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

But then again—so what if the other shows on Channel 1 are propaganda? Lots of good people make big shows and films for Ostankino, and no one holds it against them. We all have to carve out our little space. You make your own project, keep “your hands clean,” as everyone here likes to say, and the rest just isn’t your concern. It’s just a job. That’s not you.

Growing up I had never really thought too much about my parents’ life in the Soviet Union, why they had emigrated. The USSR was just someplace people left. My father was being arrested for spreading copies of Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. Who wouldn’t want to leave that sort of suffocation?

But what exactly was it that they were rejecting? I had always just assumed “dictatorship” but had never thought much about how the system really worked. Now I remembered a story my mother had once told me.

She was fifteen. It was 1971. Their teacher at her very ordinary suburban Kiev school announced that today they would receive a very special visitor. He was from Radio Komintern, one of the propaganda elite who broadcast Soviet ideas to the West.

The man was in his thirties and he wore jeans and a leather jacket. Only the coolest, most rebellious, yet best-connected (only the best-connected could afford to be rebellious) were able to get hold of jeans and leather jackets—they only came from the West, and it was a privilege to go there or even know someone who went there. This man was nothing like their square teachers. He sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk and smirked that knowing smirk that my mother would later recognize as the mark of the KGB boys, and that I now see on the President and the men around him. The smile of the men who know they can see through everything.

The special visitor told the kids how Russia was surrounded by enemies, how they needed to be careful of Western agents and Western influences.

Then he went to smoke in the corridor. The kids followed him. He gave them cigarettes, which they lit with trepidation, but their teachers were so in awe of the special visitor they didn’t dare stop them from smoking with him. He talked about how he had Beatles records at home (my mother had always been scared to even say the word “Beatles” in public). He told them he had even been abroad (no one in my mother’s school had ever been abroad). In 1968 he had been in Prague, part of the Soviet forces that had “liberated” Czechoslovakia from counterrevolution. He told the kids about how they would go drinking in the cafés of the old town (my mother tried to imagine “cafés in the old town” but struggled to form a picture in her mind).

And he told them how one time, when he was sitting in a café, some Czechs ran in and started shouting, “Russians go home! Russians go home!”

This struck my mother. She had always believed the stuff about the Soviet Union “liberating” Czechoslovakia. She believed the Soviet Union stood for global social justice.

“You mean they weren’t happy to see you?” she asked.

He looked at her like she was an idiot.

Everyone who grew up in the Soviet Union had a moment when they woke up. That was my mother’s. And as she began to look at the world around her, she slowly saw how everyone was pretending, was faking belief, being one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon. But scared, too. Fear and irony together. And so many voices at the same time. One you in the morning at the Komsomol. Another you in the afternoon reading Solzhenitsyn. One you at work being a good socialist and another listening to the BBC in secret in your kitchen, yet everyone knowing you listened because they were all listening themselves.

Whenever I ask my Russian bosses, the older TV producers and media types who run the system, what it was like growing up in the late Soviet Union, whether they believed in the Communist ideology that surrounded them, they always laugh at me.

“Don’t be silly,” most answer.

“But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?”

“Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them. And then straight after we would listen to ‘Deep Purple’ and the BBC.”

“So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?”

“No. It’s not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There’s like several ‘you’s.”

Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the “transition” between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshiping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease—a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the “orthodox” oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism—and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.

And as I walk around this fog-asphyxiated Moscow, I see how the city’s topography articulates these splits: the bullying avenues with their baron-bureaucrats, bribes, and werewolves in uniform, where the only way to survive is to be as corrupt as they are, and just a few meters away the gentle courtyards with an almost bucolic mood and small-town ideas of decency. Before I used to think the two worlds were in conflict, but the truth is a symbiosis. It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you’re always split into little bits and can never quite commit to changing things. And a result is the somewhat aggressive apathy you can encounter here so often. That’s the underlying mind-set that supported the USSR and supports the new Russia now even though the USSR might officially be long gone. But there is a great comfort in these splits, too: you can leave all your guilt with your “public” self. That wasn’t you stealing that budget/making that propaganda show/bending your knee to the President, just a role you were playing; you’re a good person really. It’s not so much about denial. It’s not even about suppressing dark secrets. You can see everything you do, all your sins. You just reorganize your emotional life so as not to care.

And always the buildings express this mind-set. In the fog above my head, balconies stick out seemingly suspended in the sky. Russians put all their shit on balconies, detritus on show. Satellite dishes, jars of gherkins, broken toys, punctured tires—all on the balcony. The English stack their sentimental junk and dirty secrets far away in the garden shed; the Germans have “Keller,” basements, deep underground to hide all their dark memories. But in Russia you just throw it on the balcony; just as long as it isn’t in the flat itself, who cares if the neighbors see? We’ll deal with all that rubbish some other time. It’s not even part of us.

But it’s not everyone who can, or who wants to, pull off this psychologically acrobatic self-division. At some point in the 1970s, during her late teens, my mother had laid down on a bed and thought she was losing her mind. All those people she was meant to be, without any center. She could feel herself splitting up into little bits. Then began her journey to find the small bands of Soviet dissidents. They had their own vocabulary. They talked about “poryadochnost,” “decency,” which in practice could mean not being an informant. About “dostojnstvo,” “dignity,” which in practice could mean not making films or writing books or saying things the Kremlin wanted but you hated. And for many in the 1970s the only way out was prison or emigration. And sometimes it still is.