With the last Yeltsin and the first Putin, Russia experienced a ‘Weimar Germany’ moment where everything was possible and, therefore, impossible. A point of madness and freedom definitely devastated by a military invasion
There were barely two months left before Vladimir Putin took power and that Moscow was sucking you in. It was the eve of All Saints in the year 1999, Boris Yeltsin was still president of Russia and the Moscow night flowed as fascinating as its unappealable metro lines.
“It was the Germany of Weimarâ€, Marc Marginedas, a correspondent –with capital letters– in the Russian capital for El Periódico reminded me a few days ago.
“That seemed unstoppable,†I told him. “I never imagined that it would end up disappearing,” concluded Marc.
I hate Halloween and I hate dressing up, but that Moscow dragged me away. He dragged me to the Halloween party organized by Studio, then the best club in the empire’s capital. They were all tsars, and especially tsarinas, on their impeccable track and stage.
Where to get a good costume? A friend of a friend of Marc’s almost clandestinely put us in the dressing room of the Stanislavski theater to choose clothes. Little joke: it is the setting that elevated Chekhov’s great theatrical dramas, beginning with The Seagull in 1898.
Marc chose a musketeer dress and I chose Napoleon. I have never forgotten it. But it is now, in a time of mud and coffins, when I remember with a certain vertigo everything that happened that Night of the Dead. It is now, with Russia sowing the Ukraine with corpses, that I remember with more disbelief what happened to me in Moscow dressed as the French emperor who, with his special military operation of 1812, sowed Russia with corpses.
Bonaparte’s uniform was perfect, and at the Studio entrance a make-up artist offered to put something creative on my face. She was putting makeup on my face and I didn’t know what she was painting me. He only saw satisfaction in her eyes. When she finished, I entered the premises, I noticed that people were staring at me and I went straight to the bathroom mirror: my face was that of a human being a few hours after receiving a bullet in the forehead.
The bullet hole in the front of my skull was just perfect, sharp, haunting. It abducted, like the Moscow that saw the birth of the t.A.T.u. group that same year, two Russians who would make a living by snogging with the same intensity and falsehood with which petrodollars would lubricate the imperial dreams of the Kremlin.
That Moscow so Weimar had its most orgasmic moment in the semifinal show of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009, held in the Russian capital: the two lesbians from t.A.T.u. singing with the Red Army choir and orchestra next to a pink -inflatable- tank full of pop flowers (and an inflatable fighter-bomber at the other end).
It was a postcard today impossible. The Kremlin has made the geopolitics of sexuality and talks about its jihad against the Western Satan. The t.A.T.u., now disbanded, have turned to the dark side, if they ever did. One of them ended up running for deputy for Putin’s party. And last October, in the midst of the carnage, they got together again to celebrate a concert in a country as bright as Belarus.
As for Halloween, there is only one thing more detestable than this somewhat faked party: banning it, which is what is happening in Russia.
The best, or worst, of that last Night of the Dead of the 20th century was yet to come (like Putin, who would come to power eight weeks later, on December 31). The worst, or the best, was when the Studio public voted for the winning costume. He had not planned to go on stage, but since El Periódico was not cut off, neither was La Vanguardia. And then what I thought was an anecdote happened and today I see as an omen.
My turn came, I was left alone on stage and people applauded. In fact, it was an applaudometer that determined who was going to win. The Russians shouted, applauded, and I, paralyzed, did not know what to do. All those who preceded me had done something, I don’t know, a greeting, a minimal number according to their disguise.
I couldn’t stay still, I had to react, and only one thing occurred to me: I put the fingers of my right hand as if they were a gun, I slowly brought the gun closer to my forehead and there, where the bullet hole was made up , I fired… Bang!
I remained for a few seconds with an unstable body on the stage, without quite dropping dead, like a zombie Napoleon in the Moscow night. And that’s when the applaud meter went off and the Russian cabaret rewarded the bullet in the forehead.
