Spring had arrived, finally, and marked the city. Tourists once again brightened up street scenes, and the hotels were back to turning down guests who hadn’t booked well in advance. The ticket booth attendant at the Winter Palace no longer had to pass the day without a single visitor. Not that it made any difference to her: she dutifully put on full, if cheap, make-up every morning. After all, she had to sit there for eight interminable hours each day to earn her modest wage and pension. She had no concept of the ‘new economy’ – not least because she would never be part of it. She had long ago settled for her state salary, even though things were constantly changing these days. But that was all down to dirty capitalism. So much, she still remembered.
Other Russians were more adept at navigating the changes that were in full swing – with dirty, capitalistic chores at run-down industrial areas on the other side of the city. They produced cheap porn movies for the insatiable export market. Trivial productions; blonde bombshells with big tits getting it rough. S&M was selling like hotcakes. The more extreme, the more popular. Mainstream was available in abundance for free on the internet. They had learned that pretty fast.48
There was an almost twilight glow in the studio. Rays of sunlight made their way through the dirty windows up under the ceiling, augmented by a couple of studio spotlights, and drew stripes through the dust-filled room. A blonde girl with her big breasts exposed was chained upright, by her hands and feet, to a crude wooden cross. A naked, dark-haired girl in thigh-length stiletto-heeled boots tugged on a ring through one of the nipples of those breasts, using her teeth. The blonde girl was screaming in pain. Her shrieks echoed through the empty space, interrupted only by the occasional ‘Bitch!’ of the dark-haired girl as she pulled the hair or squeezed the other breast of the chained girl. Behind them stood a tall, muscular man wearing a leather face mask. After a while, he stepped forward, unzipped his tight trousers, then grabbed the blonde girl’s arms and unchained her from the crucifix so that he could bend her over. As she stood there with her buttocks high, he looked straight at the camera with undisguised lust.
‘CUT, CUT!’ shouted a short, plump man seated in a chair just outside the floodlight.
He rolled his eyes towards the ceiling as he turned to face two men seated in the chairs reserved for visitors. They looked well-groomed in their expensive suits. But their true colours could have been better disguised. The heavy gold around their necks and wrists gave the game away: they were not businessmen in any traditional sense.
‘What do you think; pretty good, right?’ the director asked while agitatedly scratching his day-old stubble. He oozed self-confidence in his chinos, blazer and open shirt that lent itself well to a vibrant scarf. He was clearly satisfied that this would be 49another hit, to add to the string of hit movies he’d created. His style was to ‘distress’ his films, and make them look like home movies, something he had become famous for in porn production circles. It was his ‘artistic hallmark’, as he liked to call it, on the rare occasions when he was applauded for his work (in cheap Russian vodka). And his films were actually selling well. Buyers paid for the illusion that they were home movies. His financial backers did not take any offence at his bloated self-image, as long as he understood that his job was creating low-budget productions.
When hammered, he compared himself to ‘Americanski Tarantino’, but that was laughed off as a token of his lack of realism. Everyone knew he had only ever watched Reservoir Dogs, albeit numerous times. To the extent where he claimed he could recite the entire dialogue by heart. One scene was his favourite, though; the one where Harvey Keitel had tried to torture Mr Orange. Or was it Mr Green? Succumbing to the effects of excessive vodka, he could never actually remember the dialogue. But then he could always talk for hours about his own productions. Far superior, although he had to admit that Reservoir Dogs was not bad at all, taking into consideration that it was a low-budget production.
At a second glance, his visitors were disparate. One looked like the type of man who was accustomed to being obeyed. His demeanour demanded respect. Clearly, a leader. Those close to him knew he was formerly a Colonel of the 1180th Guards’ artillery regiment, part of the honourable guards’ parachute division. Andrej Nitchenko was an avowed old communist. His opponents often translated this as Stalinist. He commanded respect from all camps for having seen action in the Afghan War as commander of an artillery battery. He had long since realised that the Farmers’ 50Party, the haggard remains of the old communist party, could not agree on anything other than opposing the President. Thus, Andrej Nitchenko decided to launch a party for the masses. The platform was, in essence, based on traditional Russian mistrust of foreigners. He had named the party Mother Russia, which fuelled the strong, deep-rooted nationalism harboured by all Russians. A nationalism that, during the Cold War, had been propelled by slick propaganda painting the West as aggressors, using the US and NATO as convenient bugbears. Throughout his military career, Andrej Nitchenko had come to understand and exploit the fact that influence had little to do with having the best arguments, let alone being right. Quite the opposite; having contacts and connections in the right influential circles was what, in reality, defined power. And he had made this credible, in the past five years, by cultivating solid links to nationalist groups. First in Russia and then in the West.
