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.