Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (7 page)

Benedict didn’t look glum. There was always much of the chirpy, bright public school boy about him.

“I’ve joined the media,” he told me. “I’m at Russia Today.”

Russia Today is Russia’s answer to BBC World and Al-Jazeera, a rolling 24/7 news channel broadcasting in English (and Arabic and Spanish) across every hotel and living room in the world, set up by presidential decree with an annual budget over $300 million and with a mission to “give Russia’s point of view on world events.” Wasn’t Benedict worried he might end up doing the Kremlin’s PR work?

“I’ll leave if they censor me on anything. And it’s only fair Russia should have the chance of expressing its point of view.”

Benedict had been asked to put together a strategy for the business news section. He wrote papers to the head of the channel advising what sectors business news should cover, questions journalists should ask Russian CEOs so City analysts would watch the channel. He wasn’t censored or leaned on in any way. Russia Today began to look and sound like any 24/7 news channel: the thumping music before the news flash, the earnest, pretty newscasters, the jock-like sports broadcasters. British and American twentysomethings straight out of university would be offered generous compensation packages, whereas in London or Washington they would have been expected to work for free. Of course they all wondered whether RT would turn out to be a propaganda channel. The twenty-three-year-olds would sit in Scandinavia after work and talk about it: “Well, it’s all about expressing the Russian point of view,” they would say, a little uncertain.

Since the war in Iraq many were skeptical about the virtue of the West. And then the financial crash undermined any superiority they felt the West might have. All the words that had been used to win the Cold War—“freedom,” “democracy”—seemed to have swelled and mutated and changed their meaning, to become redundant. If during the Cold War Russia gave the West the opposition it needed to unify its various freedoms (cultural and economic and political) into one narrative, now that the opposition has disappeared, the unity of the Western story seems unwound. And in such a new world, what could be wrong with a “Russian point of view?”

“There is no such thing as objective reporting,” the managing editor of Russia Today once told me when I asked him about the philosophy of his channel. He had been kind enough to meet me in his large, bright office. He speaks near-perfect English.

“But what is a Russian point of view? What does Russia Today stand for?”

“Oh, there is always a Russian point of view,” he answered. “Take a banana. For someone it’s food. For someone else it’s a weapon. For a racist it’s something to tease a black person with.”

As I left the office I noticed a bag of golf clubs and a Kalashnikov leaning by the door.

“Does it scare you?” asked the managing editor.

It took a while for those working at RT to sense something was not quite right, that the “Russian point of view” could easily mean “the Kremlin point of view,” and that “there is no such thing as objective reporting” meant the Kremlin had complete control over the truth. Once things had settled down it turned out that only about two hundred of the two-thousand-or-so employees were native English speakers. They were the on-screen window dressing and spell-checkers of the operation. Behind the scene the real decisions were made by a small band of Russian producers. In between the bland sports reports came the soft interviews with the President. (“Why is the opposition to you so small, Mr. President?” was one legendary question.) When K, a twenty-three-year-old straight out of Oxford, wrote a news story in which he stated that Estonia had been occupied by the USSR in 1945, he received a bollocking from the head of news: “We saved Estonia,” he was told and was ordered to change the copy. When T, straight out of Bristol, was covering forest fires in Russia and wrote that the President wasn’t coping, he was told: “You have to say the President is at the forefront of fighting against the fires.” During the Russian war with Georgia, Russia Today ran a banner across its screen nonstop, screaming: “Georgians commit genocide in Ossetia.” Nothing of the kind had been, or would ever be, proven. And when the President will go on to annex Crimea and launch his new war with the West, RT will be in the vanguard, fabricating startling fictions about fascists taking over Ukraine.

