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

There’s the footballer’s wife who has spent over a hundred grand on Louboutins (“I can’t walk on anything less than 5-inch heels!”) and thinks that English women are frumpy (“They don’t even look like women!”).

There’s the ex-wife of the entrepreneur whose partner fell foul of the President and now can’t go back to Russia; she poses for us in her $180,000 fur coat.

And as the nine-part series rolls out, we see how those who have been in England for a while learn their Ps and Qs, learn how to spend righteously, not vulgarly, learn about charity and the virtues of flat shoes. Become, and I seem to hear this word a lot as I work on the program, “classy.”

The show rates well and feeds a double appetite. The local audience get to titter and feel pleasantly superior to the new rich they are selling parts of their country to: “Meet the most vulgar reality characters ever on TV,” explains the Daily Mail . But beyond this there is a deeper comfort in the thought that though the new Russian rich might be wealthier than any English person could ever hope to be, though the Sunday Times rich list is topped no longer by the queen but by Abramovich, Usmanov, and Blavatnik, at the end of the day these global nouveaux all yearn to fit into “our way of doing things.” Instinctively, out of habit, the editorial producers on Meet the Russians reach for some version of Vanity Fair , My Fair Lady , the myths the English grow up with. The Victorian compromise, the traditional marriage between new money and old class, is extrapolated to the era of globalization. The new global rich, the myth goes, all yearn for our culture, law, schools. Civilization.

Except I’m not entirely sure that’s what is happening at all.

Sergey is a character in Meet the Russians . He grew up in a Russian family in Estonia. In 1999, when he was thirteen, his parents took him on a holiday to London. He had never been abroad before. They took the ferry over and booked into the small, three-star Earls Court Hotel. Sergey was crazy about basketball, and he had never seen real black people before. They were all wearing the Nike Air Jordans that were his dream, and his head was already bursting with all of this, when his parents sat him down on the edge of the bed.

This was not a holiday, they explained. They were asking for asylum as Russians discriminated against in Estonia. This was his new life.

They moved to Kent. His father became an alcohol delivery driver. Worked hard. Bought a semi. On weekends Sergey would sneak up to London. First he organized underground raves in North London. As he turned eighteen, the Russian wave of money was just cresting: Abramovich was buying Chelsea, Lebedev the Standard and the Independent . The English were retreating, pulling out of their own post codes of aspiration, out of Mayfair and Belgravia and Knightsbridge, selling up and moving out to Oxfordshire or Tuscany or Norfolk, leaving behind the polished stucco squares and gated gardens to be inhabited by the new heroes of sudden wealth from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, India, Krasnoyarsk, Qatar, Donetsk.

Sergey has found himself a niche.

He’s the artful dodger of this world. The Mr. Fixit. Need a Mayfair penthouse? A Warhol? A live flamingo for your party? Sergey’s your man. He’s got different business cards for all his different roles, but his main one is as “club promoter.” But that just means he knows everyone in the golden triangle between New Bond Street in the east, Sloane Street in the West, and Berkeley Square at its tip.

When we first meet he’s running nights at Baku, the Azeri place on Sloane Street, rumored to be owned by the Azeri president, Heydar Aliev’s, daughter, where the dance floor is decorated with $50,000 bottles of wine guarded by bouncers. Then there is Kitsch on Upper Burlington, where two Russians, Sergey likes to boast, came in and dropped $200,000 in one evening after they signed some epic deal. Now we’re having lunch in Selfridges, a few days after New Year’s, when the English are still asleep, but the store is packed with Arabs, Chinese, Russians. They’re the ones who bring in the profits.

“When my mum and dad asked for asylum here they probably thought I would become English. British. Whatever,” says Sergey. “But in the world I work in, in Mayfair, Knightsbridge, Belgravia, I often end up speaking more Russian than English. The English aren’t the ones with the real money any more. They still might rule the other side of Sloane Square, down in Chelsea, but in Mayfair they can’t keep up. A good club night here brings in $180, 000. That’s three times more than out there.”

At the tip of London the city breaks through and out of England and up into a different space, which is neither Europe nor the Middle East nor Asia nor America but somewhere altogether offshore.

Sergey’s core clientele are the Golden Youth. The kids of Russian (and Ukrainian and Kazakh and Azeri) bureaucrat-businessmen (the roles are hyphenated), sent away to be educated at the prettier boarding schools and then on to international business schools in Europe and America. Wellington and Stowe, with their porticos and playing fields, are favorites. The more patriotic the Russian elites become, the more they sing hymns to “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Tsarism,” the more they damn the West—the more they send their children to study in England.

In a previous age, when the English were the club you aspired to join, some new immigrants would change their names, from “Vinogradov” to “Grade,” “Mironov” to “Mirren,” “Brokhovich” to “Brook.” But that wouldn’t occur to the Golden Youth: why bother when the richest people in the city have non-English names now anyway? The parents of the Golden Youth send them to boarding schools not because they want them to become English, but because it’s the status thing to do, along with having a home in St. Tropez or a bank account in Switzerland. But neither do the Golden Youth I meet peg themselves to Russia. They don’t deny their roots. But their reference points run Hong Kong-Geneva-Fifth Avenue-London-South of France and from there to private yachts, private planes. Offshore. Having one nationality, whether American, Russian, or British, seems passé, a little twentieth century.

“So what are you?” I ask the daughter of a Russian pop star (childhood in a gated community in Moscow, boarding school in Switzerland, and now college and clubbing off Sloane Square). “Where do you feel you belong to?” I ask two sisters, who went to boarding school near Cambridge, and whose father from Orienburg has bought them a boutique in Mayfair where they sell gem-studded Uggs.

And they pause, think, and say: “We’re sort of in-ter-na-tio-nal.”

Sergey echoes this. “My clients are the internationals” (though large swathes of those at his parties are former Soviets).

But when you press to find out what “international” means, no one can quite answer.

Evenings start at Novikov on Berkeley Street. The same Novikov who created all the zeitgeist Forbes-and-girls restaurants in Moscow where Oliona used to do (maybe still does) her hunting. This is the first place to bear to his actual name, a name that has become a signifier for the New Moscow. And the New Moscow, it turns out, is now something to aspire to.

Past the bouncers outside and the girls smoking long, skinny cigarettes, past the tinted glass doors and the jade stone Novikov has put in near the entrance for good luck. Inside, Novikov opens up so anyone can see everyone in almost every corner at any moment, the same theatrical seating as in his Moscow places. But the London Novikov is so much bigger. There are three floors. One floor is “Asian,” all black walls and plates. Another floor is “Italian,” with off-white tiled floors and trees and classic paintings. Downstairs is the bar-cum-club, in the style of a library in an English country house, with wooden bookshelves and rows of hardcover books. It’s a Moscow Novikov restaurant cubed: a series of quotes, of references wrapped in a tinted window void, shorn of their original memories and meanings (but so much colder and more distant than the accessible, colorful pastiche of somewhere like Las Vegas). This had always been the style and mood in the “elite,” “VIP” places in Moscow, all along the Rublevka and in the Garden Ring, where the just-made rich exist in a great void where they can buy anything, but nothing means anything because all the old orders of meaning are gone. Here objects become unconnected to any binding force. Old Masters and English boarding schools and Fabergé eggs all floating, suspended in a culture of zero gravity.