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

It was the first time Yana had a conversation with another inmate. She wrote a letter to herself, a list of commandments:

1. Don’t feel sorry for yourself.

2. Don’t cry.

3. Don’t think about your life on the outside.

4. Be patient.

5. He will wait for you. He won’t leave you.

6. Smile.

7. He loves you.

In the following days she began to look around the cell more carefully. On every bunk there was a little micro-world. One woman was praying, another writing, another playing cards. Suddenly a group of half a dozen women got up at the same time and went to a corner of the cell, stood in a little circle, and began exercising. Squats, push-ups, abs. They looked like stumbling bears. They were doing everything wrong. Yana came up and asked whether she could join them. The next day she began to correct them, gently at first, just showing them how to do the exercises right. By the end of the week she was their trainer.

She began to get to know them. It turned out everyone here had the same recurring dream: they were trying to call someone and couldn’t get through. She had that dream every night: trying to call Alexey on his cell phone but he was out of area. It was a relief to know everyone had the same dream.

Her cell was for first-time offenders. Half were twentysomething girls, virtually all in for drugs. They didn’t know what to do with themselves. They didn’t know how to have a proper conversation; they just watched MTV and TNT and gossiped, but when Yana talked to them they all began to say how much they missed their parents. They had never had a relationship with them and now they missed them. There was an eighteen-year-old, Lara from Ukraine, who had been busted for a sack of weed her boyfriend had given her to take over the Ukraine-Russia border. She followed Yana everywhere. “What should I do with myself?” she would ask, over and over. At night she would come and stare at Yana lying in her bunk. Yana would wake and ask: “What are you doing?”

“I tried to read but I keep on getting these thoughts in my head.”

The other half of the women were in their forties and accountants; they were in for white collar crimes like Yana. The elder women would fuss around the twenty-year-olds: “Make sure you wash the cups” and “don’t swear.” Most of the older women had worked in small businesses: estate agents, travel companies. It wasn’t the thing to do to ask what exactly others were in for, and of course they all said they were “innocent,” but after a while a couple of them told Yana what had happened. The companies had been fiddling taxes, but the male bosses fled the country in time to avoid getting caught, and it was the female accountants who went to prison. After all, their signatures were on everything. The women had been doing nothing more illegal than any other business in the country, the same double bookkeeping every small company needed to do if it wanted to survive. But either the tax police needed to fill some arrest quotas, or they wanted to scare someone else, someone bigger, and needed to make an example, so they had gone after these companies. Still other women were sure the hits on their companies had been ordered by rivals or bureaucrats who wanted to bankrupt them and then take over their companies. This was called “reiding” and was the most common form of corporate takeover in Russia, with more than a hundred recorded cases a year. Business rivals or bureaucrats—they have long become the same thing—pay the security services to have the head of a company arrested; while they are in prison their documents and registrations are seized, the company is re-registered under different owners, and by the time the original owners are released, the company has been bought and sold and split up by new owners. These raids happened at every level, from the very top—where the Kremlin would arrest the owner of an oil company like Mikhail Kho-dorkovsky, then hand the company over to friends of the President—right down to local police chiefs taking over furniture stores. It was the right to do this that glued together the great “power vertical” that stretched from the President down to the lowliest traffic cop.

Yana suspected this was what was happening to her. Of course she had heard of other companies being victims of “reiderstvo.” But she had always assumed they must have been guilty of something to be attacked. They must have done something wrong. Something. She felt stupid now to have fooled herself that way.

The usual way out was a bribe. There was a whole network and industry of payoffs. Good “lawyers” were not those who could defend you in court—the verdicts were predetermined—but those who had the right connections to know whom to pay off in the judiciary and relevant ministry. It was a complex game; pay off the wrong person and you just wasted money. You had to find the real decision maker. And quickly a whole mass of middle men would begin to appear who want to persuade you that they, and only they, know how to pay off the right person. Yana knew her parents were looking for that person on the outside. They had found a “lawyer” who said he could help—he suggested she admit to the charges, and then he could get everything sorted. Meanwhile he told Yana’s parents to sell their apartment to pay for the bribe, which would be near a million dollars. She smelled a rat. Something was wrong. Her company had done nothing wrong; shouldn’t she stick to that? And what exactly was she meant to own up to? That she had traded what she traded? Own up to absurdity? If she even started to negotiate, it would be like giving away a part of her sanity, letting them own and dictate what the truth was. And then everything would start to slip.

She asked for another lawyer. He said the same thing. These were the rules. She understood the rules, didn’t she?

It was Galya who first made Yana think there might be something bigger going on, more than just a case of common “reiderstvo.” She had first met Galya at Petrovka 38, before her initial trial. She had been pushed into the cell, plump and trembling with tears. Over fifty. The sort of woman you see selling vegetables or hosiery at train stations. She was crying and spoke with a Ukrainian accent.

Galya, it turned out, was a cashier at a pharmacy. There are little pharmacies at train stations. One morning the FDCS had come and arrested her for selling food additives. Food additives! Yana’s interest was piqued.

“What’s your name?” asked Galya.

“Yana.”

“Yana Yakovleva?”

How could she know her name? Yana had heard of stool pigeons. Was this one?

“When I was arrested,” Galya explained, “the cops were talking to each other and said I was being taken down under the same law as Yana Yakovleva. They’re all talking about you.”

Though she was only just starting to work out the full picture, this was why Yana was in prison.

In 1950, in Leningrad, near the port, Viktor Cherkesov was born into a family of dock workers. A working-class kid, he joined the army straight out of school. It is there he is suspected to have joined the KGB; with no connections, it was a way up the ladder. The KGB sent him to study law at St. Petersburg University, in the same class as the young man who would become the President, who became his friend. Like the President he studied poorly. In 1975 Cherkesov joined the fifth department of the Leningrad KGB, which was in charge of arresting dissidents and nonconformist thinkers. For some KGB men, working in the fifth department was considered an embarrassment, compared to the heroics of real espionage. In the 1970s Cherkesov worked on cases rounding up, breaking, and jailing members of underground religious and feminist groups. He became head of the department. In 1982 he personally headed up the investigation of the Soviet Union’s first independent trade union, SMOT. Vyacheslav Dolinin was one of those he interrogated: