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

And as I work on my film about the models and the Rose of the World, I start to notice how the new mysticism is seeping into everything on TV.

On the Ostankino channels the President’s personal confessor, the Archimandrite Tikhon, dressed in a long black cassock and walking through Istanbul, is telling a prime-time tale about the fall of Byzantium, of how the great Orthodox Empire (to which Russia is the successor) was brought low by a mix of oligarchs and the West. Professional historians howl in protest at this pseudo-history, but the Kremlin is starting to use religion and the supernatural for its own ends. Byzantium and Muscovy could only flourish under one great autocrat, the Archimandrite states. This is why we need the President to be like a tsar.

Even supposedly science-based programs are not immune. There is a spate of prime-time documentaries about “psychological weapons.” One is The Call of the Void . It features secret service men who inform the audience about the psychic weapons they have developed. The Russian military has “sleepers,” psychics who can go into a trance and enter the world’s collective unconscious, its deeper soul, and from thence penetrate the minds of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One has entered the mind of the US president and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the US had hatched has failed to come off. The message is clear: if the secret services can see into the US president’s mind, they could definitely see into yours; the state is everywhere, watching your every thought. The most expensive documentary ever shown on Russian television is called Plesen (“Mold”). It argues that mold is taking over the earth, that it has been doing so since the days of Moses. It is the devil’s weapon, mentioned in ancient mystic texts, an invisible but omnipresent enemy whose evil spores have been invading our lives, causing death and disease. When the film ends large numbers of fearful people go out and buy the “mold-cleaning machines” that were advertised in the film; its manufacturers were among the producers. Under siege from psychic spies and airborne fungi, audiences are kept in a constant state of panic and medieval ecstasies. The more rational critical language is pushed off TV, the fewer critical films are made about the past and present, the more the mystic narratives take hold.

“The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried,” Anna, a friend who used to work with TNT and now makes entertainment shows at Ostankino, tells me when we meet for a drink in a bar called Courvoisier. “Spiritual stuff is always good to keep people distracted. And the ratings will be good—our people love some mysticism when things are bad. Remember the 1990s.”

Eventually even Kashpirovsky makes a return to mainstream television, hosting an eleven-part documentary series about immortality, ghosts, and “bending time.” And while I am still editing my material about the Rose, I find out that the Lifespring movement in Russia is gathering strength. The largest of the Ostankino channels has created a pilot with another life trainer (much more successful and slick than the Rose of the World’s) in which the humiliations and transformations from the trainings are turned into a show. The head of Ostankino loves the format. All the tears and conflicts make for great TV.

“You look tired, Piiitrrr.”

“You should take a holiday.”

“You’re too, how shall we say…. ”

“You’re too emotional about this story.”

I’m at TNT to talk about the edit of the models’ story, and it’s not going well. The curly haired, redhead, and straight haired producers are too nice to say it, but I think they think I’ve become obsessed. They’re not altogether wrong. I’ve spent so much time deciphering what happens at the Rose, it’s all I think and talk about. Whenever I pass a high-rise I think of those girls and how they felt before they ran and leapt.

The project is so late that no one even mentions the deadline any more.

“We did say we don’t want too many negative stories.”

“You know we need a happy ending.”

“Where are the positive stories?”

“How soon can you find them?”

I say I will do my best.

“How long are you going to keep making films with TNT?” asks Anna, the friend who has moved from making shows at TNT to the big leagues at Ostankino. “It’s child’s play. If you want to make real films you have to come and work with Ostankino. When can you come for a meeting?” TNT’s success has meant many who work there are being wooed by Channel 1: the spiky comedians, the presenters, the “creative producers” are all getting contracts.

I had barely been inside Ostankino since my first visit almost a decade earlier to meet the political technologists who defined reality on the upper floors. But the great spire of the television tower had always acted as a compass for me, guiding me whenever I would be lost in town, always due north and steady among the sudden candle-flame domes of just-built cathedrals, glowing red stars of Stalin gothic towers, the erupting skyscrapers, turning cranes, and swinging wrecking balls that give a sense of perpetual movement to the horizon.

My meeting was scheduled for late, after 10:00 p.m., but the flat, wide train station of a building was still blazing with light when I arrived. In a country of nine time zones, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, comprising one-sixth of the world’s land mass, where television is the only force that can unify and rule and bind—the great battering ram of propaganda couldn’t possibly ever rest.

The lobby had been given a gleaming tile and glass makeover. The old grubby cafeteria was gone, and there was a coffee bar with the full range of beverages. Green tea with jasmine, cappuccinos, and cognac served with a slice of lemon. There was a banging coming from something being built to the left of the main doors: a new Orthodox chapel, I was told.

I was met by an assistant, and as we rode up in the elevator the doors would open, and every floor was a different civilization. The doors open once, and you find yourself on a floor with a black chrome news studio as new as a private jet. The doors open again, and you’re back in 1970-something, with beige corridors and mature women with bleached hair up in a high bun. Another floor is under reconstruction, another bright blue. Ostankino is renovated piecemeal, the whole great thing split up into a thousand little fiefdoms, each carrying on at its own rate of history.

Then it’s our floor, and the corridors begin. Left, right, left, down some stairs. As I walk I realize I’ll never find the way out again. All those doors. All the same.

My meeting is at Red Square Productions. It wins the commissions for the big factual entertainment shows for Channel 1 and is owned by the wife of the head of Channel 1. There’s a small anteroom before you enter the personal office of Red Square’s creative director. I’m asked to wait. I have CDs of my latest programs in my hand, and I shuffle them. I wait over an hour. I’m pissed off and want to go out for a cigarette, but I’m worried I won’t find the way back. It’s nearing midnight when I finally go in.

The door is heavy, and inside the office are wooden shelves with lots of books and a long table and beyond that, wide windows looking over the Moscow night. On the other side of the table sits a thin, pale, young man in a light suit with floppy black hair. He never stops smiling. This is Doctor Kurpatov, Russia’s first self-help TV psychologist. He has made a fortune with his show, on which people come to cry and be told how to change their lives. He can teach you anything, from how to conquer your fears to how to have good sex to how to love your child or make a fortune. He is a master of neuro-linguistic-programming and hypnosis, bereavement counseling, and philosophy. All along the walls of the office are his self-help books. And now he’s not just a star with his own show, but the creative director of the production company closest to the head of the most important channel. Now he has to choose the programs that will keep the whole nation calm, happy, overcoming its fears.