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

by Peter Pomerantsev

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.