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

I imagine how when I land my in-laws and I will talk about the weather. Will there be peat fires this year? Will the fires reach the dacha? We will think about the best way to drive out of town; the traffic has only gotten worse. Maybe they will recommend a concert I should attend at the conservatory, and we will negotiate our conversation through the pleasant byways of our relationship. As if everything is normal. As if there is no war. And at first glance the city will seem just as it ever was: the bulletproof Bentleys will still be triple parked across from the red-brick monastery; the flocks of cranes will still swing across a skyline changing in fast-forward. And everything will be fine until someone (a taxi driver, an old friend, someone in a bar) will casually mention, mantra-like:

“ Russia is strong again, we’ve got up from our knees! ”

“ All the world fears us! ”

“ The West is out to get us! ”

“ There are traitors everywhere! ”

And then I will switch on the television.

The weekly news roundup show is on. The well-dressed presenter walks across the well-made set and into shot, briskly summing up the week’s events, all seemingly quite normal. Then suddenly he’ll twirl around to camera 2, and before you know it he’s talking about how the West is sunk in the slough of homosexuality, and only Holy Russia can save the world from Gay-Europa, and how among us all are the fifth columnists, the secret Western spies who dress themselves up as anticorruption activists but are actually all CIA. (Who else would dare to criticize the President?) The West, he’ll say, is sponsoring anti-Russian “fascists” in Ukraine, and all of them are out to get Russia and take away its oil; the American-sponsored fascists are crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns because the West is organizing a genocide against us Russians, and there are women crying on camera saying how they were threatened by roving gangs of Russia-haters, and of course only the President can make this right, and that’s why Russia did the right thing to annex Crimea, why it’s right to arm and send mercenaries to Ukraine, and this is just the beginning of the great new conflict between Russia and the West. When you go to check (through friends, news wires, anyone who isn’t Ostankino) to see whether there really are fascists taking over Ukraine or whether there are children being crucified, you find it’s all untrue, and the women who said they saw it all are actually hired extras dressed up as “eye-witnesses,” and the whole line between fact and fiction at Ostankino has become irrelevant. But even when you know the whole justification for the President’s war is fabricated, even when you fathom that the real reason is to create a story to keep the President all-powerful and help us all forget about the melting money, the lies are told so often that after a while you find yourself nodding because it’s hard to get your head around the idea that they are lying quite so much and quite so brazenly—and at some level you feel that if Ostankino can lie so much and get away with it, doesn’t that mean they have real power, the power to define what is true and what isn’t? Wouldn’t you do better just to nod anyway? And flipping over to another channel, there are the Night Wolves riding in cavalcades through Sevastopol to celebrate the annexation, the resurrection of the Empire, holding aloft icons of Mary the Mother of God and quoting Stalin and playing their great theme tune:

The Night Wolves are just one of the many stars of the new Ostankino cast. There are the Cherubims, who dress in all black emblazoned with skulls and crosses, calling to cleanse Russia of moral darkness; the neo-Nazis with MTV dancer bodies who film themselves beating up gay teenagers in the name of patriotism; the whip-wielding Cossacks attacking performance artists on the streets. And all of them are pushed to the center of the screen to appear on trashy talk shows and star in factual entertainment formats, keeping the TV spinning with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan and the CIA. Their emergence is not some bottom-up swell; only a tiny number of Russians go to church. Rather, the Kremlin has finally mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great, 140-million-strong population entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares, which if repeated enough times can become infectious. For when I talk to many of my old colleagues who are still working in the ranks of Russian media or in state corporations, they might laugh off all the Holy Russia stuff as so much PR (because everything is PR!), but their triumphant cynicism in turn means they can be made to feel there are conspiracies everywhere: because if nothing is true and all motives are corrupt and no one is to be trusted, doesn’t it mean that some dark hand must be behind everything?

Flipping over onto another channel, there is the life trainer from the Rose of the World giving advice on how to deal with all your hang-ups (after the story with the models broke, he just changed the name of his organization and carried on regardless). How similarly Ostankino works to the Lifespring courses: repeating and endlessly playing out all of Russia’s fears and panic attacks and fevers, not searching for some criticism or cure, but just stirring them so you’re sucked in but never free, while the Kremlin ties the public to itself by first humiliating and bullying with werewolves in uniform and baron bureaucrats, and then lifts the country up with marvelous military conquests.

Later in the schedule come the shows with Duma deputies, some still spitting or beetroot-faced but more now with English suits, rimless glasses, and prim buns, their latest challenge to make up laws so flamboyant in their patriotic burlesque it will get them noticed. They conjure motions to “ban untraditional sex” or “ban English words”—and to sanction Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Glance through the careers of these new religious patriots, and you find they were recently committed democrats and liberals, pro-Western, preaching modernization, innovation, and commitment to Russia’s European course, before which they were all good Communists. And though on the one hand their latest incarnations are just new acts in the Moscow political cabaret, something about their delivery is different from the common Russian political performer who gives his rants with a knowing wink and nod. Now the delivery is somewhat deadpan. Flat and hollow-eyed, as if they have been turned and twisted in so many ways they’ve spun right off the whirligig into something clinical. Because isn’t some sort of madness implicit in the system? If at one end of the spectrum are the political technologists toying with reality, or Oliona transforming herself for every sugar daddy, or Vitaly acting out a fantasy of himself in movies he himself directs about his own life, then at the other is Boris Berezovsky, the progenitor of the system who became its absurd reflection, bankrupt, making no sense in an English courtroom, told that he “deludes himself into believing his own version of events.”

And on every channel is the President, who as a made-for-TV projection has fitted every Russian archetype into himself, so now he seems to burst with all of Russia, cutting ever quicker between gangster-statesman-conqueror-biker-believer-emperor, one moment diplomatically rational and the next frothing with conspiracies. And on TV the President is chatting via live video-link to factory workers posing in overalls in front of a tank they’ve built, and the factory workers are promising the President that if protests against him continue, they will “come to Moscow and defend our stability.” But then it turns out the workers don’t actually exist; the whole thing is a piece of playacting organized by local political technologists (because everyone is a political technologist now), the TV spinning off to someplace where there is no reference point back to reality, where puppets talk to holograms when both are convinced they are real, where nothing is true and everything is possible. And the result of all this delirium is a curious sense of weightlessness.