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

The life coach calls up anyone who is ready to join him on the stage. Ruslana had been one of the first to try this. He asked her why she came, what were her aims, what was holding her back in life. She said her problem was men: she couldn’t get any relationship right. And then the life coach ploughed into her: it was her own fault she let men leave her, she had an “inner monologue” that made her a victim. Ruslana tried to fight back—she was the innocent party, she explained. But the trainer spun her words back at her: she wanted everyone to think she was a “good girl” and that made her weak. The more you push back against the life coach, the more he argues: “Ha, the fact you’re fighting me shows how scared you are to admit you’re wrong! Scared to change!”

You find yourself first outraged and then slowly nodding.

Then everyone stands and has to recite together, like in an army, the “Commandments of Training”:

I will not tell anyone what goes on here.

I will not make any recordings.

I will not be late.

I will not drink alcohol for the duration of the training.

Smokers are told to stand. There are seven or so out of the forty. Anastasia and Ruslana were both smokers. Alex is, too. The trainer tells the smokers they have a chance to change their lives and quit. Those who promise to quit can sit. A couple (the stubborn ones) keep on standing. And the trainer begins to lay into them again; he keeps talking for ten, twenty minutes, until their legs are hurting, and they face a challenge between the physical pain they are experiencing and not giving in to the life trainer. Meanwhile the volunteers and some in the audience begin to shout at them: “Come on, sit down, you’re taking up our time.”

Eventually everyone sits down.

There’s a lunch break. It’s packed lunches or takeout; you’re not allowed to leave the building. Many are outraged and upset at the trainer—but no one leaves. People have come here for different reasons: some are midlevel professionals who want the training to give them a boost. This is what the trainer promises: to make you more “effective,” borrowing the language of the Kremlin and the political technologists. Others have been brought here by friends or lovers who have been through the courses themselves and insisted they come too.

“My girlfriend said she would leave me if I didn’t do it,” says one young man.

After lunch you go back into the hall and there’s some ambient music playing. “Who’s strong enough to tell their darkest secret?” asks the life trainer. He seems suddenly gentle now, caring. Everyone is sworn to secrecy, he repeats; this is one community. Someone stands up and tells how she was sacked at work. Someone else how a girlfriend left him. Then a woman stands up and talks about how she was raped when she was still a child, raped repeatedly. She breaks down afterward and cries; the volunteers cradle her. It’s the first time she has told anyone. There’s a hush around the room. There’s a lot of crying. When it was her turn Ruslana talked about her father: how she had felt when he departed. Anastasia remembered her parents’ divorce when she was young. For the first time the models had a place where someone would listen to them. They felt for the first time that they could be themselves. No one even knew they were models here.

And now the trainer moves in for another kill: all these events were your fault. If you were sacked—your fault. Raped—your fault. You’re all full of self-pity; you’re all victims. Now break into pairs, he orders, and tell each other your worst memories, but retell them as if you’re taking responsibility, as if you’re the creator, not the victim, of your life. This will go on for hours. And as you retell the worst moments of your life as if you were the creator, the one who made everything happen, you start to feel differently, you feel lighter, more powerful. Now you look at the life trainer a little differently. He’s bullied you and then he’s lifted you up and then confused you and made you cry, and now something else entirely. Without noticing you have been in the room twelve hours, but the time has just flown past, you’ve lost all sense of it.

You feel soft by now, somehow rubbery. You feel very close, closer than anyone you have ever known, to the other people in your group, as if you’ve always been meant to meet them.

“Transformation,” “effective,” “bright”: as you walk home these words ring through your head like gongs. You think about seeing the trainer tomorrow. You want to please him, to let him know you didn’t smoke, as you had promised. You feel a wave of warmth when you think about him. He’s tough, but he means well.

You get home toward midnight. Your relatives or roommates notice that you seem strange, but you shrug it off. It’s just that they’ve never seen you outside your comfort zone. You do the homework: detailed notes on everything you don’t like about yourself. Everything you want to change. You get to sleep at 1:00, maybe 2:00 a.m.

At night you dream about the trainer.

In the morning you’re there early. So is everybody else. When the doors open everyone rushes in, keen to show that they made it here on time. The doors are shut at 10:00 and any spare chairs removed. One guy comes in late, but there’s nowhere for him to sit. The trainer screams at him:

“You promised to be on time. You made a pledge. Why are you late?”

“I was hesitating whether I should come at all,” says the young man.

“Yesterday I saw you didn’t confess to any painful memories. You just looked at the others as if they were a show. That’s how you see everyone, entertainment, and now you want to run off. Is that the case?”

And if you were sympathetic to the young man when he was late, you now find yourself shouting: “A show! You think we’re just a show for your entertainment!”

The young man squats in the corner of the hall, ashamed. “Yes,” he admits later, “I was just afraid to leave my comfort zone.”

The trainer begins to draw more diagrams—arrows that show how you are going in one direction, and the people you know at home and work are going in another. That’s why they might not understand you after you do the trainings. You’re changing; they loved you for the person you were before, but you’re growing. This is a test for them: only the ones who really love you will be able to cope, to love the new you. And for those who don’t accept you, you should ask yourself: Are those relationships holding you back? Should you lose them?

The girl who yesterday talked about unspeakable things that happened in her childhood takes the microphone and says she regrets confessing now: some people in the hall seem wary of her, she says. But instead of feeling sympathy, everyone in the hall turns on her: “You’re just a victim,” they shout. “You’re enjoying showing off your feelings.” The life trainer doesn’t even have to tell them anymore what they should think.

Now the trainer’s talking about death. Death is no big deal. The other day some Russian tourists died in a bus explosion in Egypt. Is it a good or a bad thing? Well? It’s neither. A friend of his died recently. It’s neutral. Just a fact of life. Everyone here will die. You all, you all will die.

“Who remembers that girl Ruslana?” says the life trainer. “The model who killed herself? Jumped from a skyscraper. I knew her well. Her ‘inner monologue’ was ‘suicide.’ You know she had five attempts at suicide before she came to us?”

(This is new: none of her friends, colleagues, or family remember suicide attempts. Quite the opposite: they all say how well-balanced she appeared.)

“And did you know,” he continues, “her mother was taking money from her? She once borrowed 200 bucks from me to pay for her apartment in New York. And she was a supermodel!”