The Land of Magical Thinking: Inside Putin’s Russia

In Russia, “corrupt” is not an adjective. Corrupt is a noun, a proper noun, the word for the name and nature of the place.

Corrupt crony capitalism is familiar everywhere. But in Russia the corruption is so pervasive that even the cronies have to pay bribes, not just to the higher-ups but to the lower-downs.

Pomerantsev visits a TV studio owned by Kremlin-connected moguls. It’s in a shabby warehouse on the wrong side of town. There’s no sign or address on the metal door. Inside is a dirty little room with a drunk guard.

Pomerantsev goes down a dark corridor and up two flights of dingy stairs to another unmarked metal door. Behind that is a modern, well-lit, busy Western-style production facility. But there’s an inconspicuous door here as well, with a secret code pad. And behind thatis a more modern, better-lit, even busier production facility with an even less conspicuous door with an even more secret code leading to the real offices of the moguls, where the real business accounts are kept.

All this is to foil the tax police. Who come anyway. One of the moguls tells Pomerantsev that “the tax police were much happier taking bribes than going to the trouble of stealing money that had been paid in the orthodox fashion.”

In Russia, small town girls go to the big city and get ruined, but that’s what they’re trying to do. Really trying. They go to school for it.

The students take notes in neat writing. They have paid a thousand dollars for each week of the course. There are dozens of such “academies” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with names such as “Geisha School” or “How To Be a Real Woman.”

If a girl with potential studies hard, “she earns the basic Moscow mistress rate: the apartment, $4,000 a month, a car, and a weeklong holiday in Turkey or Egypt twice a year.”

In return, she’s available to her “sponsor,” as he’s called, any time, any day.

Nice girls, of course, don’t do this. They go to the big city and become supermodels. Like Ruslana did. She was an ethnic Russian from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Ruslana was “discovered” at sixteen, world-famous at nineteen, and two days before her twenty-first birthday she jumped off a roof in New York. Pomerantsev gives us (although, in a way, he almost doesn’t need to) the heart-breaking particulars in between.

Pomerantsev recounts the ordeals of dodging the draft in Russia. And it must be dodged.

Where he will be sent depends on the bribe the soldier pays. Some will go to Chechnya, to Ossetia, to the death zones . . . But if you pay in time, you’ll avoid those. What no one will be safe from is hazing . . . dozens of conscripts are killed every year, hundreds commit suicide, and thousands are abused. (Those are just the official statistics.)

There’s the “most desperate and most expensive remedy: the bribe to the military command.” Or a week every year pretending to be sick or injured. “Annually the hospitals fill up with pimply youths simulating illness.” But you have to pick the right disease or disability “because the ailments that can get you off change all the time.” Alternatively, you can stay in college until you’re too old for the draft. “Russian males take on endless master’s degree programs until their late twenties.” Not a good student? There are schools for that as well as for mistresses. “Dozens of new universities that have opened . . . to service the need to avoid the draft.” You can even spend a month in a psychiatric clinic. “But you will also have a certificate of mental illness hanging over you for the rest of your career.”

Anyway, this brings us to the frightening question posed by Pomerantsev’s book, a question he only implicitly asks.

What do we do about a gigantic, depraved, immoral, lunatic country armed with nuclear warheads?

“Well there really isn’t much difference between those in Ukriane and those in Russia as I see it....the people basically have the same abused past history and have great difficulty handling “freedom” because they tend to be a dependent people and therefore adjusting, taking respossibility for their own affairs is something foreign to them.”

That's largely true. The only difference is that quite a few in Ukraine understand that this is a problem and try to change that. Russians on the other hand, enjoy it and try to keep Ukraine in this mess.

Ukraine has always been a mess but now it’s in the position of “Just wanna feel apart of ‘something’.... Unfortuantely they have no Sovereignty as they’re currently still governed by foreign citizens who take their orders from Washington.

Then you have Yats who continues to go around begging for money. It’ll be more than lucky if it gets it’s head above water because I don’t think the EU nor the US want it for more than a debtor state they can run revenue through while they rape it of it’s resources etc....basically we’re seeing big geopolitical players resolve their issues at Ukraine’s peoples expense, so unfortunately nothings changed ecept a trad off of Oligarchs....

“Unfortuantely they have no Sovereignty as they’re currently still governed by foreign citizens who take their orders from Washington.”

Let's say this bolshevik bullshyt is true. That still would be, in my opinion, a vast improvement over taking orders from Moscow. Apparently in your opinion, that is disaster. Why ? Something to do with NWO/neo-cons/Monsanto nazis/banksters ?

Ukraine politics are a disaster....they continue to rob their people and simply play musical chairs in any so called new governance they get. Doesn’t matter if Russia or the EU...both rape the country to serve their own means.

The Foreign positions filled are to make certain the revenue flows to the corporate entites and IMF ....one group of Oligarchs against the other...LOL

“they continue to rob their people and simply play musical chairs in any so called new governance they get. Doesn’t matter if Russia or the EU...”

So far for vast majority of post Soviet independence period, Ukraine has been under Russian control and the result is ruined economy and 3rd world style corruption and mismanagement. The new gov has been in power for too short (and is concentrated mainly on security issues due to obvious reasons) to tell if they are going to facilitate a significant improvement or not.

If you mean that many of individuals behind current authorities were also a part of “old elites”, so it must be the same crap... It is not really about guy x or y but about the overall environment they are operating in. Both external and internal.

For governments of small/mid sized countries that are in Kremlin's sphere of influence the message is clear: We fuck our own people, steal billions from them and we won't mind if you do the same. EUnuchs/America are far from perfect, I'm well aware of that but that's a totally different league. Like I said before, just compare post-commie countries that joined NATO/EU and those that stayed under Russian influence.

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This is the Supermodel: Ruslana, the one mentioned in the above article, who became a star at age 19 and then committed suicide in New York at 21 (never leaving a note )