Chance is a scary thing to rely upon when you’re engaged on an epic metaphysical-existential-cosmic quest, but that’s what I had been guided by up to this point, and so far surrendering to fate had proven a successful strategy. An article in the back of a magazine had sparked off a memory of a strange story I had heard years earlier. Pursuing that had led to a bizarre encounter in a dirty kitchen. The consequences of that meeting had ultimately caused me to remember a throwaway comment once made to me by an editor as he rejected an article I had written – and so on, and so on. Yet out of these chance encounters a theme had emerged, seemingly of its own accord, or perhaps, and more likely, I had been pursuing it for a long time without fully realising what I was doing myself. Certainly it was a theme that fascinated me: the struggles of radical dreamers to make their improbable visions solid in a landscape that seemed to invite reinvention, and yet which was at best indifferent if not outright hostile to their goals.
After Vissarion, however, I was at a loss. I couldn’t see any way to bring my investigations forward. The journey from the Digger, via Edward to Vissarion was a smooth arc, from near-total solipsism, to reaching out, to bringing into physical being a new reality that was spreading and colonising the world, rather like Borges’ story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which over the centuries a secret society elaborates on an imaginary planet (Tlön) until it eventually comes to supplant the real one. Where else was there to go now but sideways? The trajectory, surely, was complete.
And yet my journey didn’t feel finished. Vissarion’s triumph was not, could not be the end: I knew it. There was another story to tell, there was some element of this phenomenon I had not yet explored. Unfortunately, I had no idea what it was.
Ghost narratives run parallel to the ones I have written in this book: the unrecorded stories of the other possible worlds I investigated at the same time as I was crawling through sewers and chasing demons.
For example: I spent half a year attending communist rallies and sitting in kitchens with neo-Bolshevik radicals, conducting interviews and collating notes. I was intrigued by the transformation of socialism from a myth that looked forward to a future paradise to one that looked back towards a lost Eden. This imaginary kingdom was even larger and more complex than Vissarion’s, and contrary to most reporting in the Western media, it did not appeal exclusively to old people nostalgic for a more ordered world either – there were several youth groups espousing fairly hardcore communist ideology. I was especially interested in the teenagers, unborn when the USSR dissolved, who insisted it was their homeland. They described a magical world where there was no want and no injustice, where all races had lived together in brotherhood and harmony. They were aliens, exiles from a perfect planet they had never actually known, and they seemed to believe that if they sang and chanted loud enough it would manifest itself and they would at last be able to return home.
Now that Vissarion had left me stranded, I looked back to these investigations, hoping I might find there the story I was looking for. But communism was a collective myth with multiple authors, and so it didn’t fit alongside the much more personal worlds authored by Vadim, Edward and Vissarion. It was too diffuse. The closest I came to their kind of reality was on October Revolution Day 2005, when I marched alongside a lonely woman who had fused Orthodoxy with Bolshevism, and who told me that Lenin, killer of priests and transformer of monasteries into prison camps, was the greatest friend the Church had ever had. There was an elaborately contrived logic for these statements, of course, but she knew how preposterous it all sounded, and almost winced as she gingerly trotted out her gibberish. She didn’t live boldly and unapologetically in her world the way Vadim, Edward and Vissarion did. Walking in a column with atheists who found her ideas comical was the best she could do, but it was a gesture towards action, a shadow play, and nothing more. She knew she had lost before she’d even started. The way forward did not lie here, either for her or for me.
But if politics was a dead end, then there was always my Soviet movie-star neighbour, Vasily Lanovoi to consider. I thought he might have a place in this book precisely because he so obviously didn’t – his life story negated absolutely the theme of my travels. Everyone else I had encountered was a marginal figure in society and, having rejected or been rejected by the world, was struggling to create some alternative cosmos in which they, or their ideas, governed. Even Vissarion’s success was predicated to a large degree on his distance from the centre of power in the country. If his community had been located on prime real estate outside Moscow, it would never have lasted so long.
But that negation was what attracted me to Lanovoi. While the others struggled, life seemed to slip onto him as comfortably as a pair of silk pyjamas. He had risen almost effortlessly to the top of his profession in the 1950s and 1960s, once even playing Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police and a gleeful practitioner of torture and summary execution. A grateful KGB awarded Lanovoi a medal for his portrayal. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, however, he became a Russian nationalist and patriot, who happily lent his sonorous voice to celebrations of dead tsars on Red Square during national holidays. I was intrigued by this ability to shift with the times and always be on the right side of events: happy the man who is always able to believe the right thing at the right time, and not be aware that that is what he is doing.
