Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

by Peter Pomerantsev

Flying in at night over Moscow you can see how the shape of the city is a series of concentric ring-roads with the small ring of the Kremlin at the center. At the end of the twentieth century the light from the rings glowed a dim, dirty yellow. Moscow was a sad satellite at the edge of Europe, emitting the dying embers of the Soviet Empire. Then, in the twenty-first century, something happened: money. Never had so much money flowed into so small a place in so short a time. The orbital system shifted. Up above the city the concentric rings began to shine with the lights of new skyscrapers, neon, and speeding Maybachs on the roads, swirling faster and faster in high-pitched, hypnotic fairground brilliance. The Russians were the new jet set: the richest, the most energetic, the most dangerous. They had the most oil, the most beautiful women, the best parties. From being ready to sell anything, they became ready to buy anything: football clubs in London and basketball clubs in New York; art collections, English newspapers, and European energy companies. No one could understand them. They were both lewd and refined, cunning and naive. Only in Moscow did they make sense, a city living in fast-forward, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, where boys become billionaires in the blink of an eye.

What I really wanted to do was film. To press “record” and just point and shoot. I took my camera, the battered metal Sony Z1 small enough to always drop in my bag, everywhere. A lot of the time I just filmed so as not to let this world escape; I shot blindly, knowing I would never have a cast like this again.

But in Russia, working in television is about more than being a camera, an observer. In a country covering nine time zones, one-ninth of the world’s land mass, stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic, from the Arctic to the Central Asian deserts, from near-medieval villages where people still draw water from wooden wells by hand, through single-factory towns and back to the blue glass and steel skyscrapers of the new Moscow—TV is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country. It’s the central mechanism of a new type of authoritarianism, one far subtler than twentieth-century strains. And as a TV producer I would be directed right into the center of its workings.

The first thing the President had done when he came to power in 2000 was to seize control of television. It was television through which the Kremlin decided which politicians it would “allow” as its puppet-opposition, what the country’s history and fears and consciousness should be. And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism. And at the center of the great show is the President himself, created from a no one, a gray fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman. “The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,” TV producers and political technologists liked to say. Sitting in that smoky room, I had the sense that reality was somehow malleable, that I was with Prosperos who could project any existence they wanted onto post-Soviet Russia. 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 ...

“Business theory teaches us one important lesson,” says the instructress. “Always thoroughly research the desires of the consumer. Apply this principle when you search for a rich man. On a first date there’s one key rule: never talk about yourself. Listen to him. Find him fascinating. Find out his desires. Study his hobbies; then change yourself accordingly.” Gold Digger Academy. A pool of serious blonde girls taking careful notes. Finding a sugar daddy is a craft, a profession.

“Today we will learn the algorithm for receiving presents,” the instructor tells her students. “When you desire a present from a man, place yourself at his left, irrational, emotional side. His right is his rational side: you stand to his right if you’re discussing business projects. But if you desire a present, position yourself by his left. If he is sitting in a chair crouch down, so he feels taller, like you’re a child. Squeeze your vaginal muscles. Yes, your vaginal muscles. This will make your pupils dilate, making you more attractive. When he says something, nod; this nodding will induce him to agree with you. And finally, when you ask for your car, your dress, whatever it is you want, stroke his hand. Gently. Now repeat: Look! Nod! Stroke!”

their sweet, simple glances seem to say how amusing this whole masquerade is, that yesterday we were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems and thinking Levis and powdered milk were the height of luxury, and now we’re surrounded by luxury cars and jets and sticky Prosecco. And though many westerners tell me they think Russians are obsessed with money, I think they’re wrong: the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal, not something to hoard and save but to twirl and dance in like feathers in a pillow fight and cut like papier-mâché into different, quickly changing masks. At 5:00 a.m. the music goes faster and faster, and in the throbbing, snowing night the cattle become Forbeses and the Forbeses cattle, moving so fast now they can see the traces of themselves caught in the strobe across the dance floor. The guys and girls look at themselves and think: “Did that really happen to me? Is that me there? With all the Maybachs and rapes and gangsters and mass graves and penthouses and sparkly dresses?”

