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

Grigory began by making his own computers. They sold well. Soon he had a team of other students working with him. Got involved with banking. Then came the new world of threats, bodyguards. At the parties, people would whisper he was lucky to have made it through alive.

“The worst is when people owe you money,” Grigory told me once as we drove through the woods outside of Moscow in a new, silver, sports car. “As long as you owe them, they’ll never kill you. But if they owe you they’d rather kill than pay. I dream of being able to go outside without bodyguards. A normal life.” (The bodyguard’s Jeep was visible in the rearview mirror as we drove.)

“What is it you want from Moscow, Peter?” he asked me another time, as we were drinking bright blue cocktails.

“Well, you know, it’s a booming city. It’s up and up and up.”

“Only a foreigner can think that. This city devours itself.”

And then once, when he was thinking of resuming his studies, but this time in political economy: “There must be some way of working out how to make Russia work. Must be!”

Whenever I see Grigory he is accompanied by Sergey, who directs the human scenery around his boss: he brings artists, directors, actors, and foreigners so Grigory feels he’s at the center of a bohemian feast. A personal tailor makes Sergey’s clothes: capes, knee-high boots, tweed breeches, the cultivated getup of a twenty-first-century necromancer. He has a way of making his pupils shrink and dilate in hypnotic pulsations. He drives a green vintage Jag (whose very appearance is some sort of wizardry in this black-Jeep-and-Hummer-dominated town).

Sergey and Grigory studied together at the math and physics college, shared rooms. But after school, while Grigory had become a millionaire, Sergey had tried to be an artist. He discontinued that and joined a cult. He returned talking mystic riddles about the “materialization of dreams” and “re-dividing reality into segments you can travel through.”

“I’m Grigory’s healer, his wizard,” Sergey likes to say. “The parties are mystery plays.”

Sometimes Grigory smiles at Sergey’s mystical obsessions, but with every week he seems to need him more, waiting for Sergey to take him by the hand and escape to a better world straight out of the movies they grew up on.

One evening Sergey delivers an invitation for another Grigory party. Guests are told to prepare for the art project of the year. The impossibly fashionable boys are all dressed in black this time. Grigory enters, and his court photographer (he has a stutter and is the only one here drinking as heavily as me) puts down his cocktail and scampers over. A burst of photographs: this is the Moscow way—all the rich have their own photographers. They take them on holidays, to parties, to family gatherings; you’ve only made it when your life becomes a magazine.

Grigory comes over and we toast the evening.

“Tonight is when we reveal the true face of Russia,” says Grigory. “I present Sklyarov!”

A light comes on, illuminating a stage at the far end of the club. A man with a face like a gargoyle sits on a throne, dressed in tsarist robes. Rocking, he spits and mutters. A bulge on his forehead sticks out like a small, second head, pushing the eyes down into dark slits. The eyes dart around the room like a trapped animal’s. This is Sklyarov. Sergey had picked him up outside a railroad bar in a polluted provincial town. Sklyarov was the local madman and a prodigious scribbler: conspiracy theories, nonsense political utopias, frenetic sketches of the ideal city. When Sergey showed Grigory the scribbles, he was inspired: this was the true voice of the new Russia. They flew Sklyarov to Moscow (he’d never flown before and soiled his seat), put him up in the best hotel on the highest floor, and told him people in the highest echelons of power were interested in his ideas. Tonight they are launching Sklyarov’s book, his mendicant vision for the future of the country. Sergey introduces the mendicant as a great Russian prophet, a future leader of the nation.

Sklyarov begins to read extracts from his book. His hands tremble as he holds it; it’s the hands that are the most appalling, caked with layers of factory soot, dirt, blood, the scum of railway toilets. The book opens with a description of life in his hometown, which in tsarist times had the most apt name of Yama, literally “the pit.” Sklyarov, frightened at first, reads fast:

The psychological situation in Yama has become critical, acts of psychological violence are on the increase. The violence takes place on the pathological, material, political, moral, financial, and other levels. There is an increase in corruption among bureaucrats aimed at destabilizing the psychological arsenal of the people.

The thing works like a nonsense satire of Moscow. The impossibly fashionable boys and girls start to relax, applaud, congratulate Grigory on the art project of the year. Sklyarov reads on; the next chapter deals with his autobiography:

As regards the story of my own life, in all its facts, numbers, events, trials, tortures, pluses, minuses, flights, falls, ravelings, unravelings, realities, realisms, points of view, versions, dark, light and colored phases: I was born at four o’clock and twenty minutes, in the year 1972, in the town of Yama, in the then-Soviet Union. I was raised in the tradition, order and instructions of Communism, though my soul always rebelled against them. On October 28, 1979, I was made into a Young Pioneer. I took my Young Pioneer badge and flushed it down the toilet with the words: “Maybe you, toilet, can be a young pioneer.”

Grigory stares up at the gargoyle. As the mendicant tells his story I start to notice how uncannily he and Grigory reflect each other: born in the same period, both children of one system they disbelieved, now in conflict with a new system ruled by corrupt bureaucrats. Grigory feels that he lives in an asylum, rebuilds his penthouse to look like one. Sklyarov spent all his formative years in real ones—his asylum diary takes up the bulk of his autobiography.

Sergey is as ever on Grigory’s shoulder, smiling with his success. After the event the three link arms and pose for photographs; in this city they rhyme.

But every week Grigory seems to need rebirths ever more intensely. Every time I see him he is wearing a new costume, transforming himself for another of his fancy dress evenings—one night an elf, then Hitler, Rasputin—escaping, changing, and mutating, clipping his hair short, growing it longer, brushing it to the side, then forward. (Only the bodyguards stay the same. Their boss is an eccentric, and I can never tell whether they hate or love him for it.) Sergey consults lunar calendars, arranges parties to match zodiacal principles. When Aquarius is in the sky he makes a deal with those who run the Moscow zoo and takes over the dolphinarium at night, the partygoers diving and swimming between slippery, pretty girls and dolphins. When the moon is new the theme of the party is “White.” Grigory, carrying a white rabbit in a cage, announces “tonight is all about my rebirth, a new me.” One week Grigory works as a waiter in a café (“I want to find out what it’s like to be a normal person,” he tells me), the next he’s writing plays, flying so fast no role can stick to him, and all around him the city is churning, the demolition ball swinging, and Gotham-gothic towers erupting. And now the bully bureaucrats and Chekists are closing in, and on the news there is always the same message: “Our great President has brought stability.” But all I see happening is that the brilliant boys like Grigory are being eaten.

Television is also increasingly affected. Originally TNT’s formula for success was to remake hit Western reality shows like The Apprentice or Dragon’s Den . They were successful across the world—why not here? But when TNT made Russian versions, they flopped. The premise for most Western shows is what we in the industry call “aspirational”: someone works hard and is rewarded with a wonderful new life. The shows celebrate the outstanding individual, the bright extrovert. But in Russia that type ends up in jail or exile. Russia rewards the man who operates from the shadows, the gray apparatchik, the master of the politique de couloir . The shows that worked here were based on a different set of principles. By far the biggest success was Posledny Geroi (“The Last Hero”), a version of Survivor , a show based on humiliation and hardship.