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

To what extent were Lifespring courses responsible for the models’ suicides? When Anastasia’s mother meets with lawyers to ask about the possibility of opening proceedings against the Rose, she is told that proving in court that someone was forced into suicide in this case, after she is already dead and has left no accusatory letter, is nearly impossible. But what is clear is that the Rose’s advertising doesn’t provide information about the risks associated with Lifespring, and the organization preys on those members of society—young, lost women—who are vulnerable. Girls from the former Soviet bloc are particularly fragile. Six of the seven countries with the highest suicide rates among young females are former Soviet republics; Russia is sixth in the list, Kazakhstan second. Emile Durkheim once argued that suicide viruses occur at civilizational breaks, when the parents have no traditions, no value systems to pass on to their children. Thus there is no deep-seated ideology to support them when they are under emotional stress. The flip side of triumphant cynicism, of the ideology of endless shape-shifting, is despair.

“When was the last time you spoke to Ruslana?” I ask Volodya.

He pauses as he tries to recall.

“Come to think of it—it was the day she died. It was late in Moscow, I was in a bar. It was kinda loud. I asked if there was any reason for her call—could she call back later? She said there was no real reason. She just wanted to chat. She would call back. I can’t remember the exact time, but it must have been inside the last hour before her death. I think I must have been the last one to speak to her. I didn’t notice anything abnormal.”

In March Ruslana went back to New York to look for work. Her social media posts from the time mix the light and breezy with messages full of confusion and self-hatred:

“My own fault—that I allowed in. My own fault—that I fell in love. My own fault—that I allowed my heart to be broken. My own fault.”

And then:

“Life is very fragile and its flow can easily be ruined. I’m so lost: will I ever find myself?”

One day before her death, Ruslana starred in a photo shoot on a roof in midtown New York. A weird day: first rain, then sun so hot the camera burns. The photographer’s name is Erik Heck. On a final trip to New York I visit his Harlem apartment, and he shows me grainy 8mm video of Ruslana’s last day. The Ruslana I see in this shoot is completely different from her previous work. She’s a grown woman, not a fairy-tale princess. For the first time I catch a glimpse of the real person. “She’d always been told to play different roles. What I saw in her was more than that, a timeless beauty,” Heck says. “I shot her when she wasn’t watching, she had no time to pose. That’s when you get the best work. She was free.”

A day later she was dead, three days before her twenty-first birthday. Her mother is still convinced it’s murder. Each new pathology test proves nothing new, but leaves just enough room for speculation.

More than two years after her death, the Nina Ricci ad with Ruslana in it was still used in Russia, her face hanging over Moscow with “a promise of enchantment.” The perfume is a hit with teens. It smells of seductive, adult musk, mixed with childhood scents of toffee, apples, and vanilla.

The Rose of the World wasn’t the first sect I had encountered in Russia. As the Soviet Union had sunk, so sects had bubbled to the surface. Indeed, it was the Kremlin that had given them an impetus, via the power of Ostankino. In 1989 a new show appeared on Soviet TV. Instead of the usual ballet and costume dramas, the audience suddenly saw a close-up of a man with 1970s porn star looks, black hair, and even blacker eyes. He had a very deep voice. Slowly and steadily and repeatedly he instructed the viewer to breathe deeply, relax, breathe deeply. “Close your eyes. You can cure cancer or alcoholism or any ailment with the power of thought,” he said.

This was Anatoly Kashpirovsky. He was a professional hypnotherapist who had prepared Soviet weight-lifting teams for the Olympics. He had been brought to late Soviet TV to help keep the country calm and pacified. To keep people watching TV while everything went to shit.

His most famous lecture involved asking the audience at home to put a glass of water in front of their TV sets. Millions did. At the end of the program Kashpirovsky told the audience the water was “charged with healing energy” from his through-the-screen influence. Millions fell for this.

But Kashpirovsky was only the beginning. There was Grabovoy, who had a show on television and claimed he could raise the victims of Chechen terror attacks from the dead; there was Bronnikov, who claimed he had found a way of making the blind see with an inner vision. The sect the TNT personnel were referring to when they mentioned “communes in Siberia” was that of Vissarion, a former postal worker from Krasnodar who became convinced he was the returned Christ. In the 1990s he had founded a colony in the mountains near the border with Mongolia: “The Abode of Dawn City.” It’s still there. While still a film student I had helped out on a British documentary about it.

We flew into Abakan and drove into mountains that look like giant, frozen waves. Vissarion and his forty-five hundred followers had built their settlement up in the peaks. You have to climb for two hours to get there. There are no roads. The members of the sect live in wooden houses they built themselves, cutting down and sawing the trees. They plant their own food; they don’t drink alcohol or eat meat; and they all have clear, crystal blue eyes and powerful shoulders and look ten years younger than their actual age. As first they filled me with wonder. Then they told me they were there to wait for the apocalypse. Only their mountain would be safe when the seas flooded the earth.

“You’re lucky to have come for Christmas,” they told me.

Both the Western and Orthodox Christmas had passed.

“Christmas?” I asked.

“Yes, Christmas is now on Vissarion’s birthday.”

Many of Vissarion’s followers were former minor bohemians, actors, rock musicians, painters. They were educated, but now they mostly read Vissarion’s works. Vissarion had written a New New Testament, in which he had united all the different religions (Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Judaism) into one meta-story. Just as Surkov had gathered together all political models to create a grand pastiche, or Moscow’s architecture tried to fit all styles of building onto one, Vissarion had created a collage of all religions. His followers would study transcendental meditation in the morning and whirl like dervishes in the afternoon. Vissarion also provided them with textbook drawings to explain everything from reincarnation to evil (see diagram, page 180).

On Christmas day Vissarion came down from his house, perched highest on the mountain, to meet his followers. He was dressed in flowing velvet robes, like he was playing “Jesus Christ Superstar” in an amateur production. He sat down at the front of a great wooden hall and answered questions. Someone was having problems with his wife; Vissarion told him to listen to her more. Had they tried talking about their childhoods to each other?

“Can’t you see his wisdom? Isn’t he the heir to the new consciousness?” his followers asked me.

We weren’t the first, or the last, to film Vissarion. Camera crews from around the world went up and down the mountain near Abakan regularly. Every few years Vissarion would announce the coming of the apocalypse. When it didn’t come he would tell his followers it was thanks to their prayers and efforts. No one from the Abode of Dawn protested at this. They enjoyed it. And the TV crews coming to the mountain only confirmed their sense of self-importance.