The middle-aged man seated beside him was square-cut and muscular, with short black hair and intense ice-blue eyes, which were alert but wary from witnessing too many horrors that he would rather forget. He oozed physical strength and an undisguised resolve to use it. To the naked eye a subordinate to the former Colonel, Sergey Pustynikov had the official title of party secretary of Mother Russia, but his chief duty was the security of Andrej Nitchenko. In this capacity, he was the commander of the ‘Guard’ – a group of well-trained young men, many of them former Vozdushno Desantnaya Voyska, or VDV, as the paratrooper veterans called themselves. Officially, the guard was, of course, unarmed. However, Sergey Pustynikov did not trust democracy to 51get Mother Russia into power, so the guard was prepared to reach this goal by taking arms.
They had first met in Afghanistan. Sergey Pustynikov had been a Major in a Spetsnaz unit – an airborne battalion in one of the sixteen Brigada Osobovo Naznacheniya belonging to the Soviet military intelligence service, GRU. During pauses in hostilities, the two men had often got drunk together; when far from home and surrounded by ‘savages’, you needed someone to share your stories with. Stories from their time at the M. V. Fruntze Academy for tactical leadership, which began their careers as officers. Entertaining stories of the legendary Colonel Vladimir Zubarev, famed for always wearing a ‘papakha’, the traditional grey fur hat worn by the Cossacks.
The boredom, compounded by Afghanistan’s relentless heat, got under most people’s skin. Slowly but surely. And for a Russian, nothing was more natural than seeking refuge in a numbing haze of vodka. Andrej Nitchenko and Sergey Pustynikov were no different. One scorching afternoon, after downing a bottle between them, they had aired their frustration at the inadequacy of the Soviet Army. They particularly resented their government’s weak rebuttals of Western protests against warfare directed at Afghan civilians. The politicians were simply too far removed to see that it made perfect sense to drop so-called ‘butterfly’ mines, and mines disguised as toys. And to fathom that revenge attacks on villages was the only way to tame the Afghans. After a second bottle, they needed an outlet for their pent-up anger. Sergey Pustynikov ordered his men to start up one of the Unit’s Mi-8 helicopters and force a couple of captured Afghan partisans on board. After a brief 55flight, the terrified prisoners were dropped onto a nearby village from a height of 500 metres. Their screaming cut through the noise from the rotor blades until they hit the ground in the village below. ‘A message that should hit home!’ Sergey Pustynikov noted. An extraordinary bond had been forged between them. One that had continued after their return from Afghanistan, turning into a more substantial and more decisive friendship. Pustynikov had been transferred to another Special Operations Brigade, the Baltiysk-based Morskaya Brigada Osobogo Naznacheniya. One of the Spetsnaz units of the Baltic Fleet District. Sergey Pustynikov had enjoyed learning a lot of new stuff. In particular, knowledge of the region, especially about Sweden as a potential theatre of operation. From Baltiysk, he moved on to become an instructor at the naval training centre for cold-water diving in St Petersburg, a lovely place to be stationed, particularly during its summer.
Andrej Nitchenko arrived in St Petersburg around the same time to take up permanent employment at the Baltic Military District HQ. But his fondness for vodka had been too much, even for a staff officer. When forced to leave, he devoted his entire time to Mother Russia. For Sergey Pustynikov, the instructor’s job, with its set working hours, was a doddle. So he too had plenty of time to consider the future. His own and that of Russia. But it was not simply the cushy job away from active duty that finally forced the issue. Sergey Pustynikov had prided himself on being one of the few razavedchiki and vysotniki, as the scouts and huntsman were called amongst the active members of the Spetsnaz units. But he had felt differently since the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan. That was why he had left the navy in 1995 without looking back. 53The offer to become Andrej Nitchenko’s right-hand man was the spark that had opened a whole new chapter of his life.
The director cleared his throat and derailed Pustynikov’s train of thought. As usual, he had hardly paid attention to the filming. Not that those naked girls left him exactly cold, but the scenes’ triteness had killed any arousal he might have felt in watching their well-tuned naked bodies. He glanced at Andrej Nitchenko and shrugged. It was Andrej’s final say.
‘Not to my taste. I want it harder. More pain and more detail,’ Andrej Nitchenko sighed, his mind clearly made up.
The director nodded, as if he’d had the same thought, and barked an order at his actors. ‘We didn’t see much of that sort of action amongst the Muslims in Afghanistan, did we?’ Andrej Nitchenko said, and suppressed a laugh as he gave Sergey Pustynikov a friendly slap on his thigh. ‘Let’s go. Mother Russia is demanding and we have business to discuss.’
The two men rose, left the set, and headed for a small door at the back of the room. The door looked surprisingly new compared to the dilapidated state of the building, in general. And it had three new, shiny, well-oiled locks that slid, silently as the door hinged open. Behind them, the man with the leather mask pushed the brunette, roughly, to one side and went at it with no holds barred. The eyes of the blonde girl widened in horror. Her shrieks were silenced as Nitchenko closed the heavy door behind Pustynikov.