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

But while the country’s leaders were imitating gangsters, word went out from the Ministry of Culture and Ostankino that the Kremlin wanted positive, upbeat films. Russian gangster movies, which should theoretically have rivaled the greatest in the world, were phased out. Actors who had primed themselves to be the Russian De Niros suddenly had to revamp their images and star in rom-coms. It’s the reverse of the situation in the West, where politicians try to act like upstanding citizens while films and TV shows are obsessed with the underworld; here the politicians imitate mobsters but the films are rosy. Whenever I pitch a gangster program to TNT, they stare, aghast: “We make happy things, Peter. Happy!” I supposed Vitaly never found money for his blockbuster. I was a little worried for him.

Vitaly was at the station to meet me. He was wearing his usual ironed tracksuit; it had been a while since I’d seen anybody wear one. He greeted me warmly. I sensed he was genuinely glad to see someone from the “old days.”

“Thanks for coming.”

“You live in D— now?”

“I’m lying low. I avoid Moscow: too many cops wanting to check your documents. Everyone back home has been put away, the last of my crew. I wouldn’t have anyone to film with even if I could raise the money.”

I sensed Vitaly was flirting with his old profession, but I thought it best not to pry. We walked over to his car: a brand new four-by-four (of course). No plates. Vitaly had a freshly pressed shell suit hanging in the back.

“I’m living in the car while I lie low. I’ve always preferred it to apartments anyway.”

“Whatever happened to your film project?” I ask.

“I met some Moscow producers. They wanted me to show them a script. Do they think I’m stupid? I know they’ll just steal it.”

“But Vitaly, that’s how it works here. You’d have a copyright, guarantees.”

“That means nothing. You can’t trust producers, they’re all crooks. I tried to get money from my own people, mob bosses. People you can trust. But none of them wanted to invest in gangster movies. ‘Not the future,’ they told me.”

It turned out Vitaly wanted me to shoot a short interview with him. He was planning a documentary about himself.

“None of you TV people could capture me right in your films. Did you bring a big camera? Good.”

We shot the interview in the car. Vitaly put on his most statuesque look, part reptilian, part Romantic, speaking ever so slowly.

“Ever since I was a child I knew I could be more than other people. Run faster. Jump higher—” Suddenly, mid-sentence, he broke off and burst out of the car. He started screaming, spitting at a crumpled bum with wildly swollen eyes drinking from a bottle in a plastic bag behind the car. The bum crawled away. Vitaly got back in, still breathing hard, but the anger switched off like a light.

“You wouldn’t want him in the same shot as me. He’d make it ugly.”

Then Vitaly shot an interview with me. He had all my words written out already; I just had to memorize the script.

“The first time I met Vitaly he struck me as the most talented dangerous man, and the most dangerous talented man, I had ever encountered…. ”

It was a long speech, and I kept fluffing my lines. But Vitaly was a patient director, and by the fifth take we got it right.

After the shoot Vitaly leaned into the back and brought out a pile of hardcover books.

“These are for you.”

They were novels, written by Vitaly.

“I’ve taken to writing books. They’re selling pretty well. I’ll be honest, the first one was ghostwritten. But since then I’ve learned how to write myself.”

Most of the early books were based on Vitaly’s life of crime. But in the last book he had changed genres. It was a satire of Russian politics, about a bully, gangster state that uses its giant reserves of fart gases to manipulate the countries around it into submission (at the time Russia was threatening Ukraine with shutting off its gas supply).

“I often think now I should have gone into politics,” said Vitaly. “I just thought it boring, I didn’t realize they used the same methods as us. It’s too late now, though. I’ve dedicated myself to art. If I can’t film, I’ll write. And you know what the future is, Peter? Comedy. Set up a meeting for me at TNT; they might want to televise my fart-book.”

I told Vitaly I’d do my best. He insisted I take a stack of thick, black glossy books to show people. I couldn’t say no and carried them in two plastic bags back to town, the sharp edges of the books tearing through the plastic and spiking against my legs with every step.

At TNT I went through the motions of helping Vitaly and gave the scripted comedy department a copy of the book.

“No idea whether it’s any good, but I promised,” I explained, almost apologizing. And thought that would be the end of it.

But a few weeks later I walked into TNT and there was Vitaly, sitting in one of the little glass meeting rooms with a couple of producers, wearing his shell suit and cap. He noticed me when I came in, stood up, took off his cap, and waved. “Hi, brother,” I could hear him calling, the words low and distorted through the glass. Suddenly I wanted to turn away, ignore him, pretend I’d never met him and didn’t know him. ‘Brother!’ he called again, waving his cap in ever larger motions. And the only way I could override the sudden desire to run away was to play up and call out even louder: ‘Brother! Brother!’ until everyone in the office could hear and was looking at me.

“Is he for real?” the women in the drama department asked me afterward. “It all seems a bit of an act.”

“Oh, he’s quite real. You actually interested in his book?”

“It’s well written. We need to think about it.”

One of the areas TNT specializes in is satire. If the USSR drove humor underground and thus made it an enemy of the state, the new Kremlin actively encourages people to have a laugh at its expense: one TNT sketch show is about corrupt Duma deputies who are always whoring and partying while praising each other’s patriotism; another is about the only traffic cop in Russia who doesn’t take bribes—his family is starving and his wife is always nagging him to become “normal” and more corrupt. As long as no real government officials are named, then why not let the audience blow off some steam? Vitaly’s sense that his satire would work inside the Kremlin’s rules was right.

When I tried to follow up on the meeting with Vitaly, he had disappeared. Sergey told me that another warrant had been issued for his arrest, and he was lying low again, sleeping in his Jeep, and keeping well out of any cities. But I guess he’s okay; every year I see a new novel of his on the pulp fiction shelves in bookstores, most of them comedies.

Western ex-pats first arrived in Russia as emissaries of the victorious party in the Cold War. They were superior and came to teach Russia how to be civilized. Now all that is changing. Russia is resurgent, the teachers have become the servants, and I’m not even sure who won the Cold War after all.

I first got to know Benedict in Scandinavia, a favorite restaurant of those ex-pats come to school Russia in the ways of the West in the decades of glorious afterglow after the end of the Cold War: “magic circle” lawyers, “big five” accountants, investment bankers. It’s just off Tverskaya, Moscow’s central drag, in a little courtyard of large green trees. It’s owned by Swedes, and when it first opened everything was imported from Stockholm: the waiters, cooks, burgers, fries—all flown in. In the early 2000s the guests largely spoke English; it wasn’t opulent enough for Russian oligarchs and was too expensive for “ordinary” Russians. The westerners would come here like to an oasis, before they got drunk and courageous enough to explore the Moscow night. It felt like the descendant of an old colonial club in an age that prided itself on being past all that.