“What made you want to make movies?” “I’d spent eight years in jail. You watch a lot of TV in jail. There were all these cops and robbers shows. They were showing my life, my world. But it was all fake. The fights were fake. The guns were fake. The crimes were fake. What can an actor know about being a gangster? Nothing. Only I could tell my story.” Vitaly’s TV miniseries showed his life of crime in scrupulous detail. In his violent pomp he had been a modern Dick Turpin, a real highwayman. He would hide in the bushes by the side of the motorway, waiting for a coach-load of brand new Mitsubishis or Toyotas just brought in from Japan. Then he would pull a kerchief over his face, draw out his sawn-off shotgun, and walk out into the middle of the highway. He would stand legs apart, gun pointed out from his hips, alone in the middle of the road, facing down the oncoming truck. They always stopped, and the cars were all his. If the driver struggled, Vitaly would beat him. The TV series reveled in these moments of violence. The dialogue was sometimes stilted (Vitaly wouldn’t let his crew swear on screen), but when it came to kicking, stomping on, and humiliating, the gangster actors were in their element, their faces lighting up with joy and anger.

His new film was to be about his teenage years, in the late 1980s, when the first gangsters emerged together with the first businessmen. The next day Vitaly was casting teens to play his younger self. A crowd gathered in front of the Palace of Culture and Leisure, the old Soviet theater. Fathers had taken their sons out of school and brought them to try out for the parts of the Young Vitaly and his first gang.

Stas took us on a tour of Ussuriysk. The town was famous for its car market, one of the biggest in the whole of Russia. We were near the sea with Japan, and all the new Mitsubishis and Toyotas were traded here. The market was on a hill at the entrance to the town. As we approached, it gleamed silver like a magic mountain. Only when we got closer did we realize it was the sun glinting off the new Jeeps and other four-by-fours. Everyone here drove the latest models. They might have their toilets in wooden outhouses, and their apartments might be yellowing, but the big, black cars were always shining with a TV commercial sparkle. Stas took us to a meet at which locals showed off how they’d upgraded their automobiles.

The day of his big shoot Vitaly took over a whole market. The scene had the young Vitaly and his gang being busted as they extorted money from the market traders. The traders played themselves, and cops had been hired to play cops. “Isn’t there a problem that you’re working for a gangster today?” we asked the cops. They laughed. “Who do you think we work for anyway?” (The new mayor of Vladivostok was a man nicknamed Winnie-the-Pooh, a mob boss who had previously served time for threatening to kill a businessman.)

There’s a little scene that gets played out on the Ostankino channels every week. The president sits at the head of a long table. Along each side sit the governors of every region: the western, central, northeastern, and so on. The president points to each one, who tells him what’s going on in his patch. “Rogue terrorists, pensions unpaid, fuel shortages. . . . ” The governors looked petrified. The president toys with them, pure Vitaly. “Well, if you can’t sort out the mess in your backyard, we can always find a different governor. . . . ” For a long time I couldn’t remember what the scene reminded me of. Then I realized: it’s straight out of The Godfather, when Marlon Brando gathers the mafia bosses from the five boroughs. Quentin Tarantino used a similar scene when Lucy Liu meets with the heads of the Tokyo Yakuza clans in Kill Bill—it’s a mafia movie trope. And it fits the image the Kremlin has for the President: he is dressed like a mob boss (the black polo top underneath the black suit), and his sound bites come straight out of gangster flicks (“we’ll shoot the enemy while he’s on the shitter . . . ”). I can see the spin doctors’ logic: Whom do the people respect the most? Gangsters. So let’s make our leader look like a gangster; let’s make him act like Vitaly.

Most of the early books were based on Vitaly’s life of crime. But in the last book he had changed genres. It was a satire of Russian politics, about a bully, gangster state that uses its giant reserves of fart gases to manipulate the countries around it into submission (at the time Russia was threatening Ukraine with shutting off its gas supply). “I often think now I should have gone into politics,” said Vitaly. “I just thought it boring, I didn’t realize they used the same methods as us. It’s too late now, though. I’ve dedicated myself to art. If I can’t film, I’ll write. And you know what the future is, Peter? Comedy. Set up a meeting for me at TNT; they might want to televise my fart-book.”

