Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (18 page)

Whenever I see Grigory he is accompanied by Sergey, who directs the human scenery around his boss: he brings artists, directors, actors, and foreigners so Grigory feels he’s at the center of a bohemian feast. A personal tailor makes Sergey’s clothes: capes, knee-high boots, tweed breeches, the cultivated getup of a twenty-first-century necromancer. He has a way of making his pupils shrink and dilate in hypnotic pulsations. He drives a green vintage Jag (whose very appearance is some sort of wizardry in this black-Jeep-and-Hummer-dominated town).

Sergey and Grigory studied together at the math and physics college, shared rooms. But after school, while Grigory had become a millionaire, Sergey had tried to be an artist. He discontinued that and joined a cult. He returned talking mystic riddles about the “materialization of dreams” and “re-dividing reality into segments you can travel through.”

“I’m Grigory’s healer, his wizard,” Sergey likes to say. “The parties are mystery plays.”

Sometimes Grigory smiles at Sergey’s mystical obsessions, but with every week he seems to need him more, waiting for Sergey to take him by the hand and escape to a better world straight out of the movies they grew up on.

One evening Sergey delivers an invitation for another Grigory party. Guests are told to prepare for the art project of the year. The impossibly fashionable boys are all dressed in black this time. Grigory enters, and his court photographer (he has a stutter and is the only one here drinking as heavily as me) puts down his cocktail and scampers over. A burst of photographs: this is the Moscow way—all the rich have their own photographers. They take them on holidays, to parties, to family gatherings; you’ve only made it when your life becomes a magazine.

Grigory comes over and we toast the evening.

“Tonight is when we reveal the true face of Russia,” says Grigory. “I present Sklyarov!”

A light comes on, illuminating a stage at the far end of the club. A man with a face like a gargoyle sits on a throne, dressed in tsarist robes. Rocking, he spits and mutters. A bulge on his forehead sticks out like a small, second head, pushing the eyes down into dark slits. The eyes dart around the room like a trapped animal’s. This is Sklyarov. Sergey had picked him up outside a railroad bar in a polluted provincial town. Sklyarov was the local madman and a prodigious scribbler: conspiracy theories, nonsense political utopias, frenetic sketches of the ideal city. When Sergey showed Grigory the scribbles, he was inspired: this was the true voice of the new Russia. They flew Sklyarov to Moscow (he’d never flown before and soiled his seat), put him up in the best hotel on the highest floor, and told him people in the highest echelons of power were interested in his ideas. Tonight they are launching Sklyarov’s book, his mendicant vision for the future of the country. Sergey introduces the mendicant as a great Russian prophet, a future leader of the nation.

Sklyarov begins to read extracts from his book. His hands tremble as he holds it; it’s the hands that are the most appalling, caked with layers of factory soot, dirt, blood, the scum of railway toilets. The book opens with a description of life in his hometown, which in tsarist times had the most apt name of Yama, literally “the pit.” Sklyarov, frightened at first, reads fast:

The psychological situation in Yama has become critical, acts of psychological violence are on the increase. The violence takes place on the pathological, material, political, moral, financial, and other levels. There is an increase in corruption among bureaucrats aimed at destabilizing the psychological arsenal of the people.

The thing works like a nonsense satire of Moscow. The impossibly fashionable boys and girls start to relax, applaud, congratulate Grigory on the art project of the year. Sklyarov reads on; the next chapter deals with his autobiography:

As regards the story of my own life, in all its facts, numbers, events, trials, tortures, pluses, minuses, flights, falls, ravelings, unravelings, realities, realisms, points of view, versions, dark, light and colored phases: I was born at four o’clock and twenty minutes, in the year 1972, in the town of Yama, in the then-Soviet Union. I was raised in the tradition, order and instructions of Communism, though my soul always rebelled against them. On October 28, 1979, I was made into a Young Pioneer. I took my Young Pioneer badge and flushed it down the toilet with the words: “Maybe you, toilet, can be a young pioneer.”

