Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (30 page)

“My client pays you 100,000 a month for a package of services that you say includes protection. We don’t understand how you can also work with other clients protecting their right to steal from my client, who is also your client. I’m a lawyer, for example, and I could never defend both sides.”

“That’s why we’re different from you lawyers,”
the mafia guys answered.
“You guys quarrel all the time. We work with everyone and ensure peace for all sides.”

“You’re quite right. We didn’t understand. And I’m sure it’s our fault—but now that we understand the services you offer we don’t need them anymore.”

“We walked out of a room of shocked Mafiosi. The others were only paying them 30,000. Next week the racket came back with all the computers from the rivals.”

Firestone still smiles when he relates this, playing out each line of the dialogue in Americanized, but nearly perfect, Russian. And he tells me of the time he had to hide out in a government hospital to hide from corrupt cops (they could grab him anywhere apart from a hospital full of ministers); and when his first office was raided by thugs working for his neighbor and his staff were handcuffed to the furniture and threatened at knifepoint; or when he had to fly to New York and buy up all the bugging equipment at the Spy store to give to the antifraud squad in Moscow so they would have the equipment with which to bust other bent cops trying to extort money from him.

“You know, one of the problems I have living in London is that if I actually tell the truth about my story people just assume I’m lying. They never call me back. I’ve learned to just talk pleasantries. Or if someone really wants the truth I tell them there’s a condition: ‘You give me your e-mail now before the conversation starts, and I will tell you my story and then send you some links and you can see me on the BBC or read some newspaper articles about me. And then maybe you might call me back. Because you won’t call me back otherwise. It’s just too weird. . . . ’”

Russia as the place where you are forced into extremes, which then make you examine your every decision and what you’re made of, where the choice between good and evil becomes distilled. Is this what makes it so addictive? Another incarnation of Moscow as Third Rome. We all end up becoming sucked into the city’s myths, become expressions of the only story it knows how to tell. The same tragedy can happen in so many places, but in Russia it takes on that iconic intensity.

When I refocus on what Jamison is saying, his voice is rising again.

“London shocked me. The whole system is built around wanting that money to come here. We want their money. We want their trade. And now you’ve got former German chancellor Schroeder and Lord Mandelson and Lord So-and-So working for these Russian state companies, and you know I think they should just be honest and say ‘some Kremlin company offered me 500,000 to sit on their board and I don’t do anything and I don’t know anything about how the company is run but sometimes they ask me to open some doors.’ And the argument I hear from everyone is ‘well if the money doesn’t go here it will go somewhere else’: well here ain’t going to be here if you take that attitude, here is going to be there. We used to have this self-centered idea that Western democracies were the end point of evolution, and we’re dealing from a position of strength, and people are becoming like us. It’s not that way. Because if you think this thing we have here isn’t fragile you are kidding yourself. This,” and here Jamison takes a breath and waves his hand around to denote Maida Vale, London, the whole of Western civilization, “this is fragile.”

And I see Jamison pacing through Parliament and through every think tank meeting and dinner party in London agitating and crying out, full of his American fervor and that pain that seems to physically twist him when he talks about Sergey Magnitsky. And the pain is even greater because he feels the men who are responsible for killing Sergey are here too, enjoying their stucco mansions and Harrods, and they are utterly untouchable.

But what Jamison says causes no great revelation in the golden triangle. Rather it’s assumed that everything everywhere is, well, terrible. And though most agree that yes, Mayfair and Belgravia and Knightsbridge might belong to a different order now, are part of the great offshore, and naturally we would never approve it if our own ministers did the same as that Russian (or Azeri or Nigerian) deputy prime minister who just bought that penthouse off St. James’s with money made through self-dealing government contracts, but overall we’ll be fine because we’ll keep all that bad stuff up in the spare room of our culture and it won’t change us. And Jamison, poor soul, had a terrible time, and he means well and in a way of course he’s right, but let’s not get carried away: the world has always been this way. Or others sigh and say well everything has changed here already anyway and there is no West anymore: for who are we to teach anyone how to behave?