But after Vissarion, Lanovoi’s achievements seemed underwhelming. What was he really? A representation of Soviet dreams, yes, but once again, he was a collective creation. As an actor, he stepped through illusions, but they were always other people’s illusions, and he was always uttering other people’s words. It shouldn’t have been surprising then that he could shift so smoothly from communist to nationalist. Vadim, Edward and Vissarion were much more creative, much more driven, much greater men. Lanovoi was tiny in comparison to them.
I wasn’t getting anywhere. Vissarion was still towering triumphant over me, chuckling away, amused that I was still somehow trapped in his accomplishment, unable to find a way to get beyond what he had done. I investigated some skinheads who had developed their own mythology, a Mongolian mystic who had worked for Leonid Brezhnev, and even, in a moment of desperation, considered a return to the family in Uglich who had filled their living room with papier mâché effigies of historical figures demonstrating the centrality of their little town in the Divine Order. None of them offered a path forward. They were all smaller, less complete, failures in comparison to the Son of God.
But then I stumbled upon some stories in the Russian press about a faith healer called Grigory Grabovoi. Grabovoi was a slick-looking character with a penchant for sharp suits and fraternising with post-Soviet government authorities: allegedly he had used his powers to aid the Russian and Uzbek ministries of defence, using his superhuman ESP abilities to scan aeroplanes for ‘faults’. He could also cure diseases with his mind and planned to stand for president in 2008. If elected, his first act would be to abolish death – because, like Vissarion, Grabovoi was Christ reborn. Not bad for a boy born in a village near Shymkent, Kazakhstan.
Grabovoi wasn’t president yet, however, and consequently he still had some time on his hands. So he was offering to use his remarkable powers to bring joy to the bereaved mothers of Beslan, by effecting the reincarnation of their children. For a fee, of course: the living Christ could not be expected to work for nothing.
Apparently he had offered the same service to the victims of Nord Ost, and nobody had complained. But this time he had gone too far. Grabovoi was denounced in the media as a charlatan and impostor, engaged in the cruellest exploitation. Demands were made for the authorities to conduct an investigation. The abolitionist of death had reaped the wind, and now he was sowing the whirlwind.
And now I remembered how, a year earlier, Dmitri the photographer had corrected himself when he called the Digger ‘crazy’. Yes, Vadim had strange ideas, but under no circumstances could he be considered crazy. On the contrary, he was very rational: he never went near the Kremlin or did anything that would jeopardise his ability to keep doing the things that enabled him to breathe. He knew where his reality ended and the other one, with police and punishments, began. However inspired or visionary or deluded he seemed, he knew his limits.
Edward was the same. He had spoken about making two films: a conservative version for the Orthodox and another ‘more speculative’ one for general consumption. In the world of non-believers he was absolutely free, and would express the wildest ideas when he proselytised, but he would do or say nothing that would risk his access to the exorcists, who were the key to his remaining inside the world he loved.
But nowhere was awareness of this ‘line between realities’ more evident than it was in the actions of Vissarion. He gave no clear date for the end of the world and claimed no miracles; he could never be proven a fraud. He didn’t like coming to Moscow, and I knew why. Nobody took him seriously in the capital. Here he was just another freak show among many, and he had to compete with transvestite pop stars and debutantes and all the rest of the city’s overdriven cultural life for attention. It was only in the provinces, where nobody came, nobody went and life, in general, was terrible that he had power, and that his appearances struck people as impressive. There, he drew not derision, but crowds.
But even on his home turf, where his power was strongest, Vissarion cooperated at every level with the Krasnoyarsk regional authorities. He knew that he had a powerful enemy in the Orthodox Church and a capricious overlord in the Russian state. He needed to be exceedingly careful and well organised if everything he had built was to avoid destruction.
Each of the three unique creators I had encountered so far, no matter how committed to his personal vision of the world, nevertheless displayed by his actions at all times an acute awareness of the brutal and uncompromising reality outside of it. Consciously or unconsciously, they all knew precisely when to transgress and when to step in line. They could never surrender fully to their vision, because to do so would mean to bring about its demise.
