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

I ask about Ruslana.

“Of course I feel guilty. There she was, happy with her mum, preparing for university—and up I pop and say Hey, come to modeling land, it’s wonderful out here…. And then it all ends up the way it did…. But I really thought it would be a good way for her to make money for university. It is for lots of girls. It’s a chance.”

She says this simply—there’s nothing duplicitous about her. I ask her how she found Ruslana.

Tatyana spends 50 percent of her life on the road. Her life is an endless progression of cheekbones, legs, buttocks, lips. She sees thousands of girls a year. Maybe three will make it to the top. The former Soviet Union is her territory. In the Cold War it was spies who knew this country, studied it, poured over every detail: every block of high-rises, every muddy road, every factory. Now it is modeling scouts. Voronezh, Karaganda, Alma Ata, Rostov, Minsk—these are the great wells of beauty, raw girl crude to be pumped and refined. Many have never heard of these places. Tatyana knows them inside out. The Soviet Union occupied 20 percent of the world’s land mass; its former states produce 15 percent of the world’s oil. But over 50 percent of the models on the catwalks of Paris and Milan are from the former USSR.

In 2004 Tatyana had gone to Kazakhstan. She was on the jury of Miss Alma Ata. Local businessmen invited her down; they wanted her to choose one of the girls, many their mistresses, and whisk her off to Paris. But the girls were all breasts and bums: oligarch lolls. Nothing that would suit the needs of Paris and Milan. She had gone around all the agencies while she was there, too; no one had stood out. A disappointing trip.

Tatyana was on the flight back. She had finished the paperback she was reading quicker than she thought. She flicked through the in-flight magazine.

And then she stopped. In between the whisky ad and the piece on Kazakh flora was a photo of a girl. Amazing. The photo was in dubious taste: a semiclad waif in tribal garb, posing like some cross between Lolita and Mowgli in a jungle of plastic trees. But the girl herself—she was amazing. Her blue gaze went on forever, so powerful and deep that everything—Tatyana, the plane, the clouds—seemed to be caught inside it: small toys suspended inside this young girl’s gaze.

As soon as Tatyana landed, she phoned her colleagues at a Moscow casting agency. “Find that girl,” she said. “Find that girl.”

But Ruslana wasn’t a model. No agency had heard of her. In the end they found the photographer. Ruslana had been friends with the daughter of the editor of the magazine. They had taken the photographs for fun, for a piece about Amazons. Tatyana spotting the photos was magical chance. Fairy-tale stuff.

“She was hired by a London agency straightaway. She was doing the shows in London, Paris, Milan. Just in the holidays, in between school. Later, when she went full time, she would ring to say thank-you. It’s rare to hear ‘thank-you’ from a model. Ruslana was different.”

“Why do you think she killed herself?”

“She was the most emotionally stable model I knew. The most balanced. The best educated. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

The traffic is becoming congested, and we barely make Tatyana’s flight. She rushes to the departure area.

Before she goes she turns and says: “If you see Ruslana’s mother give her my love. Tell her I think of Ruslana every day. And if you need to find me I’m at church most Sundays.”

I find video of Ruslana’s first trip to London, her first trip outside the former Soviet Union. A teenager—no, child—in a hoodie on a blustery London day, snapping photos of Tower Bridge, grinning goofily, laughing widely, and trying to hide her braces as she does so. Then she takes the hoodie off, and down it tumbles: that heavy, golden, knee-length hair. They nicknamed her “the Russian Rapunzel” in modeling land.

Masha was her best friend during those first European days. We meet up during Moscow Fashion Week. Passing backstage during the shows, I’m struck by how young the girls look. Not even nymphet-like, just skinny like prepubescent boys.

Masha is twentysomething, but she still looks fifteen. She has Bambi brown eyes. She met Ruslana in London on her seventeenth birthday. It was Ruslana’s first season modeling.

“Who would wash her hair?” I ask to break the ice.

“We all took turns in the apartment. When we first met I had the sense Ruslana was my child, she was so innocent,” says Masha.

They shared digs in six-to-a-room flats in London, Paris, and Milan. Those were the days of casting upon casting. Life squeezed into measurements (32–23–33), tense girls eyeing each other’s legs-hips-breasts, desperate to be the one who is picked: every rejection a slap saying your body’s wrong, you’re wrong. We think of models as ideal; they think only of how they don’t quite fit.

“Ruslana would cry; she took rejection personally. But then she’d pull herself together. Wrote poems to console herself.”

Some poems still survive online:

Often they went hungry: agencies only provide a small allowance for food. That gets spent quickly.

“In Paris and Milan there’d be these dinners, rich men would pay to come, we could join in for free. Ruslana and I would go: it was our only chance to eat.”

“And?”

“The men could tell we weren’t like THAT. For lots of girls modeling is just a chance to meet a rich guy. It’s not as if the men have to work hard to sleep with someone. All that stuff was happening around us.”

Some girls, the Russian girls from god-knows-where who grew up with no running water, go nuts, sucked into the whirlpool of champagne, cocaine, debauchery. But not Ruslana.

“We were the dunces,” says Masha, “the ones who went to bed early.”

Success came quickly for Ruslana. Within a year she had her first hit for Officiel . The long hair spun into seaweed chains, entwining her body. Her face made over to cross the line from childhood to sex. But not Lolita-like; rather the stuff of folktales. And again that gaze: the taiga, Baikal, snowy wastes.

Then came the ad that took Ruslana and transformed her life. Nina Ricci. The magical tree. The pink apple… and stardom. The ad catapulted Ruslana into the jet set. Jerry Epstein, the head of Bear Sterns, famous for his love of teenage girls (he was later jailed for statutory rape), flew her down to his private Caribbean island. The new Russian mega-rich were especially keen to be seen with the new Russian supermodel. She spent more and more time in Moscow, found herself in the VIP lounge of all the clubs. The dream life of all the gold diggers and wannabes: she was living it. It was Moscow she fell in love with, felt most at home in. Her rise chimed together with the city’s.

She met Alexander at a club (though no one can remember whether in New York or in Moscow). He was one of the handsomest Russian tycoons on the scene, and she fell blissfully in love.

Luba, a former Miss Chelyabinsk, knew her during the affair. Luba’s Moscow apartment is drowning in her collection of cuddly bears. A little pug yaps throughout our conversation. “I never had toys when I was small,” says Luba. “Now I’m making up for it. I have over two thousand bears. Every city I visit I buy new ones.”

She tells me about Alexander.

“He’s not that young, but he is gorgeous. Girls drop at his feet. He’s been with so many of my friends. All of them perfect.”

Friends, experienced models like Luba, warned Ruslana not to fall in love. But she was certain this was the real thing. She wanted marriage, children, a steady home.