And in the end the editorial producers cut the story about Sergey Magnitsky from
Meet the Russians
, including all those scenes we shot in Belgravia and Parliament, because try as they might they just can’t make it fit with the overall master concept: it’s meant to be a feel-good sort of show.

NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

I am at the airport, getting ready to catch the Moscow flight. My daughter is with me. Her mother, my wife, is a Muscovite; we met during the almost decade I spent in Russia. My daughter was born while I still worked in Moscow. Now we all live together in London. When I travel to Russia it is less often on TV projects and more frequently as a father. I don’t travel with a camera anymore. I find I do less of those sorts of TV projects, the ones where you push your way into people’s lives, try to get as close to things as possible. For all our claims to capture the real, a factual director is always a manipulator, a miniature vizier, seducing, framing, spinning his subjects, asking one question but waiting for another slip up, always thinking how every action we’re shooting relates not to its direct environment but to the final cut. And when we begin to edit, our subject’s video representation takes on a life of its own, a hologram cross-faded, saturated, flipped, squeezed, and cut in different ways for US, UK, Internet, and promotional edits. So almost no person is ever happy with themself on screen, even when we’ve done everything to make them “positive,” because it’s never the “him” or “her” they think they are. Yet here’s the rub. Those holograms we have created then pursue us. The emotions our subjects once poured out to us stay with us. And we begin to live in a parallel reality of video ghosts. The parents of the dead models in their deep grief, the gold diggers, the soldier off to Chechnya, Jambik, the milkmaid, the terror victims, everyone I’ve ever filmed: they visit me from time to time. “Come back!” my wife exclaims when she sees me with that distracted look. “Look at your daughter. The real world. We’re here.”

The airport is packed. I’m taking my daughter over for summer holidays, and she is looking forward to the trip. She has recently started school in London, and it can be tough for her. I have been away filming so often that her Russian is still better than her English. The other day she came home from school crying: “I can’t understand what the other children are saying about me, what if it’s something horrible?” Russia for her means adoring relatives. When we land at Domodedovo my in-laws will be there to greet her in a scene straight out of
Hello-Goodbye
. They will take her out to their small family dacha. The front of the dacha faces onto mild hills, with a little church peeking out on the horizon. The back porch runs into wild woods. She will spend the summer wandering among the hills and in the woods, listening to Russian fairy tales and imagining herself in them, stopping by little rivers, picking wild strawberries in the intense light loveliness of Russian summer, which is so short and thus so special.

I imagine how when I land my in-laws and I will talk about the weather. Will there be peat fires this year? Will the fires reach the dacha? We will think about the best way to drive out of town; the traffic has only gotten worse. Maybe they will recommend a concert I should attend at the conservatory, and we will negotiate our conversation through the pleasant byways of our relationship. As if everything is normal. As if there is no war. And at first glance the city will seem just as it ever was: the bulletproof Bentleys will still be triple parked across from the red-brick monastery; the flocks of cranes will still swing across a skyline changing in fast-forward. And everything will be fine until someone (a taxi driver, an old friend, someone in a bar) will casually mention, mantra-like:

“
Russia is strong again, we’ve got up from our knees!
”

“
All the world fears us!
”

“
The West is out to get us!
”

“
There are traitors everywhere!
”

And then I will switch on the television.

