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

Closer to Moscow, Sergey, Grigory’s “wizard,” took me to meet Boris Zolotov, his guru and the author of The Golden Way . We drove for miles out of Moscow into the murmuring Russian forest. It was night when we arrived. “The Golden Way” was painted (in English) on the road, illuminated briefly by our fog-lights. An arrow pointed the way to a disused holiday resort for Soviet factory workers: a few low, prefab buildings fenced in by concrete walls and spiky wire. We headed for the largest building. In the green corridor was a huge pile of shoes: dirty sneakers, high heels, winter boots, sandals. We left ours, too. Through the double doors I could hear laughter and little shrieks.

Inside was a disused gymnasium. It was bright. Most people in the room were lying down, and everywhere was the smell of unwashed feet; people had been here for days. They lay in a half-moon shape around a stage, upon which, on a swiveling armchair, sat a round, grey-haired man. He wore a yellow shell suit. This was the teacher—Boris Zolotov. He spoke, and the people in the hall repeated the words back to him:

The energy of time and matter were put into the earth’s core, forming an energy track in the base matrix of the planet, creating the path of circumstances into a state of light.

Where Vissarion spoke in plain, almost childlike Russian (to followers he considered children), Zolotov’s idea was to remake language to re-create consciousness. He had been a theoretical physicist in the USSR, and he spoke in a montage of science and mysticism about the “materialization of dreams” and “redividing reality into segments you can travel through.”

Zolotov’s “method” was to stage experiments in which his followers would penetrate to the new level of consciousness: sweating orgies where the old, ugly, young, and beautiful rub and kiss and caress each other in a communal bliss. They spent whole days talking to each other in grunts, howls, meows, and belches. And always Zolotov sat in the middle, conducting the sweaty chaos. Many of his pupils had been with him since the early 1990s; when the Soviet floor gave way millions of Russians just kept falling and falling, deconstructing reality to the point where they thought they could see the very core of the universe.

“The new consciousness could only appear here,” Zolotov would say, “in this country which is the graveyard of all ideologies.” This idea united all the post-Soviet sects: all the suffering, all the shocks Russia had gone through made it the place where the new man, the future, could be born. And the sects also tapped into an even deeper myth: the idea that Russia will be the birthplace for a new, messianic consciousness. In the fifteenth century, when Moscow became the capital of what would become the Russian state, it pronounced itself the last bastion of Orthodox Christianity, the true faith of Christ: Europe was mired in the heresy of Catholicism, Byzantium had fallen to the Turks, but Ivan III’s Muscovy was to be “The Third and Final Rome,” the inheritor of holiness from St. Peter’s Rome and Byzantium. Russian literature and thinking brims with the messianic. Dostoevsky’s heroes profess that Russians are the only “God-bearing people” and that the second coming of Christ will take place in Russia. Berdyayev said that Russia was the bearer of a “vigorous messianic consciousness” rivaled only by the Jews. International communism was the most geopolitically ambitious expression of this idea: Moscow as the shining city on the hill of socialism, the churning forge of the new era to end all eras. Stalin built his seven great Gotham skyscrapers, which dominate and define the circumference of the city, to echo the Seven Hills of Rome. Any idea, not necessarily religious, finds itself magnified here to an iconic extreme: The Russian white supremacist will see Russia as the last bastion of white-ness in the world; the Russian nihilist will become the nihilist; Surkov’s triumphant cynic-mystic becomes post-Soviet superman, the political technologist who can see through all ideas to the “heights of creation.”

But if Moscow is the place where the Messiah will return, then of course it has to be the place where the devil will come to challenge him. Bulgakov envisioned the devil coming to Stalin’s Moscow, strolling down its boulevards as if they were his own. It’s as if the only way the city can make sense of itself is in the messianic; it has to envision itself as the place of the great battle of good and evil.

It was an idea that I again saw expressed while watching a theater production of Surkov’s Almost Zero at the Stanislavsky Moscow Arts Theatre. It had been nearly impossible to find a ticket; black market ones were going for thousands of US dollars. In the end, I managed to obtain entrance for two bottles of champagne and a promise to one of the theater’s leading ladies to let her use my parents’ London home rent-free. It turned out that the fee wasn’t even worth a proper seat. The ushers let me in after the lights were dimmed. They gave me a cushion and told me to sit on the floor by the front row. My head spent the night knocking against the perfumed thigh of some model, her bald partner seeming none too pleased. The audience was full of these types—the hard, clever men who rule the country and their stunning female satellites. You don’t usually find them at the theater, but they were there because it was the thing to do. If they ever bumped into Surkov, they could tell him how much they liked his fascinating piece. But it was soon apparent that the staging of Almost Zero had transformed the novel. In passages that were added in, the actors talked straight at the audience, accusing it of being at ease in a world of killing and corruption. (The hard men and their satellites stared ahead, unblinking, as if these provocations had nothing to do with them. Many left at the interval.) And the Egor in the play was nothing like the Superman of the book, but rather a man wracked by self-loathing, miserable in his shiny life with its casual humiliations. A man in hell.

“Isn’t it obvious Moscow is the Third Rome? The holy city?” asks Rustam Rakhmatullin.

I sit opposite Rustam in a café: a little wooden building with neon soft drink signs that reflect in our Lipton tea and Rustam’s glasses. I order chicken soup, but it’s just cold bouillon and I leave it standing to the side. Through the windows I can see a roundabout of two motorways, so heavily congested that black smoke hangs above the cars. Above the little wooden café are 1970s apartment buildings, the blocks of concrete naked, as if someone started building them and got bored halfway through and left. Rustam looks like an insect with thick glasses. He talks like a computer.

“Moscow is a perfect web, if you take the map of Moscow,” he says. “Spin it around and you can see how it matches up perfectly with Jerusalem. Take a map of Rome, and Moscow matches onto that. This city is an expression of God’s thought.”

Rustam is no city madman. He is a scholar, a columnist in an establishment newspaper. We are talking about his new book, The Metaphysics of Moscow , which will go on to be a best seller and win highbrow literary prizes. He will later host a show on TV. He teaches the “metaphysics of the city” at a local university. The book is a kabbalah of Moscow’s streets, where nothing is accidental: the yard where in the eighteenth century a feudal lady killed fifty of her serfs, two hundred years later becomes the home of a saintly prison doctor who sacrifices everything to improve the lot of prisoners, thus “cleansing” the original sin. And so on for five hundred pages.

Rustam is one of the good guys. He works with Mozhayev to save old houses, campaigns against corruption in city government. But he catches the broader zeitgeist, the growth of the associative, irrational, and magical. For if the likes of Zolotov and Vissarion were provincial oddities, now as Moscow becomes ever more full of its own uniqueness, as it watches itself transform with new money as fast and as strangely as looking down at your own body and seeing it change from flesh to gold in one sweep under your very eyes, so the center of the capital begins to swirl with mystic, messianic clouds.