But the first-time viewer would not necessarily register these stories, for such obvious pro-Kremlin messaging is only one part of RT’s output. Its popularity stems from coverage of what it calls “other,” or “unreported,” news. Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, had a talk show on RT. American academics who fight the American World Order, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, antiglobalists, and the European Far Right are given generous space. Nigel Farage, leader of the nonparliamentary anti-immigration UKIP party, is a frequent guest; Far Left supporter of Saddam Hussein George Galloway hosts a program about Western media bias. The channel has been nominated for an Emmy for its reporting on the Occupy movement in the United States and is described as “antihegemonic” by its fans; it is the most watched channel on YouTube, with one billion viewers, and the third most watched news channel in the United Kingdom, and its Washington office is expanding. But the channel is not uniformly “antihegemonic”: when it suits, RT shows establishment stalwarts like Larry King, who hosts his own show on the network. So the Kremlin’s message reaches a much wider audience than it would on its own: the President is spliced together with Assange and Larry King. This is a new type of Kremlin propaganda, less about arguing against the West with a counter-model as in the Cold War, more about slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside. In the ad for Larry King’s show, keywords associated with the journalist flash up on-screen: “reputation,” “intelligence,” “respect,” more and more of them until they merge into a fuzz, finishing with the jokey “suspenders.” Then King, sitting in a studio, turns to the camera and says: “I would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf. That’s why you can find my new show,
Larry King Now
, right here on RT. Question more.” The little ad seems to be bundling the clichés of CNN and the BBC into a few seconds, pushing them to absurdity. There is a sense of giving two fingers to the Western media tradition: anyone can speak your language; it’s meaningless!

The journalists who cotton on to what is happening leave quickly, often keen to scrub RT out of their résumés. Some even resign or complain on air, saying they no longer want to be “Putin’s pawns.” But most stay: those who are so ideologically driven by their hatred of the West they don’t notice (or don’t care) how they are being used, those so keen to be on TV they would work anywhere, or those who simply think “well, all news is fake, it’s all just a bit of a game—isn’t it?” At any time the turnover at RT is high, as those who make a fuss are sifted out, but there is no shortage of newcomers. In the evenings they hang out at Scandinavia, joined by the other new ex-pats, the communications experts and marketing consultants. An easy relativism ambles through the conversation. A Western journalist who has just taken up a Kremlin PR portfolio is asked how he squares it with his old job. “It’s a challenge,” he explains. There’s nothing unusual in his career trajectory. Why, even the head of the BBC in Moscow moved to work in Kremlin PR. “It would be an interesting job,” everyone at Scandinavia agrees. “Russia might be naughty—but the West is bad, too,” one often hears.

I would still see the old ex-pats at Scandinavia, the investment bankers and consultants. They still have tans and white teeth and talk about jogging. Many left their wives for Russian girls; many left to work for Russian companies.

Benedict spent six months at RT. He worked mainly from home, e-mailing his reports to the head of the channel. They were all ignored. The business news section on RT is slim; deep reporting on Russian companies would mean analyzing their corruption.

On his last day, as Benedict left the RT offices, the managing editor stepped into the corridor to greet him. He was, as ever, wearing a tweed suit.

“Would you like to pop into my office for a second?” he asked in his near-perfect English. Inside the office the managing editor brought out a bag of golf clubs.

“I’m a great fan of golf,” he said to Benedict. “Would you care to come share a round with me some time?”

“I don’t play golf,” said Benedict.

“Pity. But we should become friends anyway. Look me up.”

Benedict walked out, confused. The incident stayed with him. This strange Russian, dressed like an Edwardian gentleman, in the bland corridors of RT, speaking in a faintly plummy accent, offering to play golf.

“What was he thinking? Dressed that way? What did he want from me?” Benedict wondered.

If he had stayed longer at RT, Benedict would have found out the managing editor was thought by all to be the (alleged) secret service guy in the office.

