Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (31 page)

And on every channel is the President, who as a made-for-TV projection has fitted every Russian archetype into himself, so now he seems to burst with all of Russia, cutting ever quicker between gangster-statesman-conqueror-biker-believer-emperor, one moment diplomatically rational and the next frothing with conspiracies. And on TV the President is chatting via live video-link to factory workers posing in overalls in front of a tank they’ve built, and the factory workers are promising the President that if protests against him continue, they will “come to Moscow and defend our stability.” But then it turns out the workers don’t actually exist; the whole thing is a piece of playacting organized by local political technologists (because everyone is a political technologist now), the TV spinning off to someplace where there is no reference point back to reality, where puppets talk to holograms when both are convinced they are real, where nothing is true and everything is possible. And the result of all this delirium is a curious sense of weightlessness.

But look underneath the Kremlin’s whirligig, and don’t you see the most precise, hard calculations? For if one part of the system is all about wild performance, another is about slow, patient co-optation. And the Kremlin has been co-opting the West for years: “The English likes to make fun of us,” said a Kremlin tabloid after
Meet the Russians
was released, “but is it prepared to lose our investments?”

“
It was the first non-linear war
,”
wrote Vladislav Surkov in a new
short story, “Without Sky,” published under his pseudonym and set in a dystopian future after the “fifth world war”:

In the primitive wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries. Two groups of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. No. All against all.

There is no mention of holy wars in Surkov’s vision, none of the cabaret used to provoke and tease the West. But there is a darkling vision of globalization, in which instead of everyone rising together, interconnection means multiple contests between movements and corporations and city-states. Where the old alliances, the EUs and NATOs and “the West,” have all worn out, and where the Kremlin can play the new, fluctuating lines of loyalty and interest, the flows of oil and money, splitting Europe from America, pitting one Western company against another and against both their governments so no one knows whose interests are what and where they’re headed.

“
A few provinces would join one side
,”
Surkov continues.
“
A few others a different one. One town or generation or gender would join yet another. Then they could switch sides, sometimes mid-battle. Their aims were quite different. Most understood the war to be part of a process. Not necessarily its most important part.
”

The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.

“We’re minority shareholders in globalization,” I hear from Russian corporate spooks and politicians. Which, remembering how the system tried to break Yana, might mean that the best way to imagine the Kremlin’s vision of itself in the world is as a “corporate reider”: the ultraviolent cousin of Western corporate raiders. For “reiding” is how most of the Russian elite made their first money, buying into a company and then using any means possible (arrests, guns, seizures, explosions, bribery, blackmail) to extract its advantages. The Kremlin is the great corporate reider inside globalization, convinced that it can see through all the old ways of the slow West to play at something more subversive. The twenty-first century’s geopolitical avant-garde.

“Without Sky” was published on March 12, 2014. A few days later Russia annexed Crimea. Surkov helped to organize the annexation, with his whole theater of Night Wolves, Cossacks, staged referendums, scripted puppet politicians, and men with guns. As punishment, Surkov was one of the first Russian officials to be sanctioned by the West, banned from traveling to or investing in the United States and European Union.

“Won’t this ban affect you?” a reporter asked Surkov as he passed through the Kremlin Palace. “Your tastes point to you being a very Western person.” Surkov smiled and pointed to his head: “I can fit Europe in here.” Later he announced: “I see the decision by the administration in Washington as an acknowledgment of my service to Russia. It’s a big honor for me: like being nominated for the political equivalent of an Oscar. I don’t have accounts abroad. The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.”

My daughter and I are through passport control. We’ll be boarding soon. She’s choosing souvenirs in Duty Free, mementos of England for Russian relatives. I always feel so at home in airport lounges, when you’re neither here nor there, where everyone is stateless. It used to be easy to spot the Russians in the lounge: either under- or overdressed. You’d never notice now, it’s hard to tell whether passengers are going home or departing.

And as the flight is called and we move toward the plane, I wonder whether I will find any of the other Russia on this visit: sometimes when I visit Moscow the streets are filled with protests against the Kremlin. “Don’t lie, don’t steal” is the protesters’ slogan, which might sound somewhat priggish and maybe matronly in English, but in Russian “ne vrat i ne vorovat,” with its vibrating repeating Vs and rolling Rs, sounds like an angry Old Testament growl (maybe “thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not steal” is a better approximation), capturing in four words the connection between financial and intellectual corruption, where words never mean what they say they mean and figures on budgets are never what they are.

One time, on the boulevard ring at dusk, there was a protest leader on a stage addressing a crowd, holding up the old picture of Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe impersonating the President, and he was saying: “This is a portrait by our favorite artist Vladik and this is what we need to get rid of.” And by that he meant not so much the President himself but the whole culture of simulation that eats up everything and which Vladik tried to describe: ‘“One day we will reach into the cupboard, and reach for our clothes, and they will turn to dust in our hands because they have been eaten by maggots.”

Vladik himself has died. He was found floating in a pool in Bali. Death by heart attack. Right at the end an oligarch acquaintance had made him an offer to come over to the Kremlin side and star in a series of paintings in which he would dress up as the new protest leaders engaged in sodomy. Vladik had refused.

I’ve noticed something new when wandering around the protests and talking to the new Moscow dissidents. If once upon a time they used the word “the West” in general, and the word “London” in particular, to represent the beacon of what they aimed toward, now the words “London” and the “West” can be said with a light disgust, as the place that shelters and rewards and reinforces the very forces that oppress them. And so, in the classic Third Rome twist, the Russian liberal can become the last true liberal on Earth, the only one still believing in the ideas preached by Benedict and the international development consultants.

