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

Elsewhere Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only “simulacrum” and “simulacra”… and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

At the height of his power Surkov’s ambition grew beyond mere parties and policies or even novels. He began to dream of creating a new city, a utopia. Its name was to be Skolkovo, a Russian Silicon Valley, a gated community of post-Soviet perfection. Hundreds of millions were poured into the project. I found myself invited on a media tour to Surkov’s city of the sun. We were taken on a coach and driven for hours outside of Moscow. At the visitor’s center at Skolkovo a girl with clover-blue eyes showed us 3-D video projections of the future city: offices built into the landscape in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, artificial lakes and schools, eternal sunshine and adventure sports, and entrepreneurs in sneakers. We got into the bus and drove across the real landscape: miles of snowy wastes and bare trees. Since Skolkovo’s launch billions have been spent, but virtually nothing has been built (there are whispers and rumors the project was at least partly created to give Surkov’s circle a mechanism through which to siphon off state money).

We were being taken to the hyper-cube, the only building of the future city already constructed. “We will soon arrive at the hyper-cube,” our guide said. “The hyper-cube is just coming into view.” It turned out to be a very modernist little structure, looking lost in an empty field. It had exposed concrete walls and large video screens. A PR man with a deep tan and the nasty smile common to upper-end foreign-service KGB men told us that all the corruption scandals related to Skolkovo had been solved. Behind him, on the video screens, the words “innovation” and “modernization” kept popping up. I asked whether the “modernization” project had failed: every week there were more arrests of businessmen and -women, and more than 50 percent of people were now employed by state companies. Polls showed that young people no longer wanted to be entrepreneurs but bureaucrats. The PR man shrugged and answered that the President was fully behind Skolkovo.

On the tour of Skolkovo we were accompanied by a young man named Sergey Kalenik, a member of the Kremlin youth group, Nashi, created by Surkov. Sergey wore a hoodie, goatee, and skinny jeans and looked like any hipster youth you find in Brooklyn or Hackney—then he opened his mouth and began to sing paeans to the President and how the West is out to get Russia. Sergey was from a humble background in Minsk, Belarus. He first made his name by drawing a really rather good manga cartoon that showed the President as superhero doing battle against zombie protesters and evil monster anticorruption bloggers: a nice example of the Surkovian tactic of co-opting hipster language to its own ends, trying to get the “cool” people on the Kremlin’s side.

The cartoon was so successful Kalenik was introduced to senior government officials, and his career as a young spin doctor was launched. “Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status,” Sergey told me with a smile that seemed to mimic Surkov’s (who in turn mimics the KGB men). “How do you define your political views?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was a fool to ask, then smiled: “I’m a liberal… it can mean anything!”

On the evening before her arrest, Yana Yakovleva was sitting in the garden of her country dacha. It was Sunday. The last of the summer was slowly draining out of the light. The guests had left; there were empty wine glasses and wine bottles and plates with cheese and sushi from the picnic lying on the mown grass. Yana leant back in the chaise longue to catch the last of the sun. It was getting cold fast. Suddenly, very suddenly, she had the sense something bad was about to happen. It was so strong Yana suddenly realized she was crying.

Alexey, her lover, was moving about the garden collecting things. Yana wanted to call out to him, then changed her mind. She couldn’t explain her sudden fear. They had been living together for two years, and she knew what he would say: he would tell her to snap out of it.

The next morning, a Monday, she drove the Lexus back into town still wearing the clothes from the weekend party: a short white frilly dress, pink heels, and a white handbag. They stopped for a cappuccino at the new coffeehouse on Frunzenskaya and skimmed through Vedemosti , the Russian version of the Financial Times . Then Alexey grabbed a cab to his job as a senior manager in one of the big new Russian energy companies, and Yana drove to the gym. All the while the sense that something bad was about to happen wouldn’t go away, like a distant but ever-present ringing in her ears.

At the reception desk she noticed the girl behind the counter was staring at her in a strange way. Yana thought it rude; this was a private gym, and it wasn’t the sort of stare members paid to receive. Near the door to the back office there was a small group of men in polyester suits. They didn’t look like they belonged here. One was pacing back and forth, wringing his hands.

Her trainer had Yana box, run, and then finish off with abs. It hurt after the weekend’s wine, and her trainer let her go easy on the abs. “See you Thursday,” the trainer said. She usually trained three times a week. “If I make it,” said Yana. It just came out; she wasn’t sure why she had said it. “Oh, there’s nowhere you could disappear to” laughed the trainer.

Yana showered and changed back into the white dress and pink heels. They would giggle behind her back at work, but it was her company, and there was no one to tell her what to wear. She had been running the company since she was twenty with one other partner. Now she was thirty-four, they had dozens of employees, and she could afford to turn up late wearing high heels. It was the sort of company the general public rarely notices but that makes good money: importing and reselling industrial cleaning fluids to factories and army bases. Yana came from a family of academic scientists; her father had taught chemistry, and now she made her money in the chemicals industry. Soviet knowledge transmuting smoothly to post-Soviet economics.

When she came out of the changing room the girl at the reception desk was staring at her even harder. It was embarrassing. Yana had decided enough was enough; she was going to tell her off. Then the men in polyester suits approached. The nervous one flashed his badge and said, “We’re from the FDCS [Drug Enforcement Agency]; you need to come with us.”

The first thought that went through Yana’s mind was: “That explains why the reception girl had been looking at me funny. ‘The FDCS have come for Yakovleva’—it makes me sound like I’m a drug dealer!”