyde Park, the most expensive hotel in London (rooms start at $1,200 a night; the penthouse is $26,000), the floors are black granite and the walls are black glass, with older men and younger women in the blackness hard, scowling, and sparkling. The lost-in-new-wealth world of Moscow rises and blends with the sudden global money from all the emerging, expanding new economies. And the Russians are the pacesetters, the trendsetters. Because they’ve been perfecting this for just a few years longer, because the learning curve was so much harder and faster when their Soviet world disappeared and they were all shot into cold space. They became post-Soviet a breath before the whole world went post-everything. Post-national and post-West and post-Bretton-Woods and post-whatever-else. The Yuri Gagarins of the culture of zero gravity.

  Just south of Piccadilly, on St. James, England looks like the same old-boy country it always was: the Reform Club, Brooks, the members-only halls with their worn carpets, secret passwords, and centuries-old walls. But one simply doesn’t need “in” here anymore. A partner from Novikov’s, I’m told, is buying up a building on St. James for his own private London gentlemen’s club. It’ll be more discreet, more private, more exclusive. And Novikov itself is crowded every night, bringing in $1.3 million a week, full of Paris-raised Qataris and Monaco-registered Nigerians, American hedge fund managers and Golden Youth and Premier League Football agents, escorts from Brazil and Moldova and the Swiss “lawyers” with offices in Moscow and Hong Kong, complaining loudly over house music that their business is about to go to shit because the Swiss parliament now demands that foreigners with accounts in Swiss banks reveal their real identities.

  “The point of a Swiss bank account is that it’s fucking secret!” they shout at the bar in the style of an English country house library. “I’m going to lose all my Moscow business! It’s the end of Switzerland!”

  • • •

  Skinners Hall, built in 1670, just off Cannon Street in the “heart of the City.” The Great Dining Room, oak paneled and hung with tapestries and coats of arms, is lit with spotlights of acid pink and dark cobalt blue, which combined make a sort of neon dusk. Tonight there’s an evening for the London Russian great and good who have sponsored the annual “Russia week”: a week of ballet galas at the Coliseum and Slavic rock concerts in Trafalgar Square that celebrate the Russian influx.

  The men are in black tie and the women are dressed uneasily in gowns that feel just off the rack. A quintet plays something classical. Then comes the Babushki, a trio of old women singing village songs to Euro-beats who were the Russian entry at the Eurovision Song Contest. One of the Russian wives is putting on some sort of fashion show. There’s no catwalk for the models, and they have to move in between the tables. The dresses are velvet, swooping, Italianate aristo Grace Kelly gowns: “timeless classics.” But you can’t make out the colors because of the pink and cobalt lighting.

  “Look,” whispers the fashion wife to me, “there’s T. I last saw him in Monte Carlo. That man can never go back to Russia, he’s such a crook. What is he here? A philanthropist? It’s like he’s had plastic surgery for his identity. Pulled on a new face.”

  “Is that A?” asks someone else. “The one who makes out she’s an aristo? Ha. I remember her in Moscow. Fine aristo she was then. You know how she met her first husband, the billionaire? She was ‘modeling.’”

  Original identities become as obscure as the true ownership of funds flowing between the former Soviet Union and the West. Especially since the President has passed a law banning state officials and the heads of state companies (and now most of the companies are state companies) from having bank accounts or stocks and bonds abroad, even when the point of rising in the system is the privilege to lift money over there and migrate it over here. And so the Kremlin both regulates the status that confirms the privilege and keeps everyone scared. And as long as everyone is scared, they’ll remain loyal. There might well be more FSB agents now in London than at any time in history, but their aim is less nuclear secrets and more the other Russians and whom you can hit up. A paranoia runs through every meeting and conversation.

  “See B,” a Russian high society writer leans in and says to me, “the one there in the pearls? With all the guys around her? She appeared from nowhere and opened her own networking agency. Everyone thinks she’s FSB. Why else would she need to have everyone’s contacts? Know who is here and who is not?”

  And all this makes conversation difficult outside tiny circles of loyal friends. The usual openings—“What do you do?” or “What are your politics?”—lead to dead ends. A lot of the time, the only neutral thing that people seem to be able to talk about is Art.

  • • •

  “I spent a lot of time in London when I was studying. I loved the museums, Tate Modern especially. And I thought it would be great to create a space like that in the Russian context,” says Dasha Zhukova, with the disarming simplicity only the really, truly rich can carry off: she’s building a new modern art museum in Moscow as we speak. She is the daughter of one Russian tycoon, the longtime girlfriend of another, Roman Abramovich. I’m interviewing her before an event at Art Basel that she is sponsoring. (I’m taking up a bit of writing to paper over the gaps in television work.) Trying to set up a meeting has been complicated. Within a few hours the location switches from London to the south of France to Moscow to New York. We end up meeting in Los Angeles, where she grew up. I fly economy for a one-hour chat.

  Her father made his money trading oil. There was also some story about his selling arms from Russia to the war in Yugoslavia, and he spent some time in an Italian prison on account of this (he was eventually cleared of charges). The last time I saw Abramovich he was in an English courtroom timidly revealing the moves he had pulled to make his first money.

  But all that hinterland seems to just fall away when I talk to Dasha.

  She’s beautiful in an unaggressive sort of way. She nods and listens. Her accent is unplaceable, wavering among tough Muscovite and breezy Valley Girl and hints of London. She w
as nine when she left Moscow, living with her Russian academic mother first in Texas and then LA. Whenever I try to steer the conversation to politics, she just ignores it. We just talk art. About the cool spaces in the gaps between Donald Judd sculptures. About the honesty of 1960s modernism. About not knowing quite where to belong.

  Identities are dissolved, reborn, in the clean, pure, simple lines of abstract art.

  Whenever I meet a candidate for the TV show they tell me to come along to the Arts Club on Davies Street. It’s the most “international” of the private members’ places. There’s a chandelier of shiny plastic bubbles as you climb up the staircase, and when you get up to the first floor you can soon spot the clusters of Russian wives. The men are still mainly in Moscow or Tyumen pumping crude and cash. The wives are here, worried about or resigned to whomever he is sleeping with out there (the stewardesses of private planes are always suspect), while they sit in London watching over the cash flows and keeping the bolt-holes ready, lunching in little groups in La Durée at Harrods; perfectly dressed in Hermes or something equally “classy” and restrained to the point of tautness, going for private showings at Fabergé and then meetings with a dealer at the Arts Club. The wealthier wives run galleries. In the surrounding streets, north from Piccadilly, up Albermarle and along Upper Burlington the new galleries belong to the post-Soviets: the Erarta, the St. Petersburg, Most 26.