Петр Померанцев - Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible - The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“P will get back to you next week,” Elena, would say. And giggle. P never did. Elena had been a singer at the Crystal Nightclub on Karl Marx Street before she joined the ministry. Some time later, even Elena disappeared, running off to live in Turkey with a Scandinavian ambassador who had left his wife, children, and diplomatic career for her.

The local government had its own ideas about development. The governor also ran the commercial port, and now his economics minister was busy setting up a network of banks to launder money from the proceeds. The governor himself was large and bald and always sweating. “I went to Poland recently,” he told Benedict the only time they met. “I saw them making ketchup in cement mixers. That’s the sort of innovation we need here.”

At the end of the project Benedict asked P for the paperwork to confirm that the $200,000 worth of computers had arrived. P refused to give it to him; the computers had never made it, he claimed. Benedict suspected the computers had been sold out the back door, but he couldn’t prove anything.

Benedict put his lack of progress down to the provincial nature of Kaliningrad local government. He was given a new job, in Moscow, working with a federal-level ministry, where he hoped the bureaucrats would be of a different class. And there was much he was enjoying about life in Russia. He had married his translator, Marina, a friendly, unpretentious lady the same age and with the same sense of humor as him. He enjoyed the relative wealth: no longer the down-at-heel academic, he was now a consultant with a driver, and he always bought the drinks. And another good thing had come out of the project: Benedict had allocated $136,000 for Danish experts to fix the zoo. The animals were acting normally again. Even the squirrel had calmed down.

In Moscow Benedict worked opposite the federal Ministry for Economic Development to guide the EU’s strategy in Russia. The minister for economic development was considered the most enlightened minister in Russia. He was an academic and a personal friend of the President, wore sharp suits and pink shirts, and was beloved at Davos. He had fifteen deputy ministers, many of them bright young things with MBAs (or at least studying for MBAs). The ministry was in the middle of reconstruction: some floors were bright and new, many more an extension of what Benedict had seen in Kaliningrad: the same darkling corridors and ever-ringing phones and heavy curtains and photos of the President—now the new one, but still smiling apologetically.

“Can you bring paper?” a woman who was Benedict’s liaison at the ministry asked him. “Always bring paper. A4. Every department is allowed a quota, and we can never get the amount of paper we need.”

Every time Benedict went for a meeting at the ministry he would load himself up with stacks of A4, sheltering them with his overcoat from the snowstorm.

“I’m not sure the ministry understand what we’re here for,” he told me one evening in Scandinavia. “The other day they asked us to organize and pay for a New Year’s party for the whole department.”

Meanwhile the country around us was changing. Every day Benedict would evaluate the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars’ worth of EU projects in Russia. They all ticked their boxes:

“Democracy? Check: Russia is a presidential democracy with elections every four years.”

“Civil Society Development? Check. Russia has many new NGOs.”

“Private Property? Check.”

Now, Russia does have elections, but the “opposition,” with its almost comical leaders, is designed and funded in such a way as to actually strengthen the Kremlin: when the beetroot-faced communists and the spitting nationalists row on TV political debating shows, the viewer is left with the feeling that, compared to this lot, the President is the only sane candidate. And Russia does have nongovernmental organizations, representing everyone from bikers to beekeepers, but they are often created by the Kremlin, which uses them to create a “civil society” that is ever loyal to it. And though Russia does officially have a free market, with mega-corporations floating their record-breaking IPOs on the global stock exchanges, most of the owners are friends of the President. Or else they are oligarchs who officially pledge that everything that belongs to them is also the President’s when he needs it: “All that I have belongs to the state,” says Oleg Deripaska, one of the country’s richest men. This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.

I would rarely see Benedict angry, but when he talked about this he would start to stutter and grow red in the face. He was just a bugler in the grand march of international bureaucracy, but he felt frustrated and unheard. The West was condoning this, agreeing to this perversion of meaning. Benedict was never a moralist, but there was something about fakery that dismayed him.

“If you start saying one thing is another, then, well, then the whole thing will come tumbling down,… ” he would say, slapping his lighter on the table. And then, when he would calm down: “It’s like the West reflected in a crooked mirror.”

I told Benedict I had learned how Russian TV channels were structured. On the surface most Russian TV channels are organized like any Western TV station. Independent production companies pitch program ideas at the network in what looks like open competition. But there is a twist. Most of the production companies, I soon realized, were either owned or part-owned by the heads of the network and senior execs. They were commissioning for themselves. But as they had a genuine interest in making good shows and gaining ratings, they would create a plethora of companies, each competing against the other and thus improving the quality of ideas. And while the channels themselves pay their taxes and are housed in new office buildings, the production companies, where the real money is made, operate in a quite different world.

Recently I had been cutting a show at one such production company, Potemkin. It was based far away from Moscow’s blue-glass-and-steel center, in a quiet road on an industrial estate. No graduates in horn-rimmed glasses snorting coke and eating organic sandwiches here, just the blotchy faces and twinkle-drunk eyes of factory workers and the tattooed bellies of the long-distance lorry drivers who ferry goods across one-sixth of the world’s mud, ice, and bogs. The gray warehouse building where Potemkin was based had no sign, no number on the black metal door. Behind the door was a dirty, draughty, prison-like room where I was met by a bored, unsober guard who would look at me each day as if I were a stranger encroaching on his living space. To get to the office I walked down an unlit concrete corridor and turned sharp right, up two flights of narrow stairs, at the top of which was another black, unmarked metal door. There I rang the bell and an unfriendly voice asked through the intercom: “Who are you?”‘ I waved my passport at where I guessed the spy camera to be. Then came the beep-beep-beep of the door being opened, and I was inside Potemkin Productions.

Suddenly I was back in a Western office, with Ikea furniture and lots of twentysomethings in jeans and bright T-shirts running around with coffees, cameras, and props. It could be any television production office anywhere in the world. But going past the reception desk, the conference room, coffee bar, and casting department, you reach a closed white door. Many turn back at this point, thinking they have seen the whole office. But tap in a code and you enter a much larger set of rooms: here the producers and their assistants sit and argue; here the accountants glide around with spreadsheets and solemnity; and here are the loggers, rows of young girls staring at screens as their hyperactive fingers type out interviews and dialogue from rushes. At the end of this office is another door. Tap in another code and you enter the editing suites, little cells where directors and video editors sweat and swear at one another. And beyond that is the final, most important, and least conspicuous of all the inconspicuous doors, with a code that few people know. It leads to the office of the head of the company, Ivan, and the room where the real accounts are kept. This whole elaborate setup is intended to foil the tax police. That’s who the guards are there to keep out, or keep out long enough for the back office to be cleared and the hidden back entrance put to good use.