Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (16 page)

I ride the elevator, still lit with a dim yellow bulb, past the mad woman who sits on the stairwell shouting, “I am an egg, I am an egg,” all day and night. “The KGB came and took me. They came and took me. I am an egg!” (What does she mean?, I always think to myself, Did they do something to her? Or is it just nonsense?) At the front door I pat my trouser pocket to check for the thin outline of my passport and realize it’s not there. Always the passport, always the “dokumenti!” You can get stopped and checked for papers at any moment. It might only actually happen once or maybe even twice a year, but you still have to stand in queues and knock on doors to obtain the whole library of little stamps, regulations, permits—the legal stipulations and requirements that are themselves always changing. A little trick to keep you always on tenterhooks, always patting your pockets for your papers, always waking up worried that you might have lost them in a bar. Over time you begin to pat for the passport instinctively, your hand going down unthinkingly to check your pocket so many times a day you don’t even notice any more. That’s true power—when it starts to influence the unconscious movements of your arms.

I have to go back up to the apartment.

There are so many little initiations, so many ways the system wraps itself around you. My latest has been a driving test. I would never pass, my instructor had explained, if I didn’t pay a bribe (this month $500, but about to jump to $1,000 if I didn’t hurry). I protested that I wanted to learn and pass the test for real. He explained the traffic police would fail me until I paid up.

The instructor was a friend of a friend of my parents, and I was told to trust him by everyone I knew. He specialized in giving lessons to what he described as “nervous” types: actresses and ex-pats. I gave up the money, and he made the appropriate deal. I had assumed I would then receive the license in an envelope. To my surprise my instructor told me to go to the traffic center to take the test with everyone else.

The theory part of the test was held in a large, bright, new office room with very new computers. There were around twenty of us seated in front of computers completing simulations of various driving scenarios. I assumed, with a little relief, that my bribe had been lost in the works and set about using my common sense to answer the questions. To my self-satisfied surprise I received 18/20, enough to pass. Only later did it hit me that every computer in the room must have been a priori rigged to give 18/20: everyone in the room had paid for the right result.

Then came the test proper, a sequence of maneuvers around cones in a car park. I got into a car, an instructor’s model with two sets of pedals, next to a traffic cop in uniform. He told me to start the car. I was so nervous and had completed so few lessons, I couldn’t get the pedals right and kept on stalling. The traffic cop smiled, glanced over his shoulder, and managed the ignition himself. “Put your hands on the wheel and pretend to drive,” he told me. I did as I was told, and while the traffic cop controlled the whole movement of the car from his set of pedals, I cruised around with an inane grin. After a while I had the sense I was almost driving the car myself.

Back in the apartment I find the passport in yesterday’s trousers in the unmade bed. I keep it in a special inner pocket where it would be hard to steal. But that means the passport is permanently plastered to the sweat of my leg. The logo at the front is rubbing off. The edges are curled up. The plastic coating over my photo is peeling. I hurry back down to the street to hail a ride. The cars speed up as they turn the corner: Mitsubishis, Hummers, BMWs, Mercedeses, all with tinted windows. You’re only someone as long as you at least pretend to have something to hide. One stops. The window starts to come down, and I crouch down to be at eye level; you only have a few seconds to evaluate the driver’s face. A drunk? Nutter? Or worse, someone who will drive you to a lay-by and mug you? For all the little bits of paper and little forms you need to sign to survive here, everything comes down to these little moments of improvised trust and deals, “kak dogovoritsa,” in which everyone understands the game though nothing is ever formalized.

300 to Three Station Square?

400?

350.

