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

I am in a meeting at TNT when my phone goes off. The display says “undisclosed,” which could mean it’s something important from home. I apologize and move to the corridor, under the neon sign “Feel our Love!” When I answer at first there’s a long silence. Breathing. Then a hoarse, whistling laugh.

“Piiitrrr. You recognize me? It’s Vitaly Djomochka. I need you to do me a favor. Will you do me a favor? Just a small favor?”

Vitaly has a way of asking that makes it uncomfortable to say “no.”

“Sure.”

“Come to D— station. Bring a camera. And not a little one. A real one. Deal?”

“Sure…. ”

In the evening I make my way down to D—. The journey will take an hour on one of the slow, suburban trains. These trains are among the most miserable rides in Russia: full of the angry poor of satellite towns, the shop assistants and cops and cleaners, who come every day to the big city to be within breathing distance of all the platinum watches and Porsches, only to be blown back again each evening to their dark peripheries, carrying their shift clothes crumpled in plastic bags, drinking lukewarm beer in a cold train. The benches are wooden and impossible to sit on comfortably. I fidget and wonder what Vitaly could possibly be doing in D—, it doesn’t strike me as his sort of place. But it has been a while since I last heard from him.

Once upon a time Vitaly Djomochka had been a gangster. In the 1990s the words “Russian” and “gangster” became almost synonymous, but when the President ascended to the Kremlin the era of the gangster ended. The secret services took over organized crime themselves; there was no way hoodlums could compete. Some became Duma deputies to make their money safe, while others retired to become regular businessmen. But in Siberia Vitaly Djomochka had other plans: he wanted to direct movies. He gathered his crew. No more grand theft auto and extorting businessmen, he told them; they were going to make films about themselves, starring themselves.

None of them knew anything about filmmaking. They had never heard of montage, storyboards, or camera movements. There was no film school they could go to, no famous director to guide them. Vitaly worked out how to make movies himself. He watched and rewatched the classics, breaking down every shot, every cut, every twist and turn in the plot. There was no script on paper; scripts were for saps. Everyone knew the scenes from memory. They didn’t use makeup or stuntmen; they jumped from tall buildings themselves and crashed their own cars. All the blood you saw on screen was real; when there wasn’t enough from the wound, Vitaly would stab a syringe in his own vein and spray the contents all over himself. The guns and bullets were all real, too; when they filmed a shoot-’em-up in a bar the place was wasted.

The result was an epic, six-hour miniseries, The Spets (literally “The Specialist”), and when it was ready the gangster auteurs had their own ideas about managing distribution. They would walk into local TV stations with a copy of the series and tell the managers to show it—or else. No one argued. The sound was all over the place, and some of the shots didn’t match. But overall Vitaly had cracked it. There was plot, action, drive. It was a sensation. He became a Siberian star.

When I first met Vitaly he was at the height of his fame and had come to Moscow to appear on talk shows and look for money for his next big film. I was working as an assistant to an American documentary director, and we were trying to persuade Vitaly to let us make a documentary about him. We set a date in one of the new Moscow cafés. Pastel lights diffused through a gentle indoor fountain. Muzak played softly in the background. Tall and lean and shaven headed, Vitaly looked uncannily like the President’s meaner, taller twin. He wore a designer tracksuit, pressed flat. He drank cappuccinos, dabbing his lip with a tightly folded napkin, careful that no trace of froth remained. “Capp-ooo-she-knows,” he called them, enjoying the word. He told the waitress off for giving him a dirty spoon.

“Did you always want to be a gangster?” we asked.

“I always knew I could be more than other people. Run faster, jump higher, shoot better. Just more.”

He talked in a way that was ever so statuesque, with silences between each short sentence. Everything about him seemed so contained. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and told me off for swearing. He used to be a junkie, but he quit. He laughed in a hoarse, slow way, and at the oddest things (the word “latte” he found hilarious). It had taken weeks to set up this little meeting; he first arranged dates, then broke them off at the last moment, leaving us fretting and exhausted. With time I learned this was his way, a little tactic to wrap you around him.

“What made you want to make movies?”

“I’d spent eight years in jail. You watch a lot of TV in jail. There were all these cops and robbers shows. They were showing my life, my world. But it was all fake. The fights were fake. The guns were fake. The crimes were fake. What can an actor know about being a gangster? Nothing. Only I could tell my story.”

Vitaly’s TV miniseries showed his life of crime in scrupulous detail. In his violent pomp he had been a modern Dick Turpin, a real highwayman. He would hide in the bushes by the side of the motorway, waiting for a coach-load of brand new Mitsubishis or Toyotas just brought in from Japan. Then he would pull a kerchief over his face, draw out his sawn-off shotgun, and walk out into the middle of the highway. He would stand legs apart, gun pointed out from his hips, alone in the middle of the road, facing down the oncoming truck. They always stopped, and the cars were all his. If the driver struggled, Vitaly would beat him. The TV series reveled in these moments of violence. The dialogue was sometimes stilted (Vitaly wouldn’t let his crew swear on screen), but when it came to kicking, stomping on, and humiliating, the gangster actors were in their element, their faces lighting up with joy and anger.

“But what about your victims—did you ever feel sorry for them?” asked the American.

Vitaly looked nonplussed. He turned to me:

“Of course not. No one who does what I do feels sorry for the victim. You’re either a dope or a real man, and dopes deserve all they get.”

The central scene of Spets involved Vitaly killing another mob boss. In the film he calmly walks up and shoots his rival, then calmly walks away again. The whole thing happens so fast I had to rewind and replay to double check what had happened.

“How many have you killed?” I asked when the waitress left.

“I can only talk about one time. That was revenge for my brother. I served time for the killing, but after that no one messed with me.”

“Can anyone be a killer?” asked the American.

“No. When I was in prison there were men who regretted what they’d done. They wept, went to church. Not everyone has the inner strength to do it. But I do.”

“And would you ever return to crime?

Vitaly smiled: “Nowadays my life is all about art.”

We persuaded him to take us down to his hometown and let us film him shooting a scene for his next project. We’d have an exclusive with the gangster director at work, and he’d have a promo to help raise money.

“Usually you’d be one of my victims,” he said matter-of-factly. “But in this case we’ll be partners.”

The flight to Ussuriysk, Vitaly’s hometown, took all day. Vitaly just lay back, smiled, and slept the whole journey. I chatted to another former gangster friend of his, Sergey, who wrote the music for The Spets . A former power-lifting champion, Sergey took up two seats on the flight. He had quit being a gangster when he found God: a bullet that should have killed him miraculously passed through his body. Afterward he had seen the light (with the help of an American evangelical sect that helped nurse him back to health after the shooting). He was a laughing, jolly, blonde bear of a man, with questioning, kind, light blue eyes. Previously he had dealt heroin and smuggled girls from Ukraine to Europe.