I hope I’ll be able to find Mozhayev, still searching for his Old Moscow, wandering and talking with a bottle of port in his pocket (he’s abandoned vodka). He never did emigrate, of course. I’ve heard he’s even managed to save a few buildings recently. But he could do nothing for Pechatnikov house 3, which was destroyed, and now only Mozhayev’s elegy of it survives. “This place was known as ‘the heart of Moscow,’” wrote Mozhayev in an essay I came across.

The yard was an odd sort of shape, leaning on the slope. There was a broken bench in the middle where I would like to sit. It was best to come here in the evening, when the lights were coming on in the houses, and you could feel time stopping: the ivy crawling up the open brick work, the sheets hanging out in the yard to dry, the children’s strollers by the open doors . . . they all seemed to belong to another time. Of course the sheets and strollers actually belonged to illegal migrants from Central Asia squatting in the houses, and many of the windows were boarded up and broken, and there was graffiti everywhere—but oddly the migrants gave the whole thing a sense of lived-in-ness. And there was one first-floor apartment, whose windows looked directly out onto the bench, which was pure Old Moscow, with a yellow low-hanging lampshade, and books stacked up to the ceiling where they seemed to be keeling over, and a big man with a big beard moving about with tea inside, and a cat that would fling itself repeatedly at the wood-framed windows.

We’re flying now. My daughter has the window seat she likes best. She’s bent right over, forehead pressed up against the cold glass, looking to glimpse the lights of cities between the clouds. The burning concentric rings of Moscow will soon be coming into view. One never really leaves places anymore. The whole “I went on a journey far away” yarn doesn’t feel quite real. Movement between Moscow and London has become so casual (eight flights a day including budget airlines, with the weekend plane nicknamed “the school bus”) that the two cities have become smudged in my mind. I walk into an underpass by Hyde Park Corner and emerge out on the Boulevard Ring and see many of the same faces I just saw off Piccadilly. Turn the corner of Prospekt Mira, and I am back walking along the Thames.

My daughter already finds these jump cuts between countries normal. Sometimes she likes to play a game in which she divides her face into the identities she gets to toy with: “This half of my face is Russian—and this half English. My cheek Jewish. My ear belongs to London and my mouth to Moscow, but I’m keeping my eyes for . . . ” And then she starts to laugh. Already a child of the great Offshore? And what will it turn out to be like?
Almost Zero
? The Street-of-All-Fridays?

And before I know it this trip will be over and I’ll be back in London, on my way to another of Grigory’s Midsummer’s Night parties, which he hosts in both Moscow and London now. It’s at the Orangerie in Kensington Palace. I try to get a costume at the last minute, but by the time I call the stores, all the Midsummer’s Night costumes in central London are already gone. I make myself a lame garland out of flowers plucked from some gardens near the subway. I’m running late, and for some reason I assume the entrance will be from the Knightsbridge end of the Palace, but then when I cross the park I’m told I have to go round to the other, Queensway, side. There’s no clear path, it’s getting dark, and I get lost. I’m scrambling through hedges and thorns, then turn off somewhere and find myself on the edge of Kensington Palace Gardens, which is the most expensive street in London, and the guards by the high gates are looking at me strangely. Then I’m back in the park, my trousers smeared with dirt, and hear the music and finally emerge by the right entrance. There’s a spiked black rail and a bouncer and a woman dressed as the god Pan with a guest list on her iPad. Beyond the gate I can see elf-girls in high heels and Queens of the Night in shining gowns, all talking in many languages and all disappearing beyond the corner of the palace to the party proper, which I can hear but can’t quite see. I say my name, but I’m told it isn’t on the guest list, and I’m late, and they won’t let me in. I try texting Grigory, but of course he must be busy with his guests and doesn’t answer. And I lean over the rail as far as I can go, with the blunt tips digging into my stomach, one hand holding my garland to my head, craning my neck to see if I can somehow catch a glimpse of him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book wouldn’t have been attempted without Paul Copeland, and it couldn’t have been completed without his generous help. He has taught me new meanings in friendship. I am always indebted to my parents, with this book more than ever, and to Aunt Sasha for being our guardian angel. I would like to thank Daniel Soar and Mary-Kay Wilmers at the
London Review of Books
, who gave me a chance; Tunku Varadarajan and Tina Brown for giving me some more; my agent and publishers; and Ben Judah, for the last-minute read-through. Also my producers at TNT: both for letting me make some exciting projects and for showing grace and kindness when I failed.

EXTRA READING

The biography of Surkov was informed by Zoya Svetova’s “Who Is Mr. Surkov?” in
New Times Magazine
(December 26, 2011).

Alena Ledeneva’s
Can Russia Modernise?
(Cambridge University Press, 2013) provides context for the battles among various Russian security agencies and “reiding.”

Yana Yakovleva published her book of prison letters, Неэлектронные Письма (Праксис, 2008).

A detailed account of architectural destruction in Moscow can be found in “Moscow Heritage at Crisis Point,” updated edition (SAVE Europe’s Heritage, Moscow Architectural Preservation Society, 2009).

Vitaly Djomochka’s latest novel is Газовый Кризис 2 (Gas Crisis 2) (Зебра Е, 2010).