When Benedict’s blacklisting was lifted, he was given another EU job: first in Montenegro and then back in Kaliningrad. The ex-clave has changed. There are Lexuses and Mercedeses everywhere, shopping malls and sushi bars. P is now a minister. He wears Italian tailored suits and a Rolex; rumor has it he asks $10,000 for his signature to greenlight local deals. Kaliningrad is sealed off from the EU states around it, but local bureaucrats have made that into an advantage: there is great business to be made from bribes at border crossings. From their point of view it’s more profitable for Kaliningrad to be sealed off. The border-bribes business is carefully organized on principles of effective management and cash flow, with every layer of bureaucrat taking an agreed upon cut, all the way up to the customs headquarters in Moscow. Russia has taken on the business lessons that development consultants like Benedict had come to teach, but applies them like gross carbuncles to state corruption.

Benedict has stayed on in Kaliningrad after his last project. It is Marina’s home, and there is little to connect him any more to Ireland. He is in his sixties now. He has spent well over a decade in Russia. He teaches a little English on the side.

In the evening he walks his dog through the new Kaliningrad. New-builds are coming up everywhere. The old waterfront with its sailor bars has been replaced with a replica of a seventeenth-century gingerbread German town, all merrily colored in pastels. At night the new houses are largely dark and empty. As he strolls along the waterfront, Benedict raps his knuckles on the pastel houses. They are hollow to the touch, painted Perspex and plaster imitating stone, timber, and iron.

HELLO-GOODBYE

I met Dinara in a bar near one of Moscow’s train stations. Girls would come from all over the country to be in that one bar. They would take the train into town, go straight to the bar, and hope to pick up a client. There were all types of girls: students looking for a few hundred bucks, Botox-and-silicone hookers, old and sagging divorcees, provincial teens just out for a good time. It could be hard to tell between the girls who were working and those who were just hanging out. Once you get in it is basically an old, dark shed with one long bar running the whole length. The girls sit in one interminable row along the dark bar, staring hard at every man who comes in. Above the row of girls is a row of televisions, which if you come early in the evening might be tuned to the hysterical neon pinks and yellows, the hyperactive bursts of color, the canned laughter, the swelling, swirling logo “Feel our Love!” of my entertainment channel, TNT (later in the evening it’s tuned to sports). The girls at the bar are TNT’s target audience: eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old females with basic education, approximately $2,000 a month salary, and a thirst for bright colors. When I tell the girls I work for TNT, they drop their stares and become excited groupies. They crowd around me asking for autographs from our stars. Their favorite show is a sitcom called
Happy Together
, a Russian remake of the US show
Married with Children
, in which a wife with bright red hair and bright high heels dominates her slow, weak husband. It’s the first show in Russia in which women are stronger than men, and the girls in the bar love it. They’re less crazy about the show I’m working on: a reality series called
Hello-Goodbye
, about passengers meeting and parting in the Moscow airport. It’s an emotional affair with lots of tears.

“There are so many lovers saying good-bye in your show. You should have more happy stories,” advised one of the girls.

“Are all the people in your show real?” asked another.

The question was fair. Russian reality shows are all scripted—just like the politicians in the Duma are managed by the Kremlin (“the Duma is not a place for debate,” the Speaker of the House once famously said), just like election results are all preordained—so Russian TV producers are paranoid about surrendering even a smidgen of control.
Hello-Goodbye
was an experiment in a real reality format in prime time (single documentary films don’t count; they could never fill a prime-time slot).

Dinara stood modestly in the corner and smiled at me, her large black eyes behind the bangs of her bobbed black hair: the girls who looked least like prostitutes, I noticed, were often the most successful. I bought her whisky and colas, and we were still drinking the next morning. I offered to buy pizza. She said sure—but no pepperoni, she didn’t eat pork. “I’m still a Muslim. Even though I’m a pro-sti-tute.” She let each syllable of the word pop through her mouth, as if she were saying it for the first time in a strange language: “a pro-sti-tute.”

And so it was that talk turned to matters of God.

Dinara said she believed in God but was afraid to touch the Koran since she became a prostitute. Would Allah forgive her? She liked being a prostitute—or at least she didn’t mind. But what of Allah? He hated whoring. She could feel his rebuke. It kept her awake at night.

I told her that I’m sure Allah keeps things in perspective.

She told me her real name; up until then she’d called herself Tanya. Then she told me her story.