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

But look underneath the Kremlin’s whirligig, and don’t you see the most precise, hard calculations? For if one part of the system is all about wild performance, another is about slow, patient co-optation. And the Kremlin has been co-opting the West for years: “The English likes to make fun of us,” said a Kremlin tabloid after Meet the Russians was released, “but is it prepared to lose our investments?”

“ It was the first non-linear war ,” wrote Vladislav Surkov in a new short story, “Without Sky,” published under his pseudonym and set in a dystopian future after the “fifth world war”:

In the primitive wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries. Two groups of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. No. All against all.

There is no mention of holy wars in Surkov’s vision, none of the cabaret used to provoke and tease the West. But there is a darkling vision of globalization, in which instead of everyone rising together, interconnection means multiple contests between movements and corporations and city-states. Where the old alliances, the EUs and NATOs and “the West,” have all worn out, and where the Kremlin can play the new, fluctuating lines of loyalty and interest, the flows of oil and money, splitting Europe from America, pitting one Western company against another and against both their governments so no one knows whose interests are what and where they’re headed.

“ A few provinces would join one side ,” Surkov continues. “ A few others a different one. One town or generation or gender would join yet another. Then they could switch sides, sometimes mid-battle. Their aims were quite different. Most understood the war to be part of a process. Not necessarily its most important part. ”

The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.

“We’re minority shareholders in globalization,” I hear from Russian corporate spooks and politicians. Which, remembering how the system tried to break Yana, might mean that the best way to imagine the Kremlin’s vision of itself in the world is as a “corporate reider”: the ultraviolent cousin of Western corporate raiders. For “reiding” is how most of the Russian elite made their first money, buying into a company and then using any means possible (arrests, guns, seizures, explosions, bribery, blackmail) to extract its advantages. The Kremlin is the great corporate reider inside globalization, convinced that it can see through all the old ways of the slow West to play at something more subversive. The twenty-first century’s geopolitical avant-garde.

“Without Sky” was published on March 12, 2014. A few days later Russia annexed Crimea. Surkov helped to organize the annexation, with his whole theater of Night Wolves, Cossacks, staged referendums, scripted puppet politicians, and men with guns. As punishment, Surkov was one of the first Russian officials to be sanctioned by the West, banned from traveling to or investing in the United States and European Union.

“Won’t this ban affect you?” a reporter asked Surkov as he passed through the Kremlin Palace. “Your tastes point to you being a very Western person.” Surkov smiled and pointed to his head: “I can fit Europe in here.” Later he announced: “I see the decision by the administration in Washington as an acknowledgment of my service to Russia. It’s a big honor for me: like being nominated for the political equivalent of an Oscar. I don’t have accounts abroad. The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.”

My daughter and I are through passport control. We’ll be boarding soon. She’s choosing souvenirs in Duty Free, mementos of England for Russian relatives. I always feel so at home in airport lounges, when you’re neither here nor there, where everyone is stateless. It used to be easy to spot the Russians in the lounge: either under- or overdressed. You’d never notice now, it’s hard to tell whether passengers are going home or departing.

And as the flight is called and we move toward the plane, I wonder whether I will find any of the other Russia on this visit: sometimes when I visit Moscow the streets are filled with protests against the Kremlin. “Don’t lie, don’t steal” is the protesters’ slogan, which might sound somewhat priggish and maybe matronly in English, but in Russian “ne vrat i ne vorovat,” with its vibrating repeating Vs and rolling Rs, sounds like an angry Old Testament growl (maybe “thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not steal” is a better approximation), capturing in four words the connection between financial and intellectual corruption, where words never mean what they say they mean and figures on budgets are never what they are.

One time, on the boulevard ring at dusk, there was a protest leader on a stage addressing a crowd, holding up the old picture of Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe impersonating the President, and he was saying: “This is a portrait by our favorite artist Vladik and this is what we need to get rid of.” And by that he meant not so much the President himself but the whole culture of simulation that eats up everything and which Vladik tried to describe: ‘“One day we will reach into the cupboard, and reach for our clothes, and they will turn to dust in our hands because they have been eaten by maggots.”

Vladik himself has died. He was found floating in a pool in Bali. Death by heart attack. Right at the end an oligarch acquaintance had made him an offer to come over to the Kremlin side and star in a series of paintings in which he would dress up as the new protest leaders engaged in sodomy. Vladik had refused.

I’ve noticed something new when wandering around the protests and talking to the new Moscow dissidents. If once upon a time they used the word “the West” in general, and the word “London” in particular, to represent the beacon of what they aimed toward, now the words “London” and the “West” can be said with a light disgust, as the place that shelters and rewards and reinforces the very forces that oppress them. And so, in the classic Third Rome twist, the Russian liberal can become the last true liberal on Earth, the only one still believing in the ideas preached by Benedict and the international development consultants.

I hope I’ll be able to find Mozhayev, still searching for his Old Moscow, wandering and talking with a bottle of port in his pocket (he’s abandoned vodka). He never did emigrate, of course. I’ve heard he’s even managed to save a few buildings recently. But he could do nothing for Pechatnikov house 3, which was destroyed, and now only Mozhayev’s elegy of it survives. “This place was known as ‘the heart of Moscow,’” wrote Mozhayev in an essay I came across.

The yard was an odd sort of shape, leaning on the slope. There was a broken bench in the middle where I would like to sit. It was best to come here in the evening, when the lights were coming on in the houses, and you could feel time stopping: the ivy crawling up the open brick work, the sheets hanging out in the yard to dry, the children’s strollers by the open doors… they all seemed to belong to another time. Of course the sheets and strollers actually belonged to illegal migrants from Central Asia squatting in the houses, and many of the windows were boarded up and broken, and there was graffiti everywhere—but oddly the migrants gave the whole thing a sense of lived-in-ness. And there was one first-floor apartment, whose windows looked directly out onto the bench, which was pure Old Moscow, with a yellow low-hanging lampshade, and books stacked up to the ceiling where they seemed to be keeling over, and a big man with a big beard moving about with tea inside, and a cat that would fling itself repeatedly at the wood-framed windows.