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

This is the genius of the system: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother, and your family become part of the network of bribes and fears and simulations; you learn to become an actor playing out his different roles in his relationship with the state, knowing already that the state is the great colonizer you fear and want to avoid or cheat or buy off. Already you are semilegal, a transgressor. And that’s fine for the system: as long as you’re a simulator you will never do anything real, you will always look for your compromise with the state, which in turn makes you feel just the right amount of discomfort. Whichever way, you’re hooked. Indeed, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that molds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service.

Those too poor, too lazy, or too unlucky to avoid the draft—or those for whom the army seems a better option than anything they have—are rounded up, stripped, shaved, and packed off to bases all across the country. At the end of the April and October call-ups the city streets are clogged with great trucks full of conscripts, decked with tarpaulins and open at the back. The new conscripts sit and stare at the city they are leaving, rubbing their heads as they get used to the lightness of their newly shaved skulls. Where he will be sent depends on the bribe a soldier pays. Some will go to Chechnya, to Ossetia, to the death zones everyone dreads. But if you pay in time, you’ll avoid those. What no one will be safe from is hazing, known in Russia as the “law of the grandfather”: dozens of conscripts are killed every year, hundreds commit suicide, and thousands are abused. (Those are just the official statistics.) This is why every mother wants to keep her son away from the army. New conscripts are known as “spirits.” And as the tarpaulin-covered trucks pass through the gates of the army bases, the conscripts will hear the shouts of the older officers waiting for them: “Hang yourselves, spirits, hang yourselves!” they call. And the great breaking-in begins.

The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, an NGO run by the mothers of conscripts past and present, is the refuge “spirits” flee to when they run away from camp. The headquarters are in St. Petersburg. I take the Sapsan, the new train as smart as a TGV with wider seats and so expensive no one but the new middle class can afford it, up to the northern capital. The Sapsan takes four hours to reach Petersburg, the normal train takes eight. Some laugh that the Sapsan was built especially by the President so his “team” could travel between the two cities in comfort. The country is ruled now by the “St. Petersburg set,” the President’s old chums who were raised and studied with him. As I leave the train station I drive into town through a city built like a theater set, the original Russian facade of European civilization as imagined by Peter the Great, with little of its content.

In the office of the Soldiers’ Mothers the walls are lined with photographs of dead soldiers. I’ve come to interview four eighteen-year-olds who have recently fled from a nearby base called Kamenka. I’m late, but they’re all waiting quietly and jump to attention when I walk in. They wear hoodies and the football scarves of Zenit, the St. Petersburg football team, and are desperate to prove they didn’t just run away because of common hazing, that they’re loyal, tough. They seem embarrassed by having to take shelter with fifty-year-old women. They never call the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers by its name, just “the Organization.”

“You get beaten up, that’s fine. I pissed blood but that didn’t scare me,” says one, the skinniest.

“Stools broken over your head. It’s good for you,” echoes another.

“They put a gas mask over your face, then force you to smoke cigarettes while you do push-ups. If you get through that you’re a real man.”

“I’m not red, …” they all repeat.

“Red” means “traitors.” It’s a prison word: in the 1940s Stalin started to fill up the ranks of the army with prisoners, infecting the system with prison code and hierarchies.

“You need discipline. But what happens at Kamenka has nothing to do with discipline.”

“The ‘grandfathers’ beat you to extort money, not because they want to make a soldier out of you.”

The conscripts spend most of their time repairing and repainting military vehicles, which are then sold on the sly by Kamenka’s command. The “spirits” are essentially used as free labor.

The boys had run away after a night of nonstop beatings. The “grandfathers” had been drinking all day, and then at night they began to whack the boys with truncheons. The commanding officer came by but did nothing; commanding officers need the help of the “grandfathers” in their larger corruption schemes and let them have their fun. They go to great lengths to cover up for the “grandfathers.” In one week, the Soldiers’ Mothers told me, five “spirits” at Kamenka had their spleens beaten to a pulp. The commanders couldn’t take the “spirits” to a normal hospital; too many questions would be asked. So they had to take them privately, paying 40,000 rubles (over $1,000) for each operation.

At 6:00 a.m. the “grandfathers” told the “spirits” they needed to each bring 2,000 rubles ($50) by lunchtime or they would kill them. One of the conscripts, Volodya, had decided to make a run for it. He slipped through the fence and made it to the road. His father had picked him up and brought him to the Organization.

Volodya mutters as he tells his tale. I have to keep on asking him to speak up.

“Of course it’s because the commanding officer in the army is a darkie from the Caucasus. The darkies control the camp, it’s all their fault,” he tells me. The women from the Organization tut-tut and shake their heads. They hear this every day, especially in St. Petersburg, the skinhead capital, and especially among the supporters of Zenit, Volodya’s team.

“Were the ‘dembels’ who beat you darkies?” ask the “mothers.”

“No, they were white,” admits Volodya.

The story might have died after he ran away; Volodya would have reported who had carried out the beatings. The army would have denied them. And that would have been the end of it.

But the commanding officer panicked. He drove into town, grabbed Volodya from the street in front of his apartment, bundled him into his car, and tried to bring him back to the base. Volodya’s father had given chase in his car and collided with the commanding officer’s car to stop him. There was a pileup. The cops turned up; TV cameras turned up. The Soldiers’ Mothers managed to extract Volodya. Then the new minister of defense found out about the story. The Kremlin had just pledged to reform the military. The minister needed an example to show everyone he meant it. Kamenka was already under examination; three conscripts had died during military exercises in the previous month. Maybe that’s why the commanding officer had panicked. Now the ministry had an excuse to ramp up the investigation, and the TV reporters were being encouraged to make films about it (a couple of years later the anticorruption minister of defense was himself tried for embezzlement, in the next round of Kremlin purges).

I have learned to play this game by now, feed off the scraps of freedom given by the system. I will intercut Volodya’s story together with other tales of bullying: a reality show star who married an abusive husband, a kid picked on in his yard. And my producers are happy. They have worked out that these stories about the little man being beaten up by the state play well; this is the everyday reality of the TNT generation. They’re commissioning more of them. Another director is shooting a film about a man in Ekaterinburg who was beaten nearly to death by traffic cops when he refused to pay a bribe; now he exacts his vengeance by catching traffic cops giving bribes on video and posting them online. Another film TNT is making is about a young woman killed when her car was crashed into by the head of an oil company; he got off due to his connections. Back in Moscow I have just filmed a story about teens beaten by the police. The whole thing was caught on cell phones, but the police have brought charges against the teens for beating THEM up. I hear the same chorus of confused despair from the teens that I heard from Yana Yakovleva: “It’s like they can define reality, like the floor disappears from under you.” The Kremlin has announced a new campaign to clean up the police, and the parents hope this will help save their children (and thus I’m allowed to shoot my story).