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

Those who can afford it become patrons.

The former Moscow mayor’s wife, who made part of her billions by winning construction contracts from the city government while her husband was mayor (she denies there’s any connection), is the latest to arrive. Back home Mozhayev and his friends, the defenders of Moscow’s historic architecture, blame the mayor and his wife for the “cultural genocide” of Moscow’s buildings, swathes of the old city destroyed to make way for menacing imitations of Disney towers and Dubai hotels; Russian constructivist masterpieces, which admirers come across the world to see, left to decay. Now based in London, the mayor’s wife has a foundation called Be Open, launching a Young Talent Award at Milan Design Week and devoting a new program at London Design Week “to innovative projects that reach out to the sixth sense, or intuition.”

I’m invited to a Russian party during the Frieze Art Fair. During the last financial crash many thought it meant the end for Frieze: the Wall Street men and City boys were broke. But it turned out a Russian (and a Ukrainian and an Armenian) will still trust London over Moscow or Kiev to secure their wealth. Your bank accounts might get seized, but no one can get to your family’s Jeff Koons or seize your wife’s Knightsbridge mansion. So Frieze didn’t collapse; it swelled. (In Moscow itself the market for contemporary, Western art has been failing. Not because there is no money—there are more Russian billionaires every year—but because the new demand, issued from the Kremlin, is for the patriotic. So now you buy socialist realism for your Moscow place and Rothkos for your London and New York ones.)

The party is in one of the Nash stucco mansions on a crescent opposite Regents Park (these places can go for $50 million). The London Russians have banded together to show off art from their collections: Van Goghs are spread about casually on the walls of the stairwell and in little corners, right next to student works by wives and girlfriends who are taking courses at St. Martins College of Art and Design to pass the time in London. Most of the crowd is Russian. Around them swarm the English art dealers, with slightly worn elbows, looking to start a conversation about some trade. The big thing recently is Russian avant-garde: that little moment in the early twentieth century when Russia was not just in step with but defined the world, and which you buy to be both a patriot and global. And it so happens this is the easiest art to copy. Who can tell one pure black square apart from yet another? Much of Russian avant-garde art on the market is fake. Churned out in factories run by Russian crime syndicates in Israel and Germany, then confirmed by Western art historians. Without them the fakes would never make it to the market. They play the same role as the Swiss and English lawyers who act as “nominal beneficiaries” for money-laundering shell companies, lending their signatures to help make the simulated real, and like those lawyers, they are only too happy to look the other way, as are the dealers who then sell all the fakes to the more gullible new money.

The Russians swerve around the dealers and move to the VIP area on the third floor.

Down by the bar on the first floor roam the estate agents. Many are graduates from private schools. They look happy. Business is good: three-quarters of houses over $10 million in the golden triangle are sold to the new global rich.

The estate agents tell great tales. About the new oligarch exiled from Russia who misses his childhood dacha so much he asked an architect to fly to Moscow, then re-create the place, panel by panel, with the same 1980s wallpapers and settees in the English countryside. Sourcing the old Soviet wallpaper was tough; there’s only one factory in Russia you can get it from. And then there’s the tycoon who wanted a new house in Belgravia. That wasn’t hard. But then he asked for six apartments, of equal size, in a ten-minute-walk circumference around the house. They were for his mistresses, so he could walk in any direction and arrive at one. And have you heard the one about the thief the police caught recently? Who put on an accent and would turn up at viewings for mansions saying he was a Russian oligarch and then steal jewels from the bedrooms as he went around? Actually he was a hood from Tottenham. But everyone fell for him, the accent was so good.

There’s free champagne.

Some can remember the easy days when new Russians were still suckers. In the 1990s an agent in Geneva managed to sell the head of Russian Railways a property on the slope facing away from the lake for the price of a property facing the lake; that’s twice the price. You don’t really get dunces like that anymore. Now you rarely meet the owners. They send an English lawyer. The deeds are all in the name of some company in an offshore Crown dependency. The estate agents don’t ask too many questions.

As I wait for William Browder to come in for his interview in Meet the Russians , I look at the newspaper cuttings that are all over the walls of his office on Golden Square: “One Man’s Crusade against the Kremlin,” “The Man who Took on Vladimir Putin.” Browder used to be one of the President’s more vocal supporters, back when he was the largest foreign investor in Russia. He’d come to the country in the 1990s, when most in Western finance said it was crazy to even try. He proved them all wrong. Then in 2006 he pissed off the wrong people in Russia and was banned from the country. Then things got worse: the documents for his old investment vehicles were taken in a raid by the police. Browder told a Russian lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, who worked for a Moscow-based law firm called Firestone and Duncan, to follow the trail. It turned out the investment companies were being illegally signed over by the cops to petty criminals, who would then ask for tax rebates on the companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which were then granted by corrupt tax officials, signed off on by the same cops who had taken the documents in the first place, and wired to two banks owned by a convicted fraudster, an old friend of the aforementioned cops and tax officials. Officially the tax officials and cops only earned a few thousand a year, but they had property worth hundreds of thousands, drove Porsches, and went on shopping trips to Harrods in London. And this was happening year after year. The biggest tax fraud scheme in history. Magnitsky thought he had caught a few bad apples.

Magnitsky gave an interview to Bloomberg Business Week . Twelve days later he was arrested; he was tortured and eventually died in a Russian prison a year later. It hadn’t been a case of a few bad apples. An anonymous letter by a whistle-blower to a Russian newspaper said the tax rebate mechanism was known as the “black till of the Kremlin,” used systematically for everything from personal enrichment to financing covert wars or foreign elections.

“The day I found out about Sergey’s death was the worst day of my life,” says Browder when we start the interview. “He was killed to get at me.” He is tall and balding, with glasses, direct but emotionally contained. (How many times, I wonder, must he have given the same interview?) He is American but based in London. “I have sworn to get justice. The Putin regime has blood on its hands. I used to be an investment banker, but now I’m a human rights activist.”

We carry on shooting as we drive through Belgravia: “Your viewer probably thinks the sort of people who killed Magnitsky and stole that money are gangsters with gold chains. But they’re officials who dress nicely and own nice houses and send their children to nice schools,” continues Browder.

We arrive at Parliament. Browder is having a meeting with a member of Parliament in a corner office of Portcullis House overlooking the Thames. Since Magnitsky’s death he has researched where the stolen money went. It all went abroad, via Moldova, Latvia, and Cyprus, and from there into bank accounts in Switzerland and property in Dubai and Manhattan. A Russian businessman who helped reveal these flows died of a sudden heart attack after a jog near his gated compound in Surrey. He was forty-four and had no history of illness. He had a lot of enemies. Two postmortems could not determine the cause of his death.