I sit in the front and try to size up my driver further. It’s an odd relationship you have inside these cars: on the one hand you’ve paid and you should be in charge; on the other it’s not a real taxi and the driver can get offended. This one has a beard and looks composed. He switches on the CD and it’s playing psalms. I advise him to take care on the corner where the traffic police like to change the signs from “single lane” to “no way” overnight to catch out drivers and extract their rent—the city is an obstacle course of corruption, and your options are to get angry or play up and play the game and just enjoy it. The traffic has already curdled—my journey is short but this will be a long ride. A Muscovite measures out his life in jams, the day’s success or failure judged by how many hours you spend in traffic. They have become the city’s symbol. The only way to relieve the city would be to move financial and government centers out of the inner rings of town. But that would be out of keeping with the feudal instincts of the system. So the traffic becomes the expression of the stalemate at the center of everything: on the one hand the free market means everyone can own a car, but on the other all the cars are in jams because of the underlying social structure. The siren-wielding, black (always black), bullet-proof Mercedeses of the big, rich, and powerful are free to drive against the flow of traffic, speed through the acid sludge, driven by modern-day barons who live by different rules. The sirens are the city’s status symbol, awarded like knighthoods to the most loyal bureaucrats, businessmen, and film directors (or for a certain price). As they pass us the driver and I both grunt, united, I sense, for a moment against a common enemy. I relax and tell him how much I like the psalms he’s playing. But when we end our journey and I get out to go, he suddenly grabs my shoulder and pulls me around so we are face to face. His arm is strong and his grip hard.

“Don’t worry, my brother,” he tells me, “we’ll clean the streets of all the filth, all the darkies, the Muslims and their dirty money. Holy Russia will rise again.”

One bumps into these types occasionally, Eurasianists, Great Russians, holy neo-imperialists, and the like, few but quietly supported by the Kremlin to have a mouthpiece through which to keep the conversation away from corruption and focused on fury at foreigners (the Kremlin isn’t keen to say these words itself).

I pass through the station and head for the St. Petersburg train and my latest story—about mandatory military service, the great initiation into Russian manhood. Every April and October the color khaki seems to suddenly sprout on the streets as bands of young soldiers appear in the cities; skinny, in uniforms either too large or small, with pinched red noses and red ears, scowling at the Maybachs and gold-leaf restaurants. They hang around at the entrances of metro stations where the warm air gusts up from the underground, shiver while sucking on tepid beer on street corners of major thoroughfares. They come shuffling up stairs and knocking on apartment doors and stalk through parks. It’s the time of year of Russia’s great annual hide and seek; the soldiers have been given orders to catch young men dodging the draft and force them to join the army. Military service might be mandatory for healthy males between eighteen and twenty-seven, but anyone who can avoids it.

The most common way out is a medical certificate. Some play mad, spending a month at a psychiatric clinic. Their mothers will bring them in: “My son is psychologically disturbed,” they will say. “He has been threatening me with violence, he wakes up crying.” The doctors of course know they are pretending, and the bribe to stay a month in a loony bin will set you back thousands of dollars. You will never be forced to join up again—the mad are not trusted with guns—but you will also have a certificate of mental illness hanging over you for the rest of your career. Other medical solutions are more short term: a week in the hospital with a supposedly injured hand or back. This will have to be repeated every year, and annually the hospitals fill up with pimply youths simulating illness. But the medical route takes months of preparation: finding the right doctor, the right ailment—because the ailments that can get you off change all the time. You turn up at the military center with the little stamped registration card that your mother has spent months organizing and saving for, then find that this year flat feet or shortsightedness are no longer a legal excuse.

If you’re at a university you avoid military service (or rather you fulfill it with tame drills at the faculty) until you graduate. There is no greater stimulus for seeking a higher education, and Russian males take on endless master’s degree programs until their late twenties. And if you’re not good enough to make it into college? Then you must bribe your way into an institution; there are dozens of new universities that have opened in part to service the need to avoid the draft. And the possibility of the draft makes dropping out of college much more dangerous—the army will snap you up straightaway. When the bad marks come in, mothers start to fret and scream at their sons to work harder. And when they can see the boys might fail, it’s time to pay another bribe, to make sure they pass the year. But there are a certain number of pupils the teacher has to fail to keep up appearances, and the fretting mothers start to put out feelers for the most desperate and most expensive remedy: the bribe to the military command. The mothers come to the generals, beat and weep on the doors of the commanders, cry about their sons’ freedoms (money by itself is not always enough; you have to earn the emotional right to pay the bribe).