The weekly news roundup show is on. The well-dressed presenter walks across the well-made set and into shot, briskly summing up the week’s events, all seemingly quite normal. Then suddenly he’ll twirl around to camera 2, and before you know it he’s talking about how the West is sunk in the slough of homosexuality, and only Holy Russia can save the world from Gay-Europa, and how among us all are the fifth columnists, the secret Western spies who dress themselves up as anticorruption activists but are actually all CIA. (Who else would dare to criticize the President?) The West, he’ll say, is sponsoring anti-Russian “fascists” in Ukraine, and all of them are out to get Russia and take away its oil; the American-sponsored fascists are crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns because the West is organizing a genocide against us Russians, and there are women crying on camera saying how they were threatened by roving gangs of Russia-haters, and of course only the President can make this right, and that’s why Russia did the right thing to annex Crimea, why it’s right to arm and send mercenaries to Ukraine, and this is just the beginning of the great new conflict between Russia and the West. When you go to check (through friends, news wires, anyone who isn’t Ostankino) to see whether there really are fascists taking over Ukraine or whether there are children being crucified, you find it’s all untrue, and the women who said they saw it all are actually hired extras dressed up as “eye-witnesses,” and the whole line between fact and fiction at Ostankino has become irrelevant. But even when you know the whole justification for the President’s war is fabricated, even when you fathom that the real reason is to create a story to keep the President all-powerful and help us all forget about the melting money, the lies are told so often that after a while you find yourself nodding because it’s hard to get your head around the idea that they are lying quite so much and quite so brazenly—and at some level you feel that if Ostankino can lie so much and get away with it, doesn’t that mean they have real power, the power to define what is true and what isn’t? Wouldn’t you do better just to nod anyway? And flipping over to another channel, there are the Night Wolves riding in cavalcades through Sevastopol to celebrate the annexation, the resurrection of the Empire, holding aloft icons of Mary the Mother of God and quoting Stalin and playing their great theme tune:

Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners,

And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.

The Night Wolves are just one of the many stars of the new Ostankino cast. There are the Cherubims, who dress in all black emblazoned with skulls and crosses, calling to cleanse Russia of moral darkness; the neo-Nazis with MTV dancer bodies who film themselves beating up gay teenagers in the name of patriotism; the whip-wielding Cossacks attacking performance artists on the streets. And all of them are pushed to the center of the screen to appear on trashy talk shows and star in factual entertainment formats, keeping the TV spinning with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan and the CIA. Their emergence is not some bottom-up swell; only a tiny number of Russians go to church. Rather, the Kremlin has finally mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great, 140-million-strong population entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares, which if repeated enough times can become infectious. For when I talk to many of my old colleagues who are still working in the ranks of Russian media or in state corporations, they might laugh off all the Holy Russia stuff as so much PR (because everything is PR!), but their triumphant cynicism in turn means they can be made to feel there are conspiracies everywhere: because if nothing is true and all motives are corrupt and no one is to be trusted, doesn’t it mean that some dark hand must be behind everything?

Flipping over onto another channel, there is the life trainer from the Rose of the World giving advice on how to deal with all your hang-ups (after the story with the models broke, he just changed the name of his organization and carried on regardless). How similarly Ostankino works to the Lifespring courses: repeating and endlessly playing out all of Russia’s fears and panic attacks and fevers, not searching for some criticism or cure, but just stirring them so you’re sucked in but never free, while the Kremlin ties the public to itself by first humiliating and bullying with werewolves in uniform and baron bureaucrats, and then lifts the country up with marvelous military conquests.

Later in the schedule come the shows with Duma deputies, some still spitting or beetroot-faced but more now with English suits, rimless glasses, and prim buns, their latest challenge to make up laws so flamboyant in their patriotic burlesque it will get them noticed. They conjure motions to “ban untraditional sex” or “ban English words”—and to sanction Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Glance through the careers of these new religious patriots, and you find they were recently committed democrats and liberals, pro-Western, preaching modernization, innovation, and commitment to Russia’s European course, before which they were all good Communists. And though on the one hand their latest incarnations are just new acts in the Moscow political cabaret, something about their delivery is different from the common Russian political performer who gives his rants with a knowing wink and nod. Now the delivery is somewhat deadpan. Flat and hollow-eyed, as if they have been turned and twisted in so many ways they’ve spun right off the whirligig into something clinical. Because isn’t some sort of madness implicit in the system? If at one end of the spectrum are the political technologists toying with reality, or Oliona transforming herself for every sugar daddy, or Vitaly acting out a fantasy of himself in movies he himself directs about his own life, then at the other is Boris Berezovsky, the progenitor of the system who became its absurd reflection, bankrupt, making no sense in an English courtroom, told that he “deludes himself into believing his own version of events.”