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September 8 - September 9, 2022
We all know there will be no real politics. But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. So what should we play with? Shall we attack oligarchs? [He continued,] Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like . . . like a movie!
The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism.
“The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,”
But with every year I worked in Russia, and as the Kremlin became ever more paranoid, Ostankino’s strategies became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hate-mongers were put on prime time to keep the nation entranced, distracted, as ever more foreign hirelings would arrive to help the Kremlin and spread its vision to the world.
The guys are known as “Forbeses” (as in Forbes rich list); the girls as “tiolki,” cattle. It’s a buyer’s market: there are dozens, no, hundreds, of “cattle” for every “Forbes.”
“no complexes”: code for being prepared to bed the client.
Lena wants to be a pop star. In Moscow they’re known as “singing knickers”: girls with no talent but rich sponsors.
“There are three types of men,” she tells her students. “The creatives. The analysts. We’re not interested in those. The ones we want are ‘the possessors’,” and she repeats the tell-all, prison-intimating phrase, “a man behind whom you feel like behind a wall of stone.
Do I even need to mention that Oliona grew up fatherless? As did Lena, Natasha, and all the gold diggers I met. All fatherless. A generation of orphaned, high-heeled girls, looking for a daddy as much as a sugar daddy.
The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.
in twenty-first-century Russia you are allowed to say anything you want as long as you don’t follow the corruption trail.
Still other women were sure the hits on their companies had been ordered by rivals or bureaucrats who wanted to bankrupt them and then take over their companies. This was called “reiding” and was the most common form of corporate takeover in Russia, with more than a hundred recorded cases a year. Business rivals or bureaucrats—they have long become the same thing—pay the security services to have the head of a company arrested; while they are in prison their documents and registrations are seized, the company is re-registered
under different owners, and by the time the original owners are released, the company has been bought and sold and split up by new owners. These raids happened at every level, from the very top—where the Kremlin would arrest the owner of an oil company like Mikhail Kho-dorkovsky, then hand the company over to friends of the President—right down to local police chiefs taking over furniture stores. It was the right to do this that glued together the great “power vertical” that stretched from the President down to the lowliest traffic cop.
victims of “reiderstvo.”
To make something happen in Russia, you have to be both valiant protester and Machiavellian, playing one clan off against the other.
Whenever twenty-first-century Russian culture looks for a foundation it can build itself from, healthy and happy, it finds the floor gives way and buries it in soil and blood.
The country seems transfixed in adoration of abusive leaders.
Russia has to reach outside the history of its own state to find a father figure. But
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present. As the President looks for a way to validate his own authoritarianism, Stalin is praised as a great leader who won the Soviet Union the war.
(But while Stalin’s victory is celebrated publicly and loudly, invoking him also silently resurrects old fears: Stalin is back! Be very afraid!)
The architecture reflects these agonies. The city writhes as twentyfirst-century Russia searches, runs away, returns, denies, and reinvents itself.
that the genius in casting Christ as the main hero of the divine drama was that for the first time the viewer had a God he could truly identify with.
“When my parents died I could remember them through the building that we lived in. Buildings aren’t so much about recollecting time as about the victory over time.”
For all the little bits of paper and little forms you need to sign to survive here, everything comes down to these little moments of improvised trust and deals, “kak dogovoritsa,” in which everyone understands the game though nothing is ever formalized.
the city is an obstacle course of corruption, and your options are to get angry or pay up and play the game and just enjoy it. The
A Muscovite measures out his life in jams, the day’s success or failure judged by how many hours you spend in traffic.
This is the genius of the system: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother, and your family become part of the network of bribes and fears and simulations; you learn to become an actor playing out his different roles in his relationship with the state, knowing already that the state is the great colonizer you fear and want to avoid or cheat or buy off. Already you are semilegal, a transgressor. And that’s fine for the system: as long as you’re a simulator you will never do anything real, you will always look for your compromise with the state, which in turn makes you feel just
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What no one will be safe from is hazing, known in Russia as the “law of the grandfather”: dozens of conscripts are killed every year, hundreds commit suicide, and thousands are abused. (Those are just the official statistics.) This is why every mother wants to keep her son away from the army. New conscripts are known as “spirits.”
The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, an NGO run by the mothers of conscripts past and present, is the refuge “spirits” flee to when they run away from camp.
The country is ruled now by the “St. Petersburg set,” the President’s old chums who were raised and studied with him.
“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 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.”
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.
“It’s like they can define reality, like the floor disappears from under you.”
Russians have more words for “bribe” than Eskimos do for “snow.” I
“May I use this opportunity to show a sign of my respect for you?”
This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger.
Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the “transition” between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations.
All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme. And as I walk around this fog-asphyxiated