But all these options are only available for those with money and connections. For the others, for the poorer ones, it’s hide and seek time. The soldiers will grab anyone who looks the right age and demand his documents and letters of exemption, and if he doesn’t have them march him off to the local recruitment center. So the young spend their time avoiding underground stops or hiding behind columns and darting past when they see the soldiers are flirting with girls or scrounging cigarettes off passersby. You see teens sprinting through the long, dark marble corridors of the subway as cops give chase. When soldiers come by apartments, potential conscripts pretend they are not there, barricading themselves in, holding their breath until the soldiers go away. The soldiers eventually get tired and leave, but from now on every time you have your documents checked by police you will be trembling that they might ring through and see whether you dodged the draft. And every time you go into the subway, every time you cross a main road, every time you meet friends near a cinema, any time you leave your little yard, life becomes full of trepidation. And you will live semilegally until you are twenty-seven, unable to register for an official passport and thus unable to travel outside of the country.

This is the genius of the system: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother, and your family become part of the network of bribes and fears and simulations; you learn to become an actor playing out his different roles in his relationship with the state, knowing already that the state is the great colonizer you fear and want to avoid or cheat or buy off. Already you are semilegal, a transgressor. And that’s fine for the system: as long as you’re a simulator you will never do anything real, you will always look for your compromise with the state, which in turn makes you feel just the right amount of discomfort. Whichever way, you’re hooked. Indeed, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that molds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service.

Those too poor, too lazy, or too unlucky to avoid the draft—or those for whom the army seems a better option than anything they have—are rounded up, stripped, shaved, and packed off to bases all across the country. At the end of the April and October call-ups the city streets are clogged with great trucks full of conscripts, decked with tarpaulins and open at the back. The new conscripts sit and stare at the city they are leaving, rubbing their heads as they get used to the lightness of their newly shaved skulls. Where he will be sent depends on the bribe a soldier pays. Some will go to Chechnya, to Ossetia, to the death zones everyone dreads. But if you pay in time, you’ll avoid those. What no one will be safe from is hazing, known in Russia as the “law of the grandfather”: dozens of conscripts are killed every year, hundreds commit suicide, and thousands are abused. (Those are just the official statistics.) This is why every mother wants to keep her son away from the army. New conscripts are known as “spirits.” And as the tarpaulin-covered trucks pass through the gates of the army bases, the conscripts will hear the shouts of the older officers waiting for them: “Hang yourselves, spirits, hang yourselves!” they call. And the great breaking-in begins.

The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, an NGO run by the mothers of conscripts past and present, is the refuge “spirits” flee to when they run away from camp. The headquarters are in St. Petersburg. I take the Sapsan, the new train as smart as a TGV with wider seats and so expensive no one but the new middle class can afford it, up to the northern capital. The Sapsan takes four hours to reach Petersburg, the normal train takes eight. Some laugh that the Sapsan was built especially by the President so his “team” could travel between the two cities in comfort. The country is ruled now by the “St. Petersburg set,” the President’s old chums who were raised and studied with him. As I leave the train station I drive into town through a city built like a theater set, the original Russian facade of European civilization as imagined by Peter the Great, with little of its content.

In the office of the Soldiers’ Mothers the walls are lined with photographs of dead soldiers. I’ve come to interview four eighteen-year-olds who have recently fled from a nearby base called Kamenka. I’m late, but they’re all waiting quietly and jump to attention when I walk in. They wear hoodies and the football scarves of Zenit, the St. Petersburg football team, and are desperate to prove they didn’t just run away because of common hazing, that they’re loyal, tough. They seem embarrassed by having to take shelter with fifty-year-old women. They never call the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers by its name, just “the Organization.”