Updating "The Russians"

Mob Rule, But Not as We Know It, Jim

In the late seventies, Hedrick Smith's The Russians was published.  It was a sensation amongst the commentariate.  For most Russians, it turned out, life in Russia was the pits.  The blurb said, "Russia is secretive, enigmatic--only the most ingenious observer can penetrate the veil of official statistics and guided tours to discover what it is really like to live there.  Hedrick Smith, for three years the New York Times correspondent in Moscow and winner of America's coveted Pulitzer Prize, had done just that."  Smith's book gave credence and substance to Reagan's subsequent characterisation of Soviet Russia as the "Evil Empire".  Smith's work, it turns out, has not dated as one might have expected.

But things have changed now.  Russia is very different from what it once was.  Yes, and no.  An update on Smith's The Russians has been written by Peter Pomerantsev--well, actually, an entertaining essay--and published in The London Review of Books.  It is well worth reading.

Pomerantsev was hired to work in a Russian TV productions company whose objective was to make a killing by transposing Western reality show formats and concepts into Russia, producing Russian versions of  shows like The Apprentice.  In his hilarious, yet Chekov-like tragic account, he describes first of all the "accounting" arrangements of the new company.
 

Our grey warehouse building had no sign, no number on the black metal door. Behind the door was a dirty, draughty, prison-like room where you were met by a bored, unsober guard who would look at you each day as if you were a stranger encroaching on his living space. To get to our office you had to walk down an unlit concrete corridor and turn sharp right up two flights of narrow stairs at the top of which you were confronted by another black, unmarked metal door. There you rang the bell and an unfriendly voice would come through the intercom: ‘Who are you?’ The question was ridiculous: the guard on the other side of the door could see you on his monitor – he saw you every day. But still he asked and still you answered, waving your passport at where you guessed the spy camera to be. Then came the beep-beep-beep of the door being opened and you were inside Potemkin Productions.

Suddenly you were back in a Western office with Ikea furniture and lots of twentysomethings in jeans and bright T-shirts running around with coffees, cameras and props. It could have been any television production office anywhere in the world. But there was a difference. Going past the reception desk, the conference room, coffee bar and casting department, you reached a closed white door. Many would turn back at this point, thinking they’d seen the whole office. But tap in a code and you entered a much larger set of rooms: here the producers and their assistants sat and argued, here the accountants glided around with spreadsheets and solemnity, and here were the loggers – rows of young girls staring at screens as their hyperactive fingers typed out interviews and dialogue from rushes. At the end of this office was another door. Tap in another code and you entered the editing suites: little cells where directors and video editors sweated and swore at one another. And beyond that was the final, most important and least conspicuous of all the inconspicuous doors, with a code that few people knew: it led to the office of Tim and Ivan, and the room where the real accounts were kept. This whole elaborate set-up was intended to foil the tax police. That’s who it was the guards’ job to keep out, or keep out long enough for the back office to be cleared and the hidden back entrance put to good use.

I asked Ivan whether all this was necessary. Couldn’t he just pay his taxes? He laughed. If he did that, he said, there would be no profit at all. No entrepreneur paid their taxes in full: it wouldn’t occur to them. Taxes, he said, were just a way for bureaucrats to buy themselves holidays in Thailand. As for the tax police, they were much happier taking bribes than going to the trouble of stealing money that had been paid in the orthodox fashion. In any case, Ivan’s profits were already squeezed by the broadcasters. Around 15 per cent of any budget went to the guy at the channel who commissioned the programme: in Russian these kick-backs are known as otkat, ‘backwash’. A British producer who refused to pay the ‘backwash’ was out of the country within a year.

Most of the reality shows Pomerantsev was hired to produce flopped.  Why, one wonders, did the Russian equivalent shows of "Big Brother" and "Next Top Model"--such commercial wonders in the West--go down the proverbial sewer? 

I had been hired by Potemkin as a development producer. My job was to meet with creative directors and commissioning editors and persuade them to take our shows. Russian channels come in two groups. First the behemoths: Channel One, Rossiya-1 and NTV, known as the Central Channels. These are the battering rams of Kremlin propaganda, huge corporations quartered in a Soviet-era building the size of five football pitches. Meetings involved walking down miles of brown corridors, to a smoke-filled boardroom where a producer would quite comfortably say: ‘We need something to keep the nation pacified. The financial crisis has the Kremlin worried. Ideas?’ The other group was made up of the entertainment channels: TNT, STS, MTV. They didn’t touch news or politics, and were left to their own devices. Here the offices were open-plan, full of gaudy, glossy Muscovites who looked as if they’d just jumped out of a fashion magazine. Most had a background in advertising and marketing, had worked for Western firms, spent time in London and New York, spoke English. This was the new, desperately Western Russia unhampered by the past, and these were the channels I was meant to focus on. The vogue everywhere was for non-scripted, reality-based television – The Apprentice, Next Top Model, Big Brother. These shows had been successfully remade across the globe: they were sure-fire formulas that would work anywhere. Russian channels followed the pack, bought the rights, and asked Potemkin to help make them. Russians loved Mercedes cars and Benetton jumpers: surely they’d love Western television shows too? We were wrong. Most of the shows flopped.

