Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (17 page)

“You get beaten up, that’s fine. I pissed blood but that didn’t scare me,” says one, the skinniest.

“Stools broken over your head. It’s good for you,” echoes another.

“They put a gas mask over your face, then force you to smoke cigarettes while you do push-ups. If you get through that you’re a real man.”

“I’m not red, . . . ” they all repeat.

“Red” means “traitors.” It’s a prison word: in the 1940s Stalin started to fill up the ranks of the army with prisoners, infecting the system with prison code and hierarchies.

“You need discipline. But what happens at Kamenka has nothing to do with discipline.”

“The ‘grandfathers’ beat you to extort money, not because they want to make a soldier out of you.”

The conscripts spend most of their time repairing and repainting military vehicles, which are then sold on the sly by Kamenka’s command. The “spirits” are essentially used as free labor.

The boys had run away after a night of nonstop beatings. The “grandfathers” had been drinking all day, and then at night they began to whack the boys with truncheons. The commanding officer came by but did nothing; commanding officers need the help of the “grandfathers” in their larger corruption schemes and let them have their fun. They go to great lengths to cover up for the “grandfathers.” In one week, the Soldiers’ Mothers told me, five “spirits” at Kamenka had their spleens beaten to a pulp. The commanders couldn’t take the “spirits” to a normal hospital; too many questions would be asked. So they had to take them privately, paying 40,000 rubles (over $1,000) for each operation.

At 6:00 a.m. the “grandfathers” told the “spirits” they needed to each bring 2,000 rubles ($50) by lunchtime or they would kill them. One of the conscripts, Volodya, had decided to make a run for it. He slipped through the fence and made it to the road. His father had picked him up and brought him to the Organization.

Volodya mutters as he tells his tale. I have to keep on asking him to speak up.

“Of course it’s because the commanding officer in the army is a darkie from the Caucasus. The darkies control the camp, it’s all their fault,” he tells me. The women from the Organization tut-tut and shake their heads. They hear this every day, especially in St. Petersburg, the skinhead capital, and especially among the supporters of Zenit, Volodya’s team.

“Were the ‘dembels’ who beat you darkies?” ask the “mothers.”

“No, they were white,” admits Volodya.

The story might have died after he ran away; Volodya would have reported who had carried out the beatings. The army would have denied them. And that would have been the end of it.

But the commanding officer panicked. He drove into town, grabbed Volodya from the street in front of his apartment, bundled him into his car, and tried to bring him back to the base. Volodya’s father had given chase in his car and collided with the commanding officer’s car to stop him. There was a pileup. The cops turned up; TV cameras turned up. The Soldiers’ Mothers managed to extract Volodya. Then the new minister of defense found out about the story. The Kremlin had just pledged to reform the military. The minister needed an example to show everyone he meant it. Kamenka was already under examination; three conscripts had died during military exercises in the previous month. Maybe that’s why the commanding officer had panicked. Now the ministry had an excuse to ramp up the investigation, and the TV reporters were being encouraged to make films about it (a couple of years later the anticorruption minister of defense was himself tried for embezzlement, in the next round of Kremlin purges).

I have learned to play this game by now, feed off the scraps of freedom given by the system. I will intercut Volodya’s story together with other tales of bullying: a reality show star who married an abusive husband, a kid picked on in his yard. And my producers are happy. They have worked out that these stories about the little man being beaten up by the state play well; this is the everyday reality of the TNT generation. They’re commissioning more of them. Another director is shooting a film about a man in Ekaterinburg who was beaten nearly to death by traffic cops when he refused to pay a bribe; now he exacts his vengeance by catching traffic cops giving bribes on video and posting them online. Another film TNT is making is about a young woman killed when her car was crashed into by the head of an oil company; he got off due to his connections. Back in Moscow I have just filmed a story about teens beaten by the police. The whole thing was caught on cell phones, but the police have brought charges against the teens for beating THEM up. I hear the same chorus of confused despair from the teens that I heard from Yana Yakovleva: “It’s like they can define reality, like the floor disappears from under you.” The Kremlin has announced a new campaign to clean up the police, and the parents hope this will help save their children (and thus I’m allowed to shoot my story).