Grabovoi, however, was different. Whether he truly believed what he said, half-believed it, or didn’t believe it at all, canvassing for money from the bereaved of Beslan had been a colossal misjudgement, a monumental loss of perspective. He had crossed the line the others danced around with such verve, and he was about to pay the penalty.
I had been right all along: Vissarion’s community was not the logical conclusion of my investigations. Sergei Torop was only half-lost, and it was Grigory Grabovoi who was pointing the way forward for me. I needed to talk to someone who, intoxicated by his reality, hubristic about its power, had passed to the ‘other side’, someone who couldn’t tell where the world he wanted to exist ended and the other one began. What happened to the dreamer when he lost control, when he went too far?
Grabovoi wasn’t going to be much help, however. He charged hundreds of dollars for group consultations and well over a thousand for a one-to-one meeting. I had no desire to line his pockets further, and besides, he was only just beginning his journey to the ‘other side’. Certainly I fully anticipated that the Russian state would eventually crush this Christ like a gnat between forefinger and thumb, transforming him into a greasy smear of ex-Messiah. But at the moment he was free and brazen and still making his claims.*
But if not Grabovoi, then who?
A looming Gothic nightmare transported from dreams into reality, unfinished because impossible to finish, made entirely of pieces of tree and by far the tallest such building I had ever seen, clustered with hidden rooms, attics, trapdoors, dead ends, blind walls and staircases leading to nowhere; ramshackle construction reaching up, up into the sky, culminating in two crooked tin peaks, the highest of which contains THE ROOM with the glazed aperture through which the unseen inhabitant of this monstrous edifice may look down, down, down on the world he did not create …
Wait. Breathe in, breathe out: reorient yourself, change position. View it in profile. Is it still so astonishing? Yes. What is this alien structure imposed on an unwilling landscape, eruption of unrestrained fantasy into a dead world, product of vision and energy devoted to an idea no one else understands? Who is responsible for this monstrous aberration?
I stare and stare, and I know: this tower was built by a brother to Vadim, to Edward, to Vissarion, to all the others who, toiling in obscurity, are not included in this book but certainly exist. He too is a member of this undeclared society of pointless visionaries and futile rebels, these ‘conquistadors of the useless’. I know nothing about him but I can say this: ‘architect’ does not do justice to whoever raised this monster out of the mud. That word suggests planning, rationalism, a consciousness of limitations. But this tower is an assault on reality, a triumph over it. It proudly makes no sense at all to those who behold it, and is all the more beautiful for it. It is organic and whole and wild as the unconscious. ‘Builder’ shall hardly suffice either, so in that case let us call him …
A certain Nikolai Sutyagin, native to Arkhangelsk, born and raised among descendants of prisoners exiled by tsars and general secretaries to this city located just south of the Arctic Circle, at an unspecified point in the early 1990s acquired the rights to some land in the industrial zone of Solombola, and then started building a house. He was unaware at the time of the epic nature of his undertaking. In the early stages, in fact, he planned simply to build one floor, and then another; nothing extraordinary, simply an izba, a structure to inhabit, with toilets for shitting in and furniture for sitting in, much like any other. But then something shifted inside his head and once the second floor was complete he knew that in fact he had not finished, and that there was more work to be done. And from that point he continued working, reaching up, up towards the cold, grey northern sky. By the time his work was interrupted the tower was thirteen storeys high, the tallest wooden building in the world. But do not look in the Guinness Book of Records, for the tower is not there. After all, how could it sit there, as a mere photograph and a short descriptive entry alongside big marrows, very fast tap dancers and Men Who Can Hold Their Breath for a Very Long Time? The tower wanted no part of that banal world. It represented an obsession of a very different order.
