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

“I was the first victim of President Putin’s regime,” pleads Berezovsky. “And then step by step he increased the number of victims.” And with a rising passion he reels off the names of all the jailed businessmen and women, murdered journalists, and dead lawyers.

And then Abramovich, speaking quietly, explains how back in the 1990s he would sell oil at base prices to his own companies in Cyprus and then to others at a market rate.

“If Russia in the 1990s was corrupt on a scale of four out of ten,” argues Berezovsky, “now it is corrupt ten out of ten. It is corrupt totally!”

Some $50 billion (sometimes more) is now moved illicitly out of Russia every year. Over the decades the tricks have multiplied: the state pipeline company, run by a friend of the President, buys pipes at inflated prices from a company that then turns out to be a shell owned by the state pipeline company’s management; state banks invest pension funds in companies that then mysteriously go bust. (The money just disappears! The banks deny all prior knowledge that the deals would sour.) The latest economic model is to create “hyper-projects,” which can act as vehicles for siphoning off the budget. The cost for the Russian Winter Olympics in Sochi was $50 billion, making it $30 billion more expensive than the previous summer games in London, and five times more expensive than any Winter Olympics ever. Some $30 billion is thought to have been “diverted.” There is also a “hyper-bridge,” which swings above the Pacific, connecting Vladivostok and South Sakhalin. There is nothing on South Sakhalin, the real economic benefits are almost zero, but the opportunities for graft are great. The new planned “hyper-project” is a tunnel between Russia and Japan. The USSR built mega-projects that made no macroeconomic sense but fitted the hallucinations of the planned economy; the new hyper-projects make no macroeconomic sense but are vehicles for the enrichment of those whose loyalty the Kremlin needs to reward, quickly.

But it was power, rather than money, that was always Berezovsky’s interest. The oil company the two oligarchs are fighting over was never more than a means to an end; he needed it to fund his control of television. He had been the first in Russia, in 1994, to understand that television could bring him that power. It was Berezovsky who introduced the “fabricated documentary” to Ostankino, inventing barely credible scandals about the President’s political opponents, his presenters brandishing random pieces of paper at the camera that “proved” corruption. In 1999 it was Berezovsky’s TV channel that created the new President, supporting his war in Chechnya and turning him from gray “moth” into macho leader. It was Berezovsky who invented the fake political parties, television puppet constructs, shells without any policy whose one point was to prop up the President. Russia’s slide from representative democracy to a society of pure spectacle was given its great push by Berezovsky. He created the theater I would later work inside, and which, after his exile, cast him as the eternal bogeyman: his old Ostankino channel blaming him for everything from sponsoring terrorism to political assassinations. And Berezovsky plays up to the role of Übervillain, claiming, once his influence was almost gone, that he was sponsoring attempted revolutions in Ukraine and Russia.

On Shrove Sunday during the trial, Berezovsky posts a confession on his Facebook page:

I ask for your forgiveness, oh People of Russia… for destroying freedom of speech and democratic values…. I confess for bringing the President to power. I understand confession is not words but deeds, these will soon follow.

The Russian journalists covering the trial chortle in response. No one can believe a word he says. Berezovsky is not so much the opponent of the Kremlin’s system as its progenitor turned absurd reflection. The shape-shifter spun to the point of tragicomedy.

“I found Mr. Berezovsky an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be molded to suit his current purposes,” says Justice Gloster in her final judgment. “I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being deliberately dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events.”

Berezovsky is sitting just in front of me and begins to shake and laugh as the judge speaks. It’s a choking sort of laugh. In the hall outside the courtroom he paces up and down and then walks in circles for a while. He is still laughing when he goes outside to face the press.

In the following months he fades from view, for once refusing to give interviews.

The rumor is that he is destitute. The trial has cost him over $100 million. Six months later he sells a Warhol at Christie’s, one of 120 silk-screen prints of Red Lenin showing the Soviet leader in sun-touched yellow emerging from (or being submerged by) a canvas of blood red. It sells for $202,000.

Three days later Berezovsky is dead, hanging himself in the bathroom of his ex-wife’s Ascot mansion. I had assumed the Ostankino channels would gloat. Instead the atmosphere is mournful. The President’s press secretary sets the tone, announcing that the death of any person is a tragedy. Eduard Limonov, a former dissident émigré writer who transformed himself into the leader of the National Bolsheviks—a movement that started as an art project, became an anti-oligarch revolutionary party mixing Trotskyism and Fascism, and then transformed again to become a Kremlin ally—writes: “I had always admired him. He was great, like a Shakespeare character.” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist scarecrow used by the Kremlin to frighten voters, who normally spits and scowls when he speaks of Russia’s enemies, sounds almost tender: “I’d seen him a few months ago in Israel. He was tired, disillusioned.” An Ostankino channel shows black-and-white photos of Berezovsky as touching mood music is played. “After all this time,” the presenter says, “and all the roles he’s played, we never did find out who he really was.” It is as if the vast charade of Russian politics has suddenly paused and all the actors are turning to the audience to applaud a fallen player, welcoming in his corpse.

But though the old master may be dead, the system he begat is growing, mutating, swelling now out of Moscow and flowing through many offshore, tax-free, beneficiary-disguised archipelagoes in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, and Monaco and from there into Mayfair, Belgravia, Sloane Street, White Hall, Central Park West. For the President’s men and those who fear him, for the bully-bureaucrats and the gangsters-turned-oil-traders, for the real entrepreneurs and the Russians who just want to get out and live a normal life. For everyone the pattern is the same. Make, steal, siphon your money off in Russia. Stash it in New York, Paris, Geneva, and especially London. My Moscow has landed.

I have been working on a TV show. My nine years in Russia are a bit of a black hole in my résumé, and I’m back at the bottom of the pile again: officially a “producer” (the word has lost all meaning), but actually an assistant with no editorial control, on a glitzy, trashy, documentary entertainment series for an American-English cable channel. Meet the Russians is about the new, post-Soviet rich in London, and the ad promises to take the viewer “into a world of wealth he has never before witnessed.”

There’s the pop star married to the steel tycoon who has spent $2 million on her career, including albums, winning Mrs. World (the husband bought the rights to the competition the year before she won) and starring in a Hollywood B movie with Stephen Dorff (the husband financed the movie). She keeps a falcon in their home. The home is decorated to copy a seven-star Dubai hotel she once stayed in. She takes baths in champagne to keep her skin smooth.