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

The words set off a Pavlovian reaction inside Alex. He starts to relive the last few days, the most intense days of his life, all his most intense experiences, most secret memories. He hangs up the phone, and though on the one hand he can tell quite clearly that the people at the Rose are toying with him, all of him is still desperate to go back there.

“Those bastards. They reach into your most sacred places and then wrap it around them.”

He starts to laugh, then cry. Then laughs again, but in a way that sounds very forced. His pupils are dilating. He seems to be splitting in two.

Ruslana and Anastasia would be called by the Rose of the World daily. When they were with friends they would get a call and then leave to talk and not come back for hours. At first their friends thought the girls were talking to boyfriends or parents; when they found out it was the Rose they were confused. Why talk to them when you’re with your friends already? One time, sitting in a London restaurant with Masha, Ruslana was talking to the Rose, then put the phone down and ran into the street and started stopping people to retie their laces. She came back grinning and slightly sweating. It wasn’t that the task they’d given her was so weird, it was just the way she dropped everything, the dinner, their conversation, to run and do their bidding.

Alex’s friends keep a close watch over him the next few days; they’re worried a call from the Rose will entice him to go back. Over the next weeks his sleep is ruined; he starts to wake up in the middle of the night and yearns to go back inside the training. Alex is the only one from the group not to have signed up for the advanced course. Every time anyone mentions words he heard inside the training he starts to feel nauseated. He dreams of the life trainer, can hear his voice.

The real problems start in about two or three months. Alex loses his appetite. He starts to skip deadlines and fuck up at work, shouts at his editor. Everything hurts. He starts to cry in the middle of the day, for no reason.

“I just can’t find my way back to myself,” Alex tells me when we meet. He’s shaved his hair off and lost weight.

At work they tell Alex he needs medical help. When Alex goes to see the doctor, he takes one look at Alex and prescribes a course of antidepressants, massages, acupuncture.

Alex had only spent one course at the Rose. Anastasia and Ruslana went back for more. Each course costs a little more than the previous one, and each one is far more intense. The volunteers and life trainers at the Rose told people they were getting better, stronger.

Anastasia at first seemed happier than ever. “I can do anything now, anything,” she told her friends. When they went out clubbing she would say, “You’ve just got to grab the guy you want, just grab him and take him.”

As the models moved further into the Rose, they were instructed to bring more pupils. This is how the Rose gets new clients: adepts are expected to bring in more people. Ruslana tried to persuade Masha. She insisted so much that Masha ended up agreeing. Then she couldn’t go after all due to a family thing. Ruslana got angry. Masha had never seen her angry. Ruslana swore. Ruslana cursed. She had never used swear words before. She’d stopped being the gentle girl Masha had known. Masha missed the old Ruslana.

Soon after Ruslana had to go back to New York for work. Anastasia kept on attending courses at the Rose. She signed on for the master course. One of her first challenges was to bring in at least twenty people, or she would be thrown out. This was her “exam”—and she failed it. Try as she might, she couldn’t get people to come. She was told she was letting everyone else down. She drifted away from the organization. That was in February. By May she was displaying all the signs of the depression that killed her. “I’ve failed,” she would say. She was a victim. She hadn’t been able to transform.

The cruelest part was that in the last half year she had met the man she always dreamed of.

Kostya picks me up in his new Maserati. He’s a former Olympic judo champ who now “works in oil.”

“Those fucking trainings fucked her up,” he says. “Every time she visited them she would come back cranky, nuts. She’d promised she’d stopped going…. ”

He wanted her to move in with him, was ready to settle down. But now she’d found her perfect man Anastasia couldn’t be happy with him. Her mind was starting to slip and tangle. When she and Kostya went out on the town, she would have awful attacks of jealousy, would cry if she saw him so much as talking with other women. A month before she died he left her at his home and went off on a business trip. When he came back she was gone. She was having so many panic attacks she couldn’t stand to be alone. She told friends she would hear the voice of her friend who had died the year before. She went back to her mother, to Kiev. She kept on complaining of stomach cramps. Kostya phoned her constantly the last few days before her death. Her phone was off.

“Those fucking trainings fucked her up,” he repeats as he lets me out of the Maserati. “I’m going to get my boys to see to them.” It’s all words. He never does.

“We really gave the opportunity for Anastasia to change. But some people you can’t change. She wouldn’t let herself transform. And let’s be honest—I hear she was into drugs. Blame modeling. Her lifestyle. Not us.”

It’s taken me a while to find Volodya, the only senior person from the Rose of the World who agrees to speak to me. He was Anastasia and Ruslana’s “chairman” from the volunteer group when they attended. Now he’s branching off to start his own training. He’s only in his twenties, boyish. Wears a white track suit top and jeans. He has the slightly glazed look of the true believer. He also had a brief affair with Ruslana when she was at the Rose. I ask whether that’s normal.

“Oh, that’s normal. Happens all the time. The trainings are intense. People open up.”

“Do people ever go through depression after the Rose?”

“That’s normal. We call it a rollback. Ruslana had one. She would cry at night. Would wander about town, not knowing where she was going. You have to go through that to grow. Like turbulence on a plane as it takes off. But by the time Ruslana went back to New York in March she was okay.”

Volodya’s claims contradict what his own boss, the life trainer, said about “Ruslana”: he had argued at the training that she was a “typical victim.” When I raise this with Volodya he simply says the life trainer is confused. Ruslana wasn’t the suicidal type, he says.

“So does anyone ever have any serious medical trouble after the Rose?” I ask Volodya.

“Of course they do. That’s normal. Sometimes it can be pretty rough. Not everyone can transform. But Ruslana was now a different person. She told me she wanted to fight for money she felt was owed to her from various contracts. She was new. Look—when I first started going to the trainings I quit my job, left my girlfriend. I fought with everyone I knew; my parents still think I’m in a sect. But I’m happy. I’m real. But people around you, they can get offended when you become strong. I’m sure Ruslana was murdered. Sure of it.”

The latest tests from Ruslana’s autopsy have arrived. They say there is no new evidence pointing to her being dead before she hit the ground; the neck muscles had no injuries, the thyroid and hyoid bone of the neck had no injuries. The scleras of the eyes were white without any petechia, ruling out strangulation. Meanwhile I have been doing some background checks about the Rose. On a small corner of its Web site, behind several tabs you would never think to open, is a small reference saying the trainings are based on a discipline called Lifespring, once popular in the United States. What the site doesn’t mention are the lawsuits brought against Lifespring by former adherents for mental damage, cases that caused the US part of the organization to go bankrupt in 1980, though spin-offs would quickly reopen under different names. In Russia Lifespring is in vogue; few have heard about its past. When I contact Rick Ross in New Jersey, head of the Cult Education Forum and the world authority on Lifespring, and tell him about what happened to Alex, Anastasia, and Ruslana, he replies that he has seen the pattern dozens of times: “These organizations never blame themselves. They always say, ‘It’s the victim’s fault.’ They work like drugs: giving you peak experiences, their adherents always coming back for more. The serious problems start when people leave. The trainings have become their lives—they come back to emptiness. And just like with drugs, some will just move on. But the sensitive ones, or the ones who have any form of latent mental illness, break.”