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

The Scandinavia set were tanned and spoke earnest schoolbook English. They discussed compliance, corporate governance, and workouts. Finding somewhere to go jogging, the consensus went, was a nightmare in Moscow. As was the smoking. And the traffic. When they got tipsy they made jokes about Russian girls, unless they were with their wives, in which case they discussed holiday plans. They had white teeth. Benedict had yellow teeth, drank wine at lunch, and smoked long, thick Dunhills. He was slight and moved like a cricket, waving his smoke away from others in mock apology. He was Irish, but of the Shaw or Wilde variety.

“I’m a lapsed economist,” he liked to tell people when they asked what he did.

Benedict was an international development consultant. “International development consultants” are the missionaries of democratic capitalism. They emerged en masse at the end of the Cold War, at the end of history, marching out of America and Europe to teach the rest of the world to be like them. They work on projects for the EU, WB, OECD, IMF, OSCE, IMF, DIFD, SIDA, and other national and multinational bodies that represent the “developed world” (the donor) and advise governments, central and local, of the “developing world” (the beneficiary). They wear Marks and Spencer (or Zara or Brooks Brothers) suits, and under their arms they carry wide binders that contain the Terms of Reference (known as TORA) for their projects, which have names like “building a market economy in the Russian Federation” or “achieving gender equality in the post-Soviet space.” The TORA lay out “logical framework matrices” to achieve “objectively verifiable indicators of democratization.” Western civilization condensed into bullet points:

“Elections? Check.”

“Freedom of Expression? Check.”

“Private Property? Check.”

Underlying the projects is a clear vision of history, taught in the new “international development” departments of universities and taken as gospel in ministries and multinational bodies: postcommunism, the former Soviet states would pass through the temptations of “transition” to the plateaus of liberal democracy and the market economy.

Benedict was still an economics lecturer in a small-town Irish university when he went to Russia for the first time. He gave a lecture on principles of “business and effective management” at St. Petersburg University. It was 1992. The students listened carefully, lapping up the new language: “SME,” “IPO,” “cash flow.” In the evening after the lecture Benedict walked back to his hotel. He took a wrong turn at reception and found himself in the middle of a wedding party. He tried to ask the way in English. The bride and groom were delighted a westerner had joined them and insisted he stay. He was a piece of exotica, a present in himself. They drank his health, and he stayed on drinking with them. At one point he went to his room and brought back a carton of Marlboros and some Imperial Leather soap as presents. The bride and groom were thrilled. They drank more, and everyone danced. Benedict felt that Russia would be like the West very soon.

He left his job at the Irish university a few years later, swapping $50,000 a year in a provincial college for the tax-free, six-figure sums of the strutting new development industry. Benedict was offered a position as team leader on a project called Technical Assistance for the Economic Development of the Kaliningrad Free Economic Zone. He had no idea where Kaliningrad was; he had to look it up on a map.

Kaliningrad used to be known as Koenigsberg, the capital of Eastern Prussia, the home of Kant. It lies on the Baltic Sea, between Lithuania and Poland, opposite Sweden. At the end of World War II it was captured by the Soviets, renamed, repopulated with imported Soviets from across the empire, and made into a high-security, closed-off military port. It was the most western point of the USSR. After the Cold War the Russians held onto it, though Kaliningrad has no border with Russia proper. It is now an exclave of Russia inside the European Union, a geopolitical freak. The EU recognized “the special position of Kaliningrad” but had “concerns regarding soft security issues”; that is to say, it was leaking heroin, weapons, AIDS, and a mutant strain of tuberculosis into the EU. Kaliningrad either had to change or risk having a wall built around it. There were no direct flights from Europe. Benedict had to fly all the way to Moscow, then double back and fly west to Kaliningrad. He was in his late forties and divorced, and he wanted a new start.

It was almost painful to see the difference between the tired, elegant nineteenth-century houses of the old Koenigsberg and the postwar Soviet new-builds. The red gothic cathedral, home to Kant’s grave, was surrounded, on one side by shabby hordes of aggressive, concrete apartment blocks and on the other by a harbor full of rusting, resting warships. In the evening sailors would go drinking in the bars along the waterfront. I remember finding myself in such a bar on a brief visit to Kaliningrad. The light in the bar was a murky, Baltic Sea green. I ordered a cognac.

“A local one?” asked the waitress.

“What sort of grapes grow in Kaliningrad?” I asked, not disingenuously.

“Why would you need grapes for cognac?” asked the waitress.

The shot was poured. One gulp took me through thirty seconds of pure euphoria straight through to the worst hangover I have ever known.

The Kaliningrad Ministry for Economic Development was a weighty Soviet palace on a central square. Benedict and his translator, Marina, passed through the low, heavy doors and into the world of Russian bureaucracy. Wide, dusty, empty corridors where everything happens as if under water. Telephones, installed in the mid-1970s, rang patiently without being answered. Stopped. Then rang again. Velvet curtains sagged. In all the offices hung photos of the President, smiling almost apologetically, with his head tilted to the side. The officials were mainly strong, stern women in their forties and fifties, the real foundations of the Russian state. There were fewer men, and they all seemed to be stooping. All called each other by their patronymics: “Igor Arkadievich” and “Lydia Alexandrovna.”

Benedict’s opposite number was P, a midlevel official. He wore sagging suits and had a paunch that seemed to pull him downward.

“You the man with the European technical assistance? We need computers,” said P when they met.

Technical assistance, Benedict explained, did not mean technology. It meant schooling from Western consultants. Benedict’s interpreter tried to get the point across.

“We need computers,” answered P.

Benedict arranged for some $200,000 worth of computers to be delivered; he explained to P that he would need to sign some paperwork when they arrived to confirm receipt.

He got on with the development strategy for Kaliningrad. He was given an office in the Institute of Cybernetics. He asked the dean of the institute whether he cared to advise on IT development in the region. Sorry, said the dean, though the Institute of Cybernetics was still officially a university, the salaries were so low all the staff were now involved in trading fish. It was every man for himself in Kaliningrad. The old armaments factories were making macaroni. Soldiers demobbed from East Germany sold off stockpiles of Kalashnikovs and RPGs. One of the saddest places was the zoo, once the city’s pride: the fox ran round its cage chasing its own tale; the wolf stumbled around stunned in an open pit, the polar bears grinned wildly and stared into the distance, the wild squirrel would run and slam itself against the bars of its cage again and again and again.

Benedict had the beige walls of his office painted white and replaced the velvet curtains with venetian blinds. He brought in top managers from EU blue chip companies to inspect the telecommunications, aviation, agrarian, financial, and tourism sectors. Over the next four years they produced SWOT analyses and intervention plans and knowledge trees and gender mainstreaming strategies. Benedict would then send the reports on to P. But when he phoned afterward he could only ever get through to the assistant, Elena.