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

Chernousov drove her back to the apartment she shared with Alexey. She knew their relationship was over. All those letters to him, the letters she never sent, they had been for her. She needed that illusion to keep her going. When they had spoken on the phone (four times over seven months), he was more distant each time. He wasn’t even pretending he cared. She made excuses for him: he was afraid she would come out emotionally damaged. Their relationship had been between two independent grown-ups, and now he was worried he would have to look after someone frail.

“Ha,” Chernousov grunted, “he’s just a coward. Wouldn’t even meet with me. He’s afraid it might damage his career at the company.”

Alexey was at the apartment when she arrived. They embraced formally. She gathered her things and put them into bags and waved good-bye as she left. She didn’t show any emotion. She had dreamt of coming back to that apartment. That’s what had kept her going. This was one final test, and maybe it was even the hardest. She passed it with a quick smile as she waved good-bye.

“Women always wait for men in jail,” she told Chernousov, “but men never wait. There’s been research on it.”

The trial began a few weeks later. The fact that they were even allowed to call witnesses for the defense meant they had a chance. Essentially it was diethyl ether itself that was on trial. It was bizarre. The FDCS’s scientists tried to prove it was a narcotic. Yana’s scientists tried to show it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.

Meanwhile the battle that really mattered was starting to rage on the Olympus of the Kremlin. The conflict between Cherkesov and Patrushev became known as the “war of Chekists” (the KGB men). Cherkesov’s men arrested the FSB generals involved in the Chinese border racket. In revenge Patrushev’s men arrested the FDCS’s top generals right in the middle of Domodedovo airport, surrounding them with masked gunmen and dragging them off to prison. ( Hello-Goodbye was being filmed at Domodedovo at the same time, though they missed the standoff.) For a few rare months the thick stage curtain that separates the shareholders of the Russian state from the general public was pulled back. The country’s elites were split down the middle between those who backed Patrushev and those who backed Cherkesov. With no instructions coming from the Kremlin, TV stations and newspapers had to choose sides. Cherkesov wrote an opinion piece in Kommersant , the country’s main broadsheet, which became known as the declaration of the Chekist: “Only us Chekists have saved Russian from destruction,” wrote Cherkesov. “We need to unify.” Cherkesov had broken a cardinal rule—he had spoken publicly about an inner conflict. Why had he done it? Could the President have secretly encouraged him? Where was the President? Could he not keep his own clans under control? For the first time since he had become president, he looked weak. Was he losing his grip?

No. He was just waiting for his moment. Both men had compromised themselves: Cherkesov with the scandals around the FDCS and the letter in Kommersant , and Patrushev with the revelations about cross-border smuggling. Within one week both were fired. In one swing the President had got rid of two potential challengers, they had eaten each other up. Even the President’s detractors could only step back and quietly applaud.

Yana won at her trial. The law was thrown out. Diethyl ether became legal again. She still officially runs her business, but she spends most of her time on an NGO she has set up called Business Solidarity: a sort of Good Samaritans for businesses that get into the same trouble she did. She connects them with the right lawyers, the media, me. She moved into a new apartment opposite my own. This meant whenever there was something left to film of her story, she could call me and I would grab the camera and run over to her apartment or wherever she was going.

Sometimes she takes me along to the trials. The courtrooms, to my surprise, are all brand new, with shiny bright tiles and high ceilings and lots of light. It’s their modernity, their normality, that makes the actual trials so much more twisted. There are the little businessmen, all facing trumped-up charges, all with the same look of pure confusion, like they are being sucked into a whirlpool and into an underwater world where nothing at all makes sense. And Yana walks up to them and comforts them. They calm down when they see her; she brings if not the hope for justice then at least the promise of sanity. And as I scamper behind her she walks with ever-elongating strides through the corridors and courtrooms, seeming to get taller with every step, her huge, red hair filling up the room like something burning.

This is how I cut the story (with Yana’s blessing). All the high-level political stuff goes. All the stuff about Cherkesov and the President and Patrushev. According to the film, she is released due to a bottom-up campaign against corrupt bureaucrats: proving that though of course there is corruption, one can fight it. It’s an exception rather than the norm; in other words, there’s hope in the country if you try hard. I focus on the love story, the strong woman facing huge challenges. The story is cut together with another story about a young mother who was told her infant would die of cancer if she couldn’t raise $50,000 for his operation, which she moved heaven and earth to achieve. So it becomes a film about strong women, not just about political oppression. It’s a compromise. It’s a narrow corridor. But at least it’s something. And the ratings are good. The country wants new heroes.

The demolition ball keeps the time of the city, a metronome that swings on every corner. The city changes so fast you lose all sense of reality, you can’t recognize streets. You look for a place where you went to eat a week ago, and before your eyes the whole block is being demolished. Whole swathes of town are demolished in fits of self-destruction, wastelands abandoned for years and for no apparent reason, skyscrapers erupting before there are any roads leading to them and then left standing empty in the dirty snow. The search for a style is psychotic. The first builds of the boom imitated whatever the post-Soviets had seen abroad and most desired: Turkish hotels, German castles, Swiss chalets. When Ostozhenka, the area right opposite the Kremlin, was knocked down, it was renamed “Moscow Belgravia”; there are “Mos Angeles” and “Moscow Côte D’Azur.” Dropped into the city as artificially and awkwardly as the political technologist’s faux Western-style parties. Elsewhere you can spy a neon-medieval: behind high black gates peak out Disney-like towers tacked onto pink concrete castles, with rows of offices shaped like the knight’s helmets, so they look like an army of warriors emerging from the ground. Often you find all the styles compiled into one building. A new office center on the other side of the river from the Kremlin starts with a Roman portico, then morphs into medieval ramparts with spikes and gold-glass reflective windows, all topped with turrets and Stalin spires. The effect is at first amusing, then disturbing. It’s like talking to the victim of a multiple personality disorder: Who are you? What are you trying to say? Increasingly new skyscrapers recall the Gotham-gothic turrets of Stalin architecture. Triumph-Palace, briefly Europe’s tallest apartment building, is a copy of the Stalinist “seven sisters.” Long before the city’s political scientists started shouting that the Kremlin was building a new dictatorship, the architects were already whispering: “Look at this new architecture, it dreams of Stalin. Be warned, the evil Empire is back.”