Free Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Page B

wooden floor, like wasted bums on the last night bus. Some 129 hostages died: in the seats of the auditorium, on the steps of the theater, in buses.
    The news crews reported a self-inflicted catastrophe.
    The Nord Ost theater siege, this terror-reality show—in which the whole country saw its own sicknesses in close-up, broadcast on live TV; saw its smirking cops, its lost politicians desperate for guidance not knowing how to behave; saw Black Widows, somehow pitiable despite their actions, elevated to prime-time TV stars; saw victories turn to disasters within one news flash—was when television in Russia changed. No longer would there be anything uncontrolled, unvetted, un-thought-through. The conflict in the Caucasus disappeared from TV, only to be mentioned when the President announced the war there was over, that billions were being invested, that everything was just fine, that Chechnya had been rebuilt, that tourism was booming, that 98 percent of Chechens voted for the President in elections, and that the terrorists had been forced out to refuges in the hills and forests. When someone from the Caucasus appears on television now, it’s usually as entertainment, the butt of jokes like the Irish are for the English.
    But despite all the good news from the Caucasus, Black Widows still make it up to Moscow with rhythmic regularity. Over time their profile has changed: they are less likely to be the wives or daughters of those killed in the war in Chechnya. Instead they are from middle-class families in Makhachkala or Nalchik: the Salafi and Wahhabi preachers are doing their work. My journey to TNT in the mornings is on the subway. My line stops by the coach station, where long-haul coaches finish their fifty-hour journey from the Caucasus. On the morning of March 29, 2010, two Black Widows arrived there, descended into the subway, and blew themselves up a few stops into town, killing forty and injuring a hundred. This was done before 9:00 a.m. By the time I got on the subway a few hours later, the blood and glass and flesh entwined with metal had been cleaned away, and when I arrived at Byzantium and ascended the elevator to TNT, the whole thing, if not forgotten, was then out of mind.
    There are no Black Widows in this neon-colored land.
    •  •  •
    When I went down to the Caucasus four years after Nord Ost , it was to work on a documentary about a local celebrity.
    I landed in the capital of Balkaria, Nalchik, toward evening. Balkaria is right next to Chechnya, the other side from Dagestan. The suburbs were dark; streetlights are still a problem. Driving into town, the only brightly lit building was the brand new central mosque, paid for personally by the Kremlin-backed local leader, Arsen Kanokov. It’s a nouveau riche mosque with mirrored glass, faux-marble towers, and gold-plated crescents: new money and new religion in one prayer. Locals call it the KGB mosque, an attempt by the government to co-opt Islam. The young prefer renegade Salafi preachers. In 2005 Nalchik had been attacked by 217 Islamic militants, who had stormed the TV tower and government offices. It had taken the army days to defeat them, and there were one hundred deaths, including fourteen civilians.
    “We were shocked when we found out the militants weren’t Chechens but local lads from the university where I teach,” a history professor, Anzor, told me when we had dinner that evening. He was doing a bit of moonlighting as my fixer. “I don’t know what my students think about, it’s like they speak another language to me. My generation were all Soviet. But my students, they don’t feel Russian. There’s nothing to bind them to Moscow.”
    The waitress brought more tough, smoked mutton. We were having dinner in the Sosruko restaurant, the town’s most famous, named after a local mythical hero, a sort of Hercules. The restaurant, twenty meters high and concrete, is in the shape of the head of a medieval knight, with helmet and huge