Grigory stares up at the gargoyle. As the mendicant tells his story I start to notice how uncannily he and Grigory reflect each other: born in the same period, both children of one system they disbelieved, now in conflict with a new system ruled by corrupt bureaucrats. Grigory feels that he lives in an asylum, rebuilds his penthouse to look like one. Sklyarov spent all his formative years in real ones—his asylum diary takes up the bulk of his autobiography.

Sergey is as ever on Grigory’s shoulder, smiling with his success. After the event the three link arms and pose for photographs; in this city they rhyme.

But every week Grigory seems to need rebirths ever more intensely. Every time I see him he is wearing a new costume, transforming himself for another of his fancy dress evenings—one night an elf, then Hitler, Rasputin—escaping, changing, and mutating, clipping his hair short, growing it longer, brushing it to the side, then forward. (Only the bodyguards stay the same. Their boss is an eccentric, and I can never tell whether they hate or love him for it.) Sergey consults lunar calendars, arranges parties to match zodiacal principles. When Aquarius is in the sky he makes a deal with those who run the Moscow zoo and takes over the dolphinarium at night, the partygoers diving and swimming between slippery, pretty girls and dolphins. When the moon is new the theme of the party is “White.” Grigory, carrying a white rabbit in a cage, announces “tonight is all about my rebirth, a new me.” One week Grigory works as a waiter in a café (“I want to find out what it’s like to be a normal person,” he tells me), the next he’s writing plays, flying so fast no role can stick to him, and all around him the city is churning, the demolition ball swinging, and Gotham-gothic towers erupting. And now the bully bureaucrats and Chekists are closing in, and on the news there is always the same message: “Our great President has brought stability.” But all I see happening is that the brilliant boys like Grigory are being eaten.

Television is also increasingly affected. Originally TNT’s formula for success was to remake hit Western reality shows like
The Apprentice
or
Dragon’s Den
. They were successful across the world—why not here? But when TNT made Russian versions, they flopped. The premise for most Western shows is what we in the industry call “aspirational”: someone works hard and is rewarded with a wonderful new life. The shows celebrate the outstanding individual, the bright extrovert. But in Russia that type ends up in jail or exile. Russia rewards the man who operates from the shadows, the gray apparatchik, the master of the
politique de couloir
. The shows that worked here were based on a different set of principles. By far the biggest success was
Posledny Geroi
(“The Last Hero”), a version of
Survivor
, a show based on humiliation and hardship.

Slowly Grigory, like thousands of other Russians, starts to discreetly shift to the safety and serenity of London. Every year he spends less and less time in Moscow. Away from Russia he settles down. Has kids. He posts photos of his new life on his Facebook page: at trance festivals in Arizona, among the snows of Iceland, in the Scottish highlands. Grigory now feels calm enough to ditch the bodyguards. And though he has all the money in the world he likes to travel across west London in big red public transport buses.

•  •  •

For all their restoration hedonism, there can be something so forced about the glittering whirligig of the grander, gaudier Moscow nights. One time there is even a “Putin Party” in Heaven, one of the clubs where Oliona does her hunting. Strippers writhe around poles chanting: “I want you, Prime Minister.” (The President is briefly Prime Minister at the time, though still actually in charge, still the real President, just dressed up as the Prime Minister as at a masquerade.) The mood at the “Putin Party” is a mix of feudal poses and arch, postmodern irony: the sucking up to the master completely genuine, but as we’re all liberated, twenty-first-century people who enjoy Coen brothers films, we’ll do our sucking up with an ironic grin while acknowledging that if we were ever to cross him, we would quite quickly be dead.

So, midway during nights in the baroque clubs with their Forbeses and girls, at around 2:00 a.m., I tend to take my leave, pull on my coat and scarf, and slide and stumble across black ice to one of Mitya Borisov’s bars. In earlier years I went to his little basement bar on Potapoffsky, then later to his one-room place on Herzen Street. There might be many of the same faces I’d seen earlier at the more glamorous events: Borisov’s bars aren’t “underground” places, and they’re not particularly cheap. The food ranges from okay to abhorrent, the booze is warm and often the wrong bottle. Borisov himself may well be there, but he has been drunk for so many years that his puffy, drooping face stares past you when you walk in even if you once swore friendship. He’s too tight ever to have installed air-conditioning, and the bars are such a smog of sour Russian cigarettes it makes a chain-smoker choke. Even so, as soon as you are through the door you can breathe more easily than in all the other places.

