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

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.
    “I want my son to learn about our history,” said one of the dads. “The gangsters hold this town together, keep it disciplined.”
    Vitaly did his casting in a rehearsal room. On the walls were pictures of Chekhov and Stanislavsky, the great Russian inventor of method acting. Vitaly had the boys walk up and down the room:
    “You need to walk like gangsters, like you mean it. Don’t look to the sides. Don’t look tense. Imagine everyone’s looking at you. Slowly. Walk slowly. This is your territory.”
    He picked out a few of the boys. They were thrilled. He lined them up against the wall, scanning the line, choosing which one would play him.
    “Too short. Too fat. Too loud. You. You’ll do. But you’ll have to cut off that forelock.”
    The kid he chose was the quiet one (and the best looking). His name was Mitya. He studied history at the local college. He seemed entirely emotionless at the idea of acting out Vitaly—or maybe he was just in the role already.
    Vitaly drove him to the local park for a lesson on how to play him.
    “See those kids over there? The ones drinking beer over by those benches? I want you to go over and tell them to leave. And get them to pick up their litter, too. Act like you own the place. Talk quietly. Firmly. Instruct. Let them feel you’ve got numbers behind you. Imagine that you’re me.”
    The kid did well. His menace came in the pauses between the words. He told the drinking boys to pack up. Just as they were leaving, he threw in the little humiliation: “Don’t forget your rubbish.” That touch was pure Vitaly: always looking to jab you with a put-down. (“That camera you use is so small Peter, don’t you have a real camera?” he liked to ask me, or “you don’t know how to interview; am I going to have to teach you?”)
    Mitya seemed a good boy, who would finish university and probably go on to a career in a state corporation. But his behavior, his style, was already pure gangster.
    “Do you think Mitya could be as good a gangster as you?” we asked.
    “He has potential,” said Vitaly, “but he would need to toughen up a bit. By his age I was already serving my first term in prison for racketeering.”
    We went to see Vitaly’s parents. I had hoped they would help explain the way he is, but I was disappointed. Vitaly’s father was a hard-working factory man, used to soldering parts on tanks. He was small and shy and talked about fishing. Vitaly’s mother, slightly tipsy but polite, kept a neat home. They seemed frightened of Vitaly themselves, and he was so disdainful of them he wouldn’t even enter the apartment.
    “He had been a tear-away at school,” said the dad. “We so hoped prison would help calm him down. That he would come out and get a normal job at the armaments factory. But when he came out of prison you could tell he was a big boss already.”
    Prison was Vitaly’s alma mater. This part of Siberia was full of them. Everywhere you looked were barbed wire, watchtowers, and concrete walls. We shot an interview with Vitaly as he gazed toward where he had first served time.
    “Everything I learned was there,” he said. It was the first time I’d seen him even vaguely sentimental. “You have to prove you’re a real man and not a chicken straight away. You don’t cry, you don’t blabber, you don’t let anyone tell you what to do. Only say what you mean, speak slowly, and if you promise something, keep it.”
    Vitaly had served five years that first time. He had first gone inside in 1988. When he came out in 1993 the whole universe he had grown up in was transformed. The Soviet Union had disappeared. Everyone who had previously been someone was suddenly a