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

When I tell my editors at TNT about the Rose they aren’t particularly excited.

“Find out anything you need, Piiitrrr. But why should our audience care about life-trainings for Muscovites?” says one producer.

“How much did you say they cost? 1,000 a go?” adds another.

“How does that relate to a provincial single mother? Our audience? It’s not part of her world, nor is it anything she aspires to or understands. Keep it brief,” says the third.

“But what if it is a sect?” I answer back.

“Russian sects are crazed freaks on communes in Siberia. What do this lot do: corporate trainings? That’s not like any Russian sect we know. And Piiitrrr, we still need more positive stories.”

Everyone who has been at the Rose has pledged themselves to secrecy. I need someone to go in and blend with the girls there, make friends with the employees and those who have been there a while. There must be some gossip since two students have now died. I want someone Russian, preferably the same age as the girls.

I approach an undercover reporter, Alex (not his real name), who is excited to help out. Alex is meant to be the best in the business, has penetrated gangs and corrupt state institutions. We pay just under $1,000 for the foundation course. It will last three days. After each day of the trainings Alex will meet with me and Vita Holmogorova, a professional psychologist and member of the Russian Association of Psychotherapists, to go through all the events and thoughts. Based on Alex’s testimony, recordings, and interviews I do with present and former adepts and the psychotherapist’s analysis, I slowly start to piece together what happened to Ruslana and Anastasia at the Rose.

The Rose of the World runs its trainings in a Soviet-gothic palace at the All-Russian Exhibition Center (VDNH) in northern Moscow. VDNH was commissioned by Stalin to celebrate Soviet success, with great gothic pavilions and statues dedicated to every republic from Armenia to Ukraine and every accomplishment from agriculture to space. Now it is rented out to petty traders selling anything from kitsch art to kitchens, furs, and rare flowers. Stray dogs hunt in packs between gargantuan statues of collective farm girls and decommissioned rockets. The Rose’s trainings are in the old Palace of Culture.

When you walk in at 10:00 a.m. there’s a table with name tags on it, just like at a professional conference. You’re directed up the grand staircase toward the main hall. It’s closed. All the participants of the training stand around in the foyer looking a little awkward. There’s some tea. There are roughly forty people: a few stolid fortysomething businessmen and a lot of younger women in their twenties who are clearly well looked after. Suddenly you’re startled by Star Wars music blasting from inside the hall itself. The doors burst open. The music is really loud, so loud it almost hurts. A woman is standing at the entrance:

“The doors to our auditorium are open! Come inside! Come inside!”

She shouts this over and over as you enter. Inside it’s almost pitch black, and all around the sides are people shouting: “Quick, quick, take your seats, put your bags away.” This is the “group of support,” volunteers who have been at the Rose several years. They’re shouting at you all the time, and they seem to be everywhere in the darkness. From the moment you walk in you’re lost, disorientated, somewhat stunned.

You take a seat on chairs that spread in a fan several rows deep around the stage. The volunteers are seated in the row behind you—so you can’t see them but their voices are shouting at the back of your head: “Sit down! Hurry! Hurry!”

Then everything is silent.

A bright light comes on up on the stage, and the “life coach” enters. He has a face like a teddy bear and wears an earpiece microphone and a slightly baggy suit with a bright tie that looks too loud. One of those silly ties you get as a joke for Christmas. He talks fast, very fast, and in provincial Russian with some grammatical mistakes. His accent is so hokey and he looks so comedic with his baggy suit, soft face, and silly tie that at first you find him funny. He talks about nothing in particular. How his mother was a seamstress. How he’s from the sticks. He tells a few stories, like a bad comedian. Everyone is looking at each other—what have they signed up for? This is a “life coach?”

He keeps on talking very fast, the microphone pitched at a level that slightly hurts the ears. Your head begins to ache mildly. He brings out a huge white board and draws flowcharts, complicated shapes and arrows showing how you will transform and what your personality consists of. You try to keep up with all the formulas and arrows and flowcharts, but at some point you start to get confused, lose your orientation. The more clever and alert you are, the more you focus on what he’s saying and drawing, but it never quite makes sense, and you get confused all over again. This is the point of the introduction. The shouting, the darkness, his jokes, and the frenetic drawing: your brain starts to get scrambled.

After a period (you’re not sure quite how long) of this a woman gets up to leave the room.

“Where are you going?” the life coach says, suddenly angry.

“The toilet.”

“You can’t go,” says the life coach.

Everyone thinks he’s joking.

“But I need to,” smiles the woman.

The life coach shouts back at her: “You want to change your life? And you can’t stop yourself from going to the toilet? You’re weak.”

Everyone is shocked. The woman explains that she really does need to go.

“Off you go then,” he says, light again, and waves her away.

What was that?

He talks on, jovial. A few minutes later another woman wants to go to the bathroom. When she’s at the door the life coach, stern again, says:

“Forget about coming back if you leave.”

She turns back.

“Why?”

This time he screams louder, longer, waving his arms in front of her face: “Why? We’ve come here to transform. Change. I could just wander off and grab a snack. But we’re here to perfect ourselves. You’re weak. You’re just weak!”

“That’s ridiculous,” says the young woman who wants to go to the bathroom. At first everyone in the audience backs her up; the life coach is being a tyrant. In her time Ruslana was one of the loudest and brightest in the audience, the first to pick a fight with the life teacher.

The life coach starts to negotiate with the audience. Their transformation starts now, today, he argues, this minute. Don’t they want to change? Defeat all their fears and inner demons? Be free? Together they can do it. And the only person holding them back is the woman who wants to go to the bathroom. She’s betraying them. They’ve spent how long now discussing this? Ten minutes? Fifteen? So she didn’t really need to go, did she? It’s all in her head.

“Yes, she didn’t really need to go,” repeat the volunteers from the back of the room.

The woman looks uncomfortable. What if they are right?

And without you noticing, the life coach has brought the audience around to his side, and the whole audience is calling on the person who needs the bathroom to be strong, she can make it, if she can make it they all can. She sits back down. Everyone applauds. They have crossed a little Rubicon together. The life coach has their attention.

“In the next days,” says the life coach, “you will feel discomfort, fear, but that is good, that’s because you are changing, transforming toward a brighter, more effective life. You’re like a plane, experiencing turbulence as you rise higher and higher. We all know you can’t grow without discomfort. Don’t we?”