Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Page B

modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.
    Elsewhere Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only “simulacrum” and “simulacra” . . . and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.
    At the height of his power Surkov’s ambition grew beyond mere parties and policies or even novels. He began to dream of creating a new city, a utopia. Its name was to be Skolkovo, a Russian Silicon Valley, a gated community of post-Soviet perfection. Hundreds of millions were poured into the project. I found myself invited on a media tour to Surkov’s city of the sun. We were taken on a coach and driven for hours outside of Moscow. At the visitor’s center at Skolkovo a girl with clover-blue eyes showed us 3-D video projections of the future city: offices built into the landscape in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, artificial lakes and schools, eternal sunshine and adventure sports, and entrepreneurs in sneakers. We got into the bus and drove across the real landscape: miles of snowy wastes and bare trees. Since Skolkovo’s launch billions have been spent, but virtually nothing has been built (there are whispers and rumors the project was at least partly created to give Surkov’s circle a mechanism through which to siphon off state money).
    We were being taken to the hyper-cube, the only building of the future city already constructed. “We will soon arrive at the hyper-cube,” our guide said. “The hyper-cube is just coming into view.” It turned out to be a very modernist little structure, looking lost in an empty field. It had exposed concrete walls and large video screens. A PR man with a deep tan and the nasty smile common to upper-end foreign-service KGB men told us that all the corruption scandals related to Skolkovo had been solved. Behind him, on the video screens, the words “innovation” and “modernization” kept popping up. I asked whether the “modernization” project had failed: every week there were more arrests of businessmen and -women, and more than 50 percent of people were now employed by state companies. Polls showed that young people no longer wanted to be entrepreneurs but bureaucrats. The PR man shrugged and answered that the President was fully behind Skolkovo.
    On the tour of Skolkovo we were accompanied by a young man named Sergey Kalenik, a member of the Kremlin youth group, Nashi, created by Surkov. Sergey wore a hoodie, goatee, and skinny jeans and looked like any hipster youth you find in Brooklyn or Hackney—then he opened his mouth and began to sing paeans to the President and how the West is out to get Russia. Sergey was from a humble background in Minsk, Belarus. He first made his name by drawing a really rather good manga cartoon that showed the President as superhero doing battle against zombie protesters and evil monster anticorruption bloggers: a nice