Kaliningrad used to be known as Koenigsberg, the capital of Eastern Prussia, the home of Kant. It lies on the Baltic Sea, between Lithuania and Poland, opposite Sweden. At the end of World War II it was captured by the Soviets, renamed, repopulated with imported Soviets from across the empire, and made into a high-security, closed-off military port. It was the most western point of the USSR. After the Cold War the Russians held onto it, though Kaliningrad has no border with Russia proper. It is now an exclave of Russia inside the European Union, a geopolitical freak. The EU recognized “the special position of Kaliningrad” but had “concerns regarding soft security issues”; that is to say, it was leaking heroin, weapons, AIDS, and a mutant strain of tuberculosis into the EU. Kaliningrad either had to change or risk having a wall built around it. There were no direct flights from Europe. Benedict had to fly all the way to Moscow, then double back and fly west to Kaliningrad. He was in his late forties and divorced, and he wanted a new start.

Russia does have elections, but the “opposition,” with its almost comical leaders, is designed and funded in such a way as to actually strengthen the Kremlin: when the beetroot-faced communists and the spitting nationalists row on TV political debating shows, the viewer is left with the feeling that, compared to this lot, the President is the only sane candidate. And Russia does have nongovernmental organizations, representing everyone from bikers to beekeepers, but they are often created by the Kremlin, which uses them to create a “civil society” that is ever loyal to it. And though Russia does officially have a free market, with mega-corporations floating their record-breaking IPOs on the global stock exchanges, most of the owners are friends of the President. Or else they are oligarchs who officially pledge that everything that belongs to them is also the President’s when he needs it: “All that I have belongs to the state,” says Oleg Deripaska, one of the country’s richest men. This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.

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.

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.

Her parents were secular Soviets, but the younger ones were all enthralled by the Wahhabi preachers who had come to the Caucasus from Saudi Arabia. Dinara couldn’t stand the Wahhabis. But her younger sister was hooked. She had started to wear a head scarf and talked incessantly about jihad, about freeing the Caucasus from Moscow’s yoke, about a caliphate stretching from Afghanistan to Turkey. Dinara was worried they would make her into a suicide bomber, a “Black Widow.” All her sister’s friends wanted to become Black Widows, to come to Moscow and blow themselves up.

At 5:00 a.m. on the fourth night of the siege, special forces slipped a fizzing, mystery anesthetic blended with an aerosol spray gas into the ventilation system of the theater. A gray mist rose through the auditorium. The Black Widows were knocked out instantly, slouching over and sliding onto the floor. The hostages and hostage-takers all snored. Barely a shot was fired as special forces, safe from the fumes in gas masks, entered. All the Chechens were quickly killed. The soldiers celebrated the perfect operation. The darkness around me was lit up with the spotlights of news crews reporting a miracle of military brilliance. The medics moved in to resuscitate the audience. They hadn’t been warned about the gas. There weren’t enough stretchers or medics. No one knew what the gas was, so they couldn’t give the right antidotes. The sleeping hostages, fighting for breath, were carried out, placed face up on the steps of the theater, choking on their tongues, on their own vomit. I, and a thousand TV cameras, saw the still-sleeping hostages dragged through cold puddles to city buses standing nearby, thrown inside any which way and on top of each other. The buses pulled past me, the hostages slumped and sagging across the seats and on the wooden floor, like wasted bums on the last night bus. Some 129 hostages died: in the seats of the auditorium, on the steps of the theater, in buses.

Domodedovo is the newest of Moscow’s three airports. It’s all glass and light, swept marble floors, cappuccino bars, and bikini boutiques.

Our presenter, dressed in a bright orange shirt, would walk around the airport and talk to people parting or meeting: slow-kissing lovers parting as he leaves to work in San Francisco; funny lads off for a dirty weekend in Thailand; a secretary waiting for her boss, whom she is secretly in love with, to return from a business trip to London. A microcosm of the new, middle-class Russia, the first Russian generation that not only flies but even flies abroad as a matter of course, a generation’s aspirations under one high-domed roof, in this bright new airport in a bright new nation.

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.

“Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status,” Sergey told me with a smile that seemed to mimic Surkov’s (who in turn mimics the KGB men). “How do you define your political views?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was a fool to ask, then smiled: “I’m a liberal . . . it can mean anything!”

“Yakovleva is a highly dangerous criminal.

Yana

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.

Yana Yakovleva.

To make something happen in Russia, you have to be both valiant protester and Machiavellian, playing one clan off against the other.

I can hear the groan and feel the shudders of the excavator before I even turn onto Gnezdnikovsky Alley, the air already filling up with clouds of red-brick dust. A nineteenth-century, two-story palace folds so easily. The clumsy arm of the excavator pulls down a wall awkwardly, like a toddler playing, revealing for a moment the innards of an old apartment—the 1970s wallpaper, photographs, a radio—and then the demolition ball swings, and it’s all gone for good. Gnezdnikovsky is just off Pushkin Square, what tourist guides describe as “Moscow’s historic center.” It should be untouchable. But the tremors of drill and demolition ball only become more frenzied with every meter closer you get to the Kremlin. Property prices are measured by distance from Red Square: the aim is to build your office or apartment as close to the center of power as possible, the market organized by a still feudal social structure defined by needing to be within touching distance of the tsar, the general secretary of the Communist Party, the President of the Russian Federation. The country’s institutions—oil companies, banks, ministries, and courts—all want to crowd around the Kremlin like courtiers. This means the city is almost destined to destroy itself; it can’t grow outward, so every generation stomps on the heads of previous ones. Over a thousand buildings have been knocked down in the center so far this century, with hundreds of officially “protected” historic monuments lost. But the new build...

Here we find places with names like Krivokolennaya, the street of the crooked knee, and Po-ta-poff-sky, a word that falls like snowflakes in the mouth. But my favorite of all is Pyatnitskaya: in English, the Street-of-All-Fridays. There is no pomposity on the Street-of-All-Fridays. It is full of little two-story, nineteenth-century mini-mansions, leaning higgledy-piggledy on each other like happy drunk friends singing on their way home to a warm bed. In every courtyard there is a bar, some little place with cheap vodka and smoky rooms. There are no office blocks, no narcissistic skyscrapers, no domineering malls. But there is an old metro station, a large, low, yellow, pancake-shaped building in which students share beers and boys chase girls.

These little vigilante gangs have become common in Moscow, protecting not from burglars but from developers, who send arsonists to set buildings ablaze, then use the fire as an excuse to evict homeowners by claiming the houses are now fire hazards. The motivation is great: property prices rose by over 400 percent in the first decade after 2000. So these fires have become habitual in Moscow. Muscovites have taken to patrolling their own buildings at night: gangs of doctors, teachers, grannies, and housewives eyeing every passerby as if he were an arsonist. It’s pointless for them to call the police; the largest groups of developers are friends and relatives of the mayor and the government. The mayor’s wife is the biggest of the lot. The near mythical Russian middle class, suddenly finding they have no real rights at all over their property, can be thrown out and relocated like serfs under a feudal whim.

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.

I take the Sapsan, the new train as smart as a TGV with wider seats and so expensive no one but the new middle class can afford it, up to the northern capital. The Sapsan takes four hours to reach Petersburg, the normal train takes eight. Some laugh that the Sapsan was built especially by the President so his “team” could travel between the two cities in comfort. The country is ruled now by the “St. Petersburg set,” the President’s old chums who were raised and studied with him. As I leave the train station I drive into town through a city built like a theater set, the original Russian facade of European civilization as imagined by Peter the Great, with little of its content.

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.

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.

One evening Sergey delivers an invitation for another Grigory party. Guests are told to prepare for the art project of the year. The impossibly fashionable boys are all dressed in black this time. Grigory enters, and his court photographer (he has a stutter and is the only one here drinking as heavily as me) puts down his cocktail and scampers over. A burst of photographs: this is the Moscow way—all the rich have their own photographers. They take them on holidays, to parties, to family gatherings; you’ve only made it when your life becomes a magazine.

