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

The police report of her death shows photographs of her rented rooms: there are no books, no photos on the wall, no paintings. The door was locked from inside. The door to the balcony was open. There were cigarette butts on the floor—she would always smoke there. The balcony was covered with thick black netting from the building site next door. On the floor of the balcony there was a kitchen knife. There was a long cut through the netting: she must have taken the knife and sliced it open. The balcony is set at an angle away from the street. She couldn’t have jumped from there; any fall would have been broken by the floors beneath. There was a small gap through the scaffolding to the building site. It was so small only a lithe girl could make it. When the police arrived none of them could slither through.

Next door the frame of the new fifteen-floor office building was already built. A concrete shell, complete with stairs and dividing walls, but with no front. The police report doesn’t specify how long she spent wandering the empty building site. Several levels up one of the floors juts out into the street like a diving board. Could it have been from there? The police report doesn’t specify where she jumped from.

The street was nearly empty the Saturday she died. It was the hottest day of the year, a headache-making hot New York high summer. On weekends the bankers are away, and in high summer anyone who can flees the financial district. At 12:45 a city laborer working on the street heard a loud thud: “I thought a car had hit a person. I turned around and there was a girl lying in the middle of the road,” he told police. She was lying right out by the dividing lines, 8.5 meters away from the building—8.5 meters. The supermodel didn’t take a step off and fall. She took a run and soared.

The night before her death Ruslana was with Vlada Ruslakova, the Chanel girl. I’m lucky to catch her in New York—she’s about to fly off again, to somewhere in Asia. They’re nothing like their images on paper, these girls. Brittle, with lost looks not quite sure on what to focus. I suppose it’s only when they strike a pose for work that they become resolved; until then they are oddly in-between. But Vlada’s face is perfectly proportioned: she holds the center of the shot very well during the interview.

“We had dinner in Manhattan, at our favorite bistro. We were planning for her to maybe come to Paris in a few days’ time. Later that evening I took a plane to Paris myself for a shoot. She texted me when I landed—to see if I had arrived okay. That must have been morning in New York. And then a few hours later… a few hours later I saw on the news she was dead.”

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

“No. But she had spent much of the last year in Moscow. So we hadn’t seen each other much recently.”

“Was she upset about anything?”

“No.”

“Was she high?”

“No!”

“Why do you think she killed herself?”

“I refuse… I can’t… I don’t believe she did.”

Vlada describes Ruslana as “sweet,” “honest,” and “intelligent.” “Like a child.” She repeats this: “like a child.” Behind me Ruslana’s mother is there during the whole of the interview. Vlada only agreed to talk because the mother asked her to, and I can’t quite tell whether she’s revealing all she knows. I can hear the mother gasping for breath like one holding back tears throughout our conversation. When it’s her turn to give an interview, she runs out of the room weeping after just a couple of questions.

“I should never have let her go. Never. She was a child. She wasn’t right for this world.”

The mother has the same eyes, the exact same eyes, as Ruslana, and as I talk to her it can seem as if Ruslana is somehow present. She speaks in a small, sharp voice that cuts the ears ever so slightly.

Valentina hates the media, TV, journalists—anyone who had taken possession of and tried to tell her daughter’s story.

“Why do they all say she was a drug addict, a prostitute? How dare they? How can you just take someone and talk about them when you never knew them? What right do they have?”

I tell her I will be different. Samples of Ruslana’s organs and blood are kept in a vault under the New York coroner’s office. Valentina allows me to send blood samples for a full test to see whether there are traces of heavy drug use. She also insists we test for Ruffinol and chloroform or any other drug that could have been administered to knock her out.

“She would have never killed herself,” both Valentina and Vlada insist. “She wasn’t like that .”

Ruslana grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The family was Russian: Ruslana’s father was a Red Army officer, and Kazakhstan happened to be the last place he was stationed before the breakup of the USSR. He then went into private business.

“We were wealthy. One of the first to be really wealthy,” the mother tells me as we walk through New York. “But he was killed.”

Ruslana was only five at the time. She had a younger brother, Ruslan. Ruslan and Ruslana.

“You gave them the same names?”

“Yes—it’s beautiful. Don’t you find?”

Valentina looked around for work. She found door-to-door sales; American cosmetics companies were just expanding in Kazakhstan. Their business was dipping in the west but rising in the east. Valentina enrolled. She attended training to make her into a model salesperson: you can sell anything to anyone, they preached, as long as you believe. They taught her the “secrets” of sales success: make the customer say “yes” three times when you first chat with her, she can just be agreeing about the weather, that way she will be tuned into saying “yes” when you offer lipstick or anti-ageing cream. In the post-Soviet space such companies were hugely successful: the promise of money, secret knowledge, and Western beauty all in one package. (The catch was that the sales reps were actually being conned; they had to buy the cosmetics in bulk and see if they could sell them. They felt like salespeople, but actually they were the customers.)

“I was one of the best,” Valentina tells me, and I can almost hear the corporate training pride. “I made it to the level of middle manager.”

Valentina sent Ruslana to the local German-language school, considered the best in Almaty. It was prestigious to attend one. Ruslana had braces, got good marks, and was preparing for university in Germany. She had hair that reached down to her knees.

“Such beautiful hair,” remembers Valentina. “I would help her wash it. Until the age of fifteen she never washed her hair alone.”

When the call came from the modeling scout, Valentina laughed it off. Modeling wasn’t their sort of thing; it smelled of prostitution. Ruslana was going to university after all. But the scout kept on calling. She explained that modeling was the best way to pay for a university education, even in England or America. Ruslana would go straight to the West; she wouldn’t be held up in Moscow. They would try her at London fashion week.

“London, I’ll finally see London!” Ruslana told her mother as she begged to go.

The scout’s name is Tatyana Cherednikova. I find her in Moscow. She is on her way to the airport, and we talk in the back of the car. I expected someone in a designer dress and heels. Tatyana is quite the opposite. She wears a fleece with a reindeer pattern on it and snow boots. We listen to a CD of Christmas carols on the player. It’s approaching the Western date for Christmas (the Russian date is in January). Tatyana converted to Protestantism during her travels in Europe and America.

“It’s all about hard work and honesty,” she tells me about her new faith.