The fundamental premise for most Western reality shows is what people in the industry call ‘aspirational’: someone works hard and is rewarded with a wonderful new life. The shows celebrate the outstanding individual, the bright extrovert. For the Russian version of The Apprentice, Vladimir Potanin, a metals oligarch worth more than $10 billion, was recruited to be the boss choosing between the candidates competing for the dream job. Potanin goaded, teased and tortured the candidates as they went through increasingly difficult challenges. The show looked great, the stories and dramas all worked, but there was a problem: no one in Russia believed in the rules. The usual way to get a job in Russia is not by impressing at an interview, but by what is known as blat – ‘connections’. Russian society isn’t much interested in the hard-working, brilliant young business mind. Everyone knows where that type ends up: in jail like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or in exile like the mobile phone billionaire Yevgeny Chichvarkin.

Today’s Russia rewards the man who operates from the shadows, the grey apparatchik, the master of the politique de couloir – the man like Putin. Promotion in such a system comes from knowing how to debase yourself, how to suck up and serve your master, how to be what the Russians call a holop, a ‘toady’. Bright and extrovert and aspirational? Not if you want success. The shows that did work were based on a quite different set of principles. By far the biggest success was Posledny Geroi (‘The Last Hero’), a version of Survivor, a show based on humiliation and hardship. This chimed in Russia – a country where being bullied by the authorities is the norm.

It turns out that the fundamental problem with reality shows in Russia is that everyone in Russia knows that everything in public life is scripted.  Thus reality shows lacked, well, reality. 

What’s Russia’s problem with reality? The basic principle of reality-based programming is that the audience believes the characters are having real experiences, that the action is not predetermined. The producer’s skill lies in nudging and manipulating the heroes into behaving in an interesting way. Russian channel heads refused to countenance the idea that you could make ‘reality’ programmes which weren’t scripted beforehand. ‘Of course it’s all fake,’ audiences complained, and usually they were right. Towards the end of Putin’s second presidential term, while ‘scripted reality’ was playing out on television, the Kremlin’s propaganda team, led by the former TV executive Vladislav Surkov, was inventing a new political system for Russia called ‘managed democracy’: something that looked like democracy, with political parties and elections, but where the behaviour of the main players was scripted beforehand by the president’s men. No one in the audience believed that show either.

In Russia, the news is heavily scripted by the State.  Just as in the Soviet Union, no-one believes it.  Everyone plays out a ridiculous charade.  Here is Pomerantsev's description of the standard evening news motif.

Heavy-duty propaganda is of course most evident on the news, which generally adheres to a strict formula. Item one features the president visiting somewhere – a hospital, a school, a farm. Item two is a serious piece of national news: forest fires, economic problems. Item three is a piece of foreign news, chosen to show that Russia’s problems are nothing compared with other countries’: if the Russian piece has been about forest fires, the next item will be about forest fires in Australia or the US; if the Russian news has been about economic problems, the next item will focus on economic problems in the West. The final item is always a happy piece: a tiger cub born in a zoo, Russian victory at the Eurovision Song Contest.

But despite its best attempts at scripting and propaganda, Russia cannot help but betray its governing reality: it is a gangster state.  It eerily resembles what you would expect if the mob had taken over the government.

Another news-programme favourite has the president sitting at the head of a long table while along the sides sit the governors of every region: the western, central, north-eastern and so on. The president points to each in turn and each in turn tells him what’s going on on his patch. ‘Rogue terrorists, pensions unpaid, fuel shortages …’ The governors look petrified. The president toys with them: ‘Well, if you can’t sort out the mess in your backyard, we can always find a different governor …’ For a long time I wasn’t sure what this scene reminded me of, then I realised: it’s taken straight from the moment in The Godfather when Marlon Brando gathers the heads of the New York clans to discuss business. Tarantino repeats the device when Lucy Liu meets the Yakuza heads in Kill Bill – it’s a trope in gangster movies. I doubt this is coincidence. Putin’s PR men dress him like a crime boss (the black polo top underneath the black suit) and his soundbites come straight out of gangster movies (‘we’ll shoot the enemy while he’s on the shitter …’). I can see the logic. Who do the people respect most? Gangsters. Which movies do they like most? Gangster movies. The difference between Putin and Medvedev is that whereas Putin played (and plays) the role convincingly, the new president looks like a prefect taking part in a school production of Bugsy Malone.

One recalls that just a couple of weeks ago, in response to the Moscow airport bombings, Putin vowed "retribution" in that gravelly voice.  He is, of course, famous for vowing ten years ago that blood would flow in Chechnya and that the perpetrators of the violence that killed Russia's strongman in the region would be "shot in the outhouse".  Shades of the Corleone Family.  Life imitating art.  Or, maybe in the case of Putin's Russia, art is imitating life.

If New Zealand's pursues its free trade agreement with Russia--a world-first, you know--we could end up being the first national state to do business with the Mob.  One wonders if the New Zealand government is going to follow its own "Know Your Client" rules and avoid the embarrassment of being suckered into one of the biggest money-laundering scams in history.