The victims I meet never talk of human rights or democracy; the Kremlin has long learned to use this language and has eaten up all the space within which any opposition could articulate itself. The rage is more inchoate: hatred of cops, the army. Or blame it all on foreigners. Some teens, the anarchists and artists, have started to gather and protest, rushing out of the metro and cutting off the roads and the main squares. They call their gatherings “Monstrations” and carry absurdist banners:

“The sun is your enemy.”

“We will make English Japanese.”

“Eifiyatoloknu for president.”

The only response to the absurdity of the Kremlin is to be absurd back. An art group called Vojna (“War”) are the great tricksters of the Monstration movement: running through the streets and kissing policewomen; setting cockroaches loose in a courtroom; graffiti-ing a penis on the underside of a bridge in St. Petersburg so when the bridge comes up the penis faces the local FSB; projecting a skull and crossbones onto the parliament building.

In any other culture this might seem flippant; in this society of spectacle and cruelty it feels like oxygen. Even the performance artist Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe has become politicized, posing in a magazine as a grotesque version of the President. He spent days immersing himself in the role: “When I became Putin, I felt myself become a totemic maggot, about to explode with shit. But I wasn’t the baddie, I was the janitor, who needed to eat up everything, Russia, the USSR, so the new life could begin. . . . Putin will eat up our country. 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.”

But just as I feel I’m on a roll, my little corridor is cut off.

“We’re sorry, Peter,” my producers tell me at TNT, “we’ve been told to stop making . . . ‘social’ films. You understand. . . . ”

They look a little uncomfortable when they say this (there’s a new one among them, a redhead, who has replaced the raven-haired, who has married and left to live in London). I’m uncomfortable for their discomfort, and I find myself nodding. Of course I understand. I have learned to pick things up on the edge of a hint. I don’t ask “why.” I don’t argue that ratings should be our priority. There are unspoken walls. The Kremlin wave of cleaning things up has finished. The 2008 financial crisis in the West has lowered the oil price, and there’s less money for the Kremlin to indulge in toying with reforms. We need calm now. The economy is curdling.

As I am coming out of TNT toward evening, the neon lamps on the sushi bars are already lighting up dark mountains of dirty acid sludge: the chemicals the city puts in grit burn the paws of stray dogs. You can hear them whimper as they huddle by the warm pipes along the buildings. Two pork-faced cops, whom Muscovites have taken to calling “werewolves in uniform,” patrol the corner. I try not to gawk and walk past in the Moscow style, face down and furious. The main thing is not to catch their eye—one of my many registrations has expired. But they can still smell the fear on me—belching out the phrase that is their mark of power: “Documents: Now!” I know the script. They shepherd me toward the darkness of a courtyard. Then comes the ultimate Moscow transaction, the slipping of the bribe, a 500-ruble note already placed that morning among the pages of my passport (the rate has been going up as the economy worsens). But never offer money directly. Paying bribes requires a degree of delicacy. Russians have more words for “bribe” than Eskimos do for “snow.” I use my favorite formulation: “May I use this opportunity to show a sign of my respect for you?” “Of course you may,” the werewolves say, smiling suddenly, and slip the cash under their policeman’s caps. All they ever wanted was some respect.

And though I still tremble quietly at the act, I have become good at this.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAMS

An advertisement hangs on huge billboards over the city: a single, handsome, male eye staring out of a dark room through a crack in a door, both spying on the passersby and imploring them to release him. The advertisement is for one of Grigory’s companies, office furniture (black sells best) to fill up the just-built offices of the new Moscow. At thirtysomething, Grigory is one of Moscow’s young self-made multimillionaires, one of the boys who became rich in a blink during the 1990s, when being an entrepreneur, and not a bureaucrat, was the thing to do.