Borisov’s bars tap into the only unbroken tradition in Moscow, that of Soviet dissidents and nonconformists, a tradition that started off in Soviet kitchens and didn’t have to reinvent itself after 1991 because it had never pretended to “speak Bolshevik” beforehand. It just continued out of the kitchens and into Borisov’s bars. Borisov’s father, a literature professor, served time (he’ll tell you the story around 4:00 a.m.), and his first venue was an old apartment where you brought your own bottles and read your own poems. The clientele now range from an older generation in their sixties to their children and grandchildren. There’s no face control, but Borisov might threaten to throw you out if you can’t tell a decent rhyme from a bad one.

During the night I make my way from one of Borisov’s bars to the next. He’s put a bunch of places on one street so you never have to leave this world. There’s Kvartira 44, decorated like a 1970s dissident apartment, with the same books you would have found in your parents’ homes. (We’re back drinking in kitchens—though now you have to pay for the experience.) There’s Jean-Jacques, themed as a French bistro, John Donne as an English pub. But they don’t feel like hollow pastiche so much as witty acts of imaginary emigration, like visiting a White Russian émigré locale in 1920s Paris or a nineteenth-century London pub full of exiled antitsarists. Between darkness and dawn we all want to escape from the President’s Russia.

And if the mood is still with me the next day, I like to head down to the big yellow concert hall on Herzen Street and order a large Armenian brandy from the bar in the grand, scuffed marble foyer, with a little slice of lemon on the side (always insist on a fresh one). I avoid the stalls and stride right upstairs and take my seat among the gods with the pale, intense conservatoire students and the slight spinsters, usually music teachers, whose breath smells of brandy and who are quite convinced these concerts are just for them. And when I get to my seat and finally look around, I notice something unusual, namely the light. Most classical concert rooms only have artificial lighting. But here on Herzen Street there are great, arched windows that show the sky. Only the sky; you don’t see any roofs. And if your timing is lucky it will just be approaching sunset and the sky will be turning brandy-tinted. As the music starts I always have the sense the concert hall is somehow lifting. And if the wind is blowing and the clouds are moving fast, you get the extraordinary feeling that you’re flying on a zeppelin powered by brandy, lemon, wind, sky, and music.

ACT III

FORMS OF DELIRIUM

THE LOST GIRLS

When Ruslana Korshunova was first spotted as a potential supermodel at the age of sixteen, it was her eyes that caught everyone’s attention. Large and a wolf blue, the light of her Siberian ancestry: somewhere far off, a white midwinter sun on snowy wastes. Their power was heightened by a slight physical defect: in the bottom inside indent of each of Ruslana’s eyes there was a slight cup, which led to them always being filled with liquid and thus always shining, giving the impression she might be about to cry or maybe had just been crying—though whether in joy or sadness you could never tell. The rest of her face, in stark contrast to those deep, light, blue, complex eyes, was all innocence. The eyes of a thirty-year-old woman, more actress than model, in the face of a child.

At the age of eighteen she became the star of a campaign for a “magical, enchanting perfume” from Nina Ricci. You might even remember the ad. It’s in the style of a fairy tale. Ruslana, in a pink ball gown with bouncing curls, enters a white palace room. The room is empty apart from a tree, withered and bare but for a bottle of perfume shaped like a pink apple, which dangles from one of the branches, and a high mountain of dark, red apples in front of the tree. Ruslana sees the pink apple, and the camera zooms in as she gasps with teen excitement. She climbs the apple mountain, higher and higher, up to the very top, stretches, and reaches for the object of desire.

Two days before her twenty-first birthday she was dead. It was all over the tabloids, cable channels, and glossies: “Russian supermodel dies after plunging from near her ninth-floor apartment in downtown Manhattan. Her death is a presumed suicide. There was no note.”

The moment her body hit the ground the story exploded into a clusterfuck of rumors. Was it drugs? Love? Mafia? Prostitution? She had burst into a thousand Ruslanas—the addict, the whore, the spurned lover. And through all these rumors the magical face of the girl stared out at me.