EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATI
The Byzantine logic behind
modern Russian cynicism
By Michael Idov
Russia is a society of
conspiracy theorists. In fact,
the notion that politics is mere
theater and policy is determined
via backroom collusion is so
central to the Russian worldview
that “theorist” is perhaps too
weak a word. Russia is a society
of conspiracy axiomists.
The terms “black PR” and
“political technologies” dot the
mainstream press. An art gallery
owner (RUSSIA!
contributor Marat Guelman)
routinely gets credit for
masterminding coups while top
officials are blithely dismissed
as puppets.
Here is the basic formula,
applicable to any bit of news:
if an event makes Ivanov look
bad, it must be engineered by
Petrov. That’s entry-level
cynicism, though, unworthy of
discussion. A real Russian knows
that someone wants you to
think the Ivanov-implicating
event was engineered by Petrov,
in which case it’s a totally
brilliant move by Ivanov.
Unless, of course, it’s Sidorov
trying to make it look like
Ivanov and Petrov are locked in
a petty smear campaign while he
marches off with credibility
intact; which means Ivanov and
Petrov are actually in a sub
rosa pact to take down
Sidorov. If we transplant this
rationale to the U.S. soil, for
instance, we’d find that, in
2000, the insidious push polls
suggesting John McCain had sired
a black baby were the handiwork
of, say, a Condi Rice-Hillary
Clinton alliance to weaken Karl
Rove, with Jon Stewart paid off
to make jokes about it.
One facile, but probably
correct, explanation for this
phenomenon is that the Russians
have no reason to trust anyone
tasked with speaking to them.
Over the course of the
mega-corrupt 1990s, the print
media pissed away all the
credibility they had briefly
amassed in the perestroika
years. Reporters and publishers
alike were so eager to turn a
buck that it’s only natural for
the first question one asks
looking at a Russian paper to be
“who ordered this?” (To this
day, one finds corporate press
releases published as news in
major outlets, with nary a word
changed.) With TV, things are
simpler: after the state chomped
down on all independent
networks, you at least know
who’s doing the ordering.
Or do you? Here is
bestselling novelist Boris
Akunin: “The more TV channels
cheerlead for the President, the
more harm they do to his
so-called rating. I am beginning
to suspect that they’re managed
by secret agents of the Union of
the Right Forces.” He might be
kidding, but then again he might
not. To a savvy Russian, graft
is everywhere. Whatever looks
genuine is brilliant
graft.
Funny thing is, all identifiable
instances of the dread “black
PR” I’d seen myself were utterly
inept. For instance, here’s some
silly entity trying to smear the
aforementioned Union of Right
Forces in the run-up to the
December election:
Let Our Agitator In!
As part of an
international initiative to
combat dangerous diseases, the
URF employs AIDS patients and
HIV-positive individuals. Let us
officially assure you that, with
the appropriate safety measures,
AIDS sufferers pose no threat to
you or your loved ones. Simply
be aware Let the URF agitator
into your home!
Do I need to tell you that the
Union of the Right Forces is
believed to have deviously
designed this nonsense
themselves, in order to make the
opposition look bad? Not that
this tactical brilliance helped
them at the polls (as if
anything could). But that fact
conveniently falls by the
wayside.
Akunin’s own polished genre
fiction, needless to say, freely
dabbles in conspiracy scenarios.
He’s in good company, too:
secret cabals figure in a
staggering percentage of Russian
highbrow prose. Pavel Krusanov’s
Angel’s Bite,
Garros-Evdokimov’s Grey Goo
and Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice
come to mind. Then there’s the
bestselling Viktor Pelevin,
whose 1999 satire of the
advertising world, Generation
P (published in the U.S. as
Homo Zapiens), was hugely
successful in reflecting and
perhaps even shaping the way
young Russians think about
power—by explaining that the
world leaders are CGI cartoons:
“Reagan was animated all his
second term. As for Bush—do you
remember that time he stood
beside a helicopter and the hair
he’d combed across his bald
patch kept lifting up and waving
in the air? A real masterpiece.”
“But is it true that their
copywriters work on our
politics?”
“That’s a load of lies. They
can’t even come up with anything
any good for themselves… All
their political creatives are
pure shit. They have two
candidates for president and
only one team of scriptwriters.”
Each of Pelevin’s recent novels
starts as a kind of
observational humor piece about
the mores of the day, then opens
up into a druggy vision of a
secret force running the world.
In Generation P, it’s
reality-manufacturing, Ishtar-worshipping
copywriters; in 2003’s DPP/NN,
it’s numerology and a gay mafia.
(Lately, Pelevin has gotten
lazy: in The Sacred Book of
the Werewolf it’s the
werewolves, and in Empire V
it’s vampires.)
The nagging vision of the man
behind the curtain is by no
means limited to politics: it
pops up at the pettiest of
provocations. In a recent
episode, several popular
bloggers got caught using their
LiveJournals (most of Russian
blogging is done through LJ) to
disseminate a paid plug for a
store called Platypus—all on the
same day. The commenters’ first
reaction: the store was dumb not
to stagger the promos but to
unleash them all at once, thus
exposing the ploy. The almost
instantaneous second reaction:
the Platypus people are
geniuses! Getting caught
maximized their exposure!
Surely, you might say, this kind
of black-is-white lunacy thrives
in the West as well—any
political comment thread on any
open forum teems with 9/11
“truthers” and other tiresome
types. Correct. The difference
is that in Russia, this paranoia
penetrates the kitchens and
minds of completely sane people.
And it’s having a crippling
effect. By taking the “who
benefits” question and looping
it around until it loses all
meaning, this logic produces a
resigned stasis. Everything is a
power play; everybody’s a plant;
nothing is knowable or
changeable, by vote or by force,
and, as a corollary, nothing
is my fault. In the end, the
Russian paranoia is a kind of
self-therapy, too. It’s
paradoxically more consoling to
imagine a shadowy cabal than to
accept the fact that a slight,
balding ex-KGB apparatchik holds
all the power levers in
increasingly plain sight.
