Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Read Online Free PDF Page A

him to take us down to his hometown and let us film him shooting a scene for his next project. We’d have an exclusive with the gangster director at work, and he’d have a promo to help raise money.
    “Usually you’d be one of my victims,” he said matter-of-factly. “But in this case we’ll be partners.”
    The flight to Ussuriysk, Vitaly’s hometown, took all day. Vitaly just lay back, smiled, and slept the whole journey. I chatted to another former gangster friend of his, Sergey, who wrote the music for The Spets . A former power-lifting champion, Sergey took up two seats on the flight. He had quit being a gangster when he found God: a bullet that should have killed him miraculously passed through his body. Afterward he had seen the light (with the help of an American evangelical sect that helped nurse him back to health after the shooting). He was a laughing, jolly, blonde bear of a man, with questioning, kind, light blue eyes. Previously he had dealt heroin and smuggled girls from Ukraine to Europe.
    “How does the new, religious you make sense of the past?” I asked.
    “When I was baptized all my sins were washed away,” answered Sergey.
    “But do you feel guilt for what you used to do?”
    “I was a demon, but I was still fulfilling God’s will. All my victims must have deserved it. God only punishes bad people.”
    On the flight Sergey was trying to write a film script. It was to be a modern spin on the old Russian fairy tale of the “three bogatyri,” huge knights of unnatural strength who traveled old Russia taming dragons and invaders. In Sergey’s version the “bogatyri” were former gangsters.
    When we finally landed in Vladivostok (the nearest airport to Ussuriysk) I expected to see the orient; we were, after all, 1,000 km east of Beijing, where Russia meets the Pacific. Apart from Vitaly this region is famous for its tigers. But instead it looked like more of the same Russia, the same green-brown blur of hills and thin, unhappy trees. We might as well have been in suburban Moscow. Vitaly’s crew were at the hanger of an airport to meet us: young, polite men with darting eyes, shell suits, gold medallions, tidy haircuts, and neat nails. One brought Vitaly a new Jeep, a vassal fetching his lord a new, stolen steed. No plates. We drove in a spread-eagled cortege across both lanes of the highway, so fast it made me first scared and then ecstatic. Vitaly ignored the first traffic cop who waved at him, then stopped for the second one. When the cop saw who it was, he waved him on.
    “They know better than to mess with me,” said Vitaly.
    Vitaly didn’t need to stop. It was all just demonstration, just to let everyone know: he’s back.
    We sped into Ussuriysk itself, past the oversized, windy central square, designed with military parades and not human beings in mind. The cinema, town hall, and swimming pool were all in the same stiff Soviet classicism. Wide avenues led to nowhere, stopping abruptly at the endless taiga. You find the same towns throughout the old Soviet Empire, all designed in some Moscow Ministry for Urbanism, awkward and ill at ease.
    The town was clean. Quiet.
    “Us gangsters keep this town disciplined,” said Vitaly. “There used to be druggies, prostitutes. Teens with long hair. They wouldn’t dare show their faces now. We showed them who’s boss. I don’t even let anyone in my crew smoke cigarettes. If anyone of my boys were to get drunk in public, I’d give them such a beating.”
    Vitaly was a celebrity here. When we walked down the streets teenage girls with large shoulders and short skirts stopped to have their pictures taken with him. When we paused by a school the kids saw him through the window and came running out, mobbing Vitaly and thrusting forward their math books and homework pads for him to sign, the teachers smiling benignly.
    His new film was to be about his teenage years, in the late 1980s, when the first gangsters emerged together with the first