Moscow knows Grigory best through his great parties: oases where we escape the barons and werewolves for a night. Tonight’s event is in honor of Grigory’s marriage. He has taken over a mini-Versailles-like palace for the occasion. Near the entrance to the park teams of makeup artists from Moscow’s film studios dress up the guests in motion picture costumes: tonight’s theme is “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The same crowd follows Grigory around from week to week, re-creating itself for his latest whim. Inside the park trapeze artists on invisible ropes swoop down and through the trees; synchronized swimmers dressed as mermaids with shining silver tails flip and dive in the dark lake. Geysers shoot up from the water: as the droplets fall they’re lit up to create a rainbow in the night. Everyone wonders: Where are the bride and groom? A spotlight illuminates the lake. Grigory and his bride appear on opposite sides, on separate little boats made up like tortoise shells, both dressed in white. The tortoise shells move magically toward each other (pushed, I later learn, by frogmen). The boats meet in the middle; the lovers join hands and step barefoot on the water. They do not sink. Suspended on the lake, they turn and walk across the water toward us, their path illuminated by lasers. We gasp at the miracle and all applaud. The effect is achieved with a secret walkway installed specially under the lake, but it is still divine.

But when Monday comes Grigory will return to a world of corrupt officials demanding bribes. The world of businessmen is shrinking. Even the poster for Grigory’s company seems to suggest a secret social edge: Is the eye peeking through the door a reference to “Big Brother is watching you”?

I first met Grigory through an old university friend, Karine. Back home I’d remembered Karine as wearing sandals and tie-dyed skirts, forever getting her curls in her eyes. Then she went to Moscow and was transformed: her hair up, back bare, designer heels replacing Birkenstocks. She’d changed after meeting some Russian guy. That was Grigory. When I first came to Moscow she introduced us. He was living in one of the new skyscrapers, his penthouse perched over the erupting city. The apartment had been specially designed for Grigory and was featured in glossy architecture magazines: open plan, all-white, a lot of plastic. A vision of the future—or maybe a lunatic asylum. Grigory would pace it with the walk common to many of Moscow’s newly rich: a confident strut with the odd, sudden alarmed glances. He was small and lithe, with the eternally young face of a choir boy.

Looking around, I noticed the apartment seemed to have no signs of personal history: no old books, clothes, silverware, photographs. As if Grigory had emerged out of a void.

With time I found out more about him.

He grew up in Tatarstan. His dad was just another Soviet oil worker, a small cog in the great state energy machine. Growing up the young Grigory excelled at math and physics, the type of quiet boy who would spend hours on the toilet reading chess books, forgetting where he was, learning grand masters’ games by heart. (I played him once; he beat me in ten moves.) His talents were quickly spotted, and in the 1980s he was dispatched to a special math and physics college in Moscow, to be taught by Nobel Prize winners, with others being crunched and molded into crack intellectual troops to glorify the Soviet Empire. It was perestroika, and the Soviet Union was creaking, swaying. Films and books and music from the West were starting to seep into the new black markets. Everyone pieced together his own version of the West, his own collage of freedom. Grigory got into Freddy Mercury, later films by Pasolini and Jarman, Dadaists, Greenaway—as far away from Soviet Tatarstan as you could possibly go. He was finishing his studies as the Soviet Union collapsed. For an older generation, for men like the President, the collapse of the empire was tragic. But for a twentysomething like Grigory, it meant that suddenly anything was possible.

Grigory began by making his own computers. They sold well. Soon he had a team of other students working with him. Got involved with banking. Then came the new world of threats, bodyguards. At the parties, people would whisper he was lucky to have made it through alive.

“The worst is when people owe you money,” Grigory told me once as we drove through the woods outside of Moscow in a new, silver, sports car. “As long as you owe them, they’ll never kill you. But if they owe
you
they’d rather kill than pay. I dream of being able to go outside without bodyguards. A normal life.” (The bodyguard’s Jeep was visible in the rearview mirror as we drove.)

“What is it you want from Moscow, Peter?” he asked me another time, as we were drinking bright blue cocktails.

“Well, you know, it’s a booming city. It’s up and up and up.”

“Only a foreigner can think that. This city devours itself.”

And then once, when he was thinking of resuming his studies, but this time in political economy: “There must be some way of working out how to make Russia work. Must be!”