“Our great President has brought stability.” But all I see happening is that the brilliant boys like Grigory are being eaten. Television is also increasingly affected. Originally TNT’s formula for success was to remake hit Western reality shows like The Apprentice or Dragon’s Den. They were successful across the world—why not here? But when TNT made Russian versions, they flopped. The premise for most Western shows is what we in the industry call “aspirational”: someone works hard and is rewarded with a wonderful new life. The shows celebrate the outstanding individual, the bright extrovert. But in Russia that type ends up in jail or exile. Russia rewards the man who operates from the shadows, the gray apparatchik, the master of the politique de couloir. The shows that worked here were based on a different set of principles. By far the biggest success was Posledny Geroi (“The Last Hero”), a version of Survivor, a show based on humiliation and hardship.

The Soviet Union occupied 20 percent of the world’s land mass; its former states produce 15 percent of the world’s oil. But over 50 percent of the models on the catwalks of Paris and Milan are from the former USSR.

As you walk home you feel warm inside. Everything around you, the whole evening, seems to be dissolved in a slightly fuzzy light. People look beautiful. The trainer has given you homework: you’ve been told to walk through town and hug at least ten strangers. And you do it. You can do anything. You feel free. They look at you funny, but no one reacts badly. You’ve made them smile. You can break free of all barriers and limits, you can change. A bright, effective life. You won’t be a victim. You’ll take responsibility.

“The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried,” Anna, a friend who used to work with TNT and now makes entertainment shows at Ostankino, tells me when we meet for a drink in a bar called Courvoisier. “Spiritual stuff is always good to keep people distracted. And the ratings will be good—our people love some mysticism when things are bad. Remember the 1990s.”

The story is to be about a World War II admiral who defied Stalin’s orders and started the attack on the Germans, while the Kremlin was still in denial about Hitler’s intentions and hoped for peace. The admiral was later purged and largely forgotten. It’s a good story. It’s a really good story. It’s the dream project. I tell her I need time to decide. She says no rush.

The camera, the old beaten metal-cased Z-1, the picture resolution of which is past its sell-by date since the arrival of hi-def, is on my bed. There are tapes all around it with castings and tasters from my search for TNT’s positive stories. Many of the tapes are about Alexander: a blind football player, the star of Russia’s first blind football team. I had hoped his story would be inspirational. He’s someone who has overcome things: blind since childhood and now a potential para-Olympian. On the tapes he looks like a Viking god with his long, red hair. He talks loudly and goes everywhere with his girlfriend, a quiet girl who teaches music to small children. When they walk she guides him gently beneath the elbow, around pillars and through doors. She’s part blind herself, with glasses as thick as the bottoms of bottles, but she can see more than Alexander. Blind boys usually go out with girls who are partially sighted. The boys, especially the football players, act tough, but it’s the girls who are in charge. They can see. The blind boys are always worried their girls are looking at someone else. Or even kissing and touching someone else in the same room. Alexander supports Dynamo Moscow. Every weekend he takes his place in the stands among the hard-core supporters behind the goal. He doesn’t listen to radio commentary, as most blind supporters do: he tells me he can feel what’s going on during the game with an inner football vision.

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. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshiping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease—a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the “orthodox” oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism—and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.

I have been working on a TV show. My nine years in Russia are a bit of a black hole in my résumé, and I’m back at the bottom of the pile again: officially a “producer” (the word has lost all meaning), but actually an assistant with no editorial control, on a glitzy, trashy, documentary entertainment series for an American-English cable channel. Meet the Russians is about the new, post-Soviet rich in London, and the ad promises to take the viewer “into a world of wealth he has never before witnessed.” There’s the pop star married to the steel tycoon who has spent $2 million on her career, including albums, winning Mrs. World (the husband bought the rights to the competition the year before she won) and starring in a Hollywood B movie with Stephen Dorff (the husband financed the movie). She keeps a falcon in their home. The home is decorated to copy a seven-star Dubai hotel she once stayed in. She takes baths in champagne to keep her skin smooth.

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.

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 ...

“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.

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).

Peter Pomerantsev is an award-winning contributor to the London Review of Books. His writing has been published in the Financial Times, NewYorker.com, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Daily Beast, Newsweek, and Atlantic Monthly. He has also worked as a consultant for the EU and for think tanks on projects covering the former Soviet Union. He lives in London.