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

Slowly Grigory, like thousands of other Russians, starts to discreetly shift to the safety and serenity of London. Every year he spends less and less time in Moscow. Away from Russia he settles down. Has kids. He posts photos of his new life on his Facebook page: at trance festivals in Arizona, among the snows of Iceland, in the Scottish highlands. Grigory now feels calm enough to ditch the bodyguards. And though he has all the money in the world he likes to travel across west London in big red public transport buses.

For all their restoration hedonism, there can be something so forced about the glittering whirligig of the grander, gaudier Moscow nights. One time there is even a “Putin Party” in Heaven, one of the clubs where Oliona does her hunting. Strippers writhe around poles chanting: “I want you, Prime Minister.” (The President is briefly Prime Minister at the time, though still actually in charge, still the real President, just dressed up as the Prime Minister as at a masquerade.) The mood at the “Putin Party” is a mix of feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony: the sucking up to the master completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated, twenty-first-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross him, we would quite quickly be dead.

So, midway during nights in the baroque clubs with their Forbeses and girls, at around 2:00 a.m., I tend to take my leave, pull on my coat and scarf, and slide and stumble across black ice to one of Mitya Borisov’s bars. In earlier years I went to his little basement bar on Potapoffsky, then later to his one-room place on Herzen Street. There might be many of the same faces I’d seen earlier at the more glamorous events: Borisov’s bars aren’t “underground” places, and they’re not particularly cheap. The food ranges from okay to abhorrent, the booze is warm and often the wrong bottle. Borisov himself may well be there, but he has been drunk for so many years that his puffy, drooping face stares past you when you walk in even if you once swore friendship. He’s too tight ever to have installed air-conditioning, and the bars are such a smog of sour Russian cigarettes it makes a chain-smoker choke. Even so, as soon as you are through the door you can breathe more easily than in all the other places.

Borisov’s bars tap into the only unbroken tradition in Moscow, that of Soviet dissidents and nonconformists, a tradition that started off in Soviet kitchens and didn’t have to reinvent itself after 1991 because it had never pretended to “speak Bolshevik” beforehand. It just continued out of the kitchens and into Borisov’s bars. Borisov’s father, a literature professor, served time (he’ll tell you the story around 4:00 a.m.), and his first venue was an old apartment where you brought your own bottles and read your own poems. The clientele now range from an older generation in their sixties to their children and grandchildren. There’s no face control, but Borisov might threaten to throw you out if you can’t tell a decent rhyme from a bad one.

During the night I make my way from one of Borisov’s bars to the next. He’s put a bunch of places on one street so you never have to leave this world. There’s Kvartira 44, decorated like a 1970s dissident apartment, with the same books you would have found in your parents’ homes. (We’re back drinking in kitchens—though now you have to pay for the experience.) There’s Jean-Jacques, themed as a French bistro, John Donne as an English pub. But they don’t feel like hollow pastiche so much as witty acts of imaginary emigration, like visiting a White Russian émigré locale in 1920s Paris or a nineteenth-century London pub full of exiled antitsarists. Between darkness and dawn we all want to escape from the President’s Russia.

And if the mood is still with me the next day, I like to head down to the big yellow concert hall on Herzen Street and order a large Armenian brandy from the bar in the grand, scuffed marble foyer, with a little slice of lemon on the side (always insist on a fresh one). I avoid the stalls and stride right upstairs and take my seat among the gods with the pale, intense conservatoire students and the slight spinsters, usually music teachers, whose breath smells of brandy and who are quite convinced these concerts are just for them. And when I get to my seat and finally look around, I notice something unusual, namely the light. Most classical concert rooms only have artificial lighting. But here on Herzen Street there are great, arched windows that show the sky. Only the sky; you don’t see any roofs. And if your timing is lucky it will just be approaching sunset and the sky will be turning brandy-tinted. As the music starts I always have the sense the concert hall is somehow lifting. And if the wind is blowing and the clouds are moving fast, you get the extraordinary feeling that you’re flying on a zeppelin powered by brandy, lemon, wind, sky, and music.

When Ruslana Korshunova was first spotted as a potential supermodel at the age of sixteen, it was her eyes that caught everyone’s attention. Large and a wolf blue, the light of her Siberian ancestry: somewhere far off, a white midwinter sun on snowy wastes. Their power was heightened by a slight physical defect: in the bottom inside indent of each of Ruslana’s eyes there was a slight cup, which led to them always being filled with liquid and thus always shining, giving the impression she might be about to cry or maybe had just been crying—though whether in joy or sadness you could never tell. The rest of her face, in stark contrast to those deep, light, blue, complex eyes, was all innocence. The eyes of a thirty-year-old woman, more actress than model, in the face of a child.

At the age of eighteen she became the star of a campaign for a “magical, enchanting perfume” from Nina Ricci. You might even remember the ad. It’s in the style of a fairy tale. Ruslana, in a pink ball gown with bouncing curls, enters a white palace room. The room is empty apart from a tree, withered and bare but for a bottle of perfume shaped like a pink apple, which dangles from one of the branches, and a high mountain of dark, red apples in front of the tree. Ruslana sees the pink apple, and the camera zooms in as she gasps with teen excitement. She climbs the apple mountain, higher and higher, up to the very top, stretches, and reaches for the object of desire.

Two days before her twenty-first birthday she was dead. It was all over the tabloids, cable channels, and glossies: “Russian supermodel dies after plunging from near her ninth-floor apartment in downtown Manhattan. Her death is a presumed suicide. There was no note.”

The moment her body hit the ground the story exploded into a clusterfuck of rumors. Was it drugs? Love? Mafia? Prostitution? She had burst into a thousand Ruslanas—the addict, the whore, the spurned lover. And through all these rumors the magical face of the girl stared out at me.

I had “access,” that magical word all documentary makers and TV producers crave. A friend of mine knew Ruslana’s friends and family. In the months since her death they had refused documentary makers, but they would make an exception for me. I phoned TNT, excited. It was the story that had everything. There would be supermodels, suicide, and parties. There was Moscow, New York, London, and Paris. Glamour and tragedy. It was the easiest commission I ever had. I was even given a larger advance than usual to produce the film.

“But don’t make it too dark,” TNT said, “Remember we need positive stories.”

She died on Water Street, at the corner of Wall Street, Manhattan, where the financial district meets the East River. The evening I arrive is cold and wet. During the day it’s crowded here with office workers, but after 6:00 p.m. it goes quiet quickly. Just the last clerks in pall-bearer black suits hurrying home, the coffee bars already closing. Ruslana’s apartment is the only residential building on the street. It’s a twelve-floor concrete jagged thing, the floors at different angles that fold awkwardly to fit onto the corner. Few families live here, just the tired travelers of trade and commerce, the foot soldiers of globalization: a Pakistani wool trader, a Malaysian PhD student. Jobbing models handed Ruslana’s apartment down to each other.