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

by Peter Pomerantsev

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...