And what was it for? The structure itself gave no clues: it was impossible to read. There were rumours, of course: that Sutyagin had built a wooden spacecraft, intended for interstellar travel, or that he planned it as an ark for all the Slav peoples – Czechs, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Slovenes, Bulgarians and all the others scattered across Europe and Asia – and that he would gather them together and lead them safely into the future, protected inside his wooden tower. Now that was a reason to build a tower. I loved the wildness, the impossibility of it. It echoed Vissarion’s plan to build an ark in Siberia where righteous men and women would survive the apocalypse in the wilderness, but also brought me back to Sergei’s original claim (later denied) that the Diggers were a tribe of civilised intellectuals who had chosen to live underground permanently, rejecting the wicked ways of an evil world. And although Edward was not constructing an ark, he was fighting a deluge …
But that was not all. For Sutyagin’s structure immediately brought other impossible towers to mind, all of them Soviet, as if he were continuing a tradition of grandiose dreaming into this new age. One of the most famous was Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the Third International’, a leaning iron spiral 400 metres tall, containing a rotating glass cylinder, a rotating glass cone, a rotating glass cube and a device for projecting messages onto clouds, and this was to have been built in the aftermath of a Civil War by a ravaged and impoverished society; and then, of course, there was the legendary Palace of Soviets with which Stalin had intended to out-skyscraper New York, and which would also have served as a podium for a monstrously engorged statue of Lenin, a handy platform in the clouds from which the Father of the World Proletariat would eternally wag a scolding finger at a God who was supposed to be dead.
Even in their unrealised state, existing nowhere except in the imagination, these towers cast a shadow over history. They were more written about, more beloved and more hated than the vast majority of structures that had actually been built in Russia. People still admired them, still lamented them, still dreamt of them – and that was why Sutyagin’s ‘impossible tower’, for all that it reminded me of these two precursors, was as much their inversion as a continuation. Because although his structure existed it cast a shadow over nothing; hardly anyone knew it was there, and those who did had no idea what it was intended to glorify or represent. But that didn’t make it any the less attractive to me; on the contrary, it only increased its mystery, its allure.
Two impossible towers: 1) Vladimir Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the Third International’, and 2) Boris Iofan’s sketch of the Palace of Soviets, complete with outsize Lenin
But that was not the real reason I had to go, no. That was much simpler.
The line, the line – I wanted someone who had crossed ‘the line’. I mentioned that Sutyagin’s work on the tower was ‘interrupted’. For there was a legend that read like something from the Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’ monumental novel of fortresses, subterranean chambers, drug abuse, torture and labyrinthine revenge – except for one significant detail. In the novel, it is Edmond Dantès, the future ‘count’ himself, who is imprisoned in a desolate fortress and later seeks revenge. In the Legend of the Tower, Sutyagin is both avenging Count and villain, punishing someone who transgressed against him by locking him in the basement of his citadel.
I couldn’t find any details as to what the crime was, or whether Sutyagin’s prisoner had survived the ordeal, but it was clear that the constructor had crossed the line that Vadim, Edward and Vissarion knew instinctively to avoid. He had believed himself above the law, that in his fortress other rules applied and he was invincible. But the police found out, Sutyagin went to prison, and thus ended the dream of an ark for the Slavs.
Sutyagin was out of jail now, but no one had seen him in years. The rumour was that he lived with his mother in a flat in Arkhangelsk. Whatever money he had had was now lost; no work had been done on the tower since he was imprisoned. And so for years it had stood, simultaneously a memorial to the dream he had lost control of and also as a rotting wooden carcass awaiting the day of its collapse, when it would release the souls of the neighbouring villagers from their meat-prisons and itself cross over into the realm of ghost-buildings. But that day had not yet come, and until then Sutyagin, invisible or not, was going to protect his creation: massive Caucasian shepherd dogs prowled the territory at night, scaring away those who would burn it down or otherwise inflict damage, howling at the indifferent moon a lament for the impossible tower.
And where did I learn about all this? In the back of a free magazine, of course, on the page opposite an incisive pictorial feature on our planet’s ‘Top Ten Greatest Pairs of Knockers’, under the stunningly inventive headline Russian Tower of Babel. I’d seen this particular magazine in the rack of the internet café a thousand times but had never picked it up. The cover, starting with the gruesome typeface, was always ugly, and the cover stories never seemed to be about anything at all. So why I picked it up now I can’t say. It was just an impulse, a few neurons firing randomly in some dark place in my skull. And adding to the arbitrariness, I was only there in the first place because my printer had broken down.
So it was Chance, fickle goddess of the ancient Greeks, who delivered the story unto me, rewarding my faith. This only strengthened my certainty that Sutyagin’s Tower was the answer, that I would find the end to my quest there. I had three weeks left in Russia before my visa ran out, three weeks in which I now had to find this Sutyagin who had first disappeared into his dream, then disappeared into jail, before disappearing entirely.
I had no idea how to do it. But I had to at least try.