Forms of Delirium
Peter Pomerantsev circles the Kremlin

In the Moscow compound of the Night Wolves, the Russian equivalent of the Hells Angels, ships’ conrods have been refashioned as crosses ten feet high. Broken plane parts have been bolted to truck engines to make a giant stage; crushed Harley-Davidsons have been beaten into a bar; boats’ hulls have been moulded into chairs; and train parts into Valhalla-sized tables. The crosses are everywhere, wrenched together out of old bike parts and truck shafts and engines. The Night Wolves, or Nochnye Volki, are bikers who have found a Russian God. In an act of patriotism they have changed all the words on their leathers from Latin lettering to a gothic Cyrillic. One of the Hells Angels symbols, a ‘1 per cent’ inside a diamond, is still etched on a great stone at the entrance to their kingdom. In Hells Angels lore it stands for the 1 per cent who are outlaws. But the Night Wolves have engraved a new text around the diamond, transforming its meaning: ‘In heaven there is more joy at the 1 per cent of sinners who confess than the 99 per cent who have no need of salvation.’

‘We only have a few years to rescue the soul of holy Russia,’ Alexei Weitz said. ‘Just a few years.’ Weitz is a leading member of the Night Wolves. There are five thousand of them in Russia, five thousand Beowulf-like bearded men in leathers riding Harleys. It’s Weitz who has done most to turn them from outlaws into religious patriots. For the past few years, Vladimir Putin has posed for photo-ops with them, dressed in leathers and riding a tri-bike (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler). They defended the ‘honour of the church’ after the Pussy Riot affair, roaring in a cavalcade through Moscow bearing golden icons of Mary the Mother of Christ on the front of their Harleys. The Kremlin gives them several hundred million rubles a year and they work to inspire loyalty across the country with concerts and bike shows that fuse flying Yamahas, Cirque du Soleil-style trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle re-enactments, religious icons, holy ecstasies, speeches from Stalin and dancing girls (there are booths for go-go girls next to the great crosses). At the last concert in Volgograd, 250,000 locals turned up, a world record for a ‘bike show’. Evander Holyfield was meant to come, to introduce a boxing match that went with the patriotic fireworks, but he had to pull out at the last minute – there was a problem with his visa. Everyone sang the anti-communist perestroika anthem ‘We Want Changes’.
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It’s hard to fathom how real the foreign threat to the Night Wolves is. There are thousands of Night Wolves and no more than a few dozen Bandidos in Russia. But to hear Weitz speak of it they are surrounded on all sides. ‘The Bandidos are the biker aspect of the American assault on Holy Rus. This is the last bastion of true religion. Stanislavsky used to say: “Either you are for art, or art is for you.” That is the difference between the West and Russia. You are imperialists, you think all art is for you and we think we are all for art. We give, you take. That is why we can have Stalin and God together. We can fit everything inside us, Ukrainians and Georgians and Germans, Estonians and Lithuanians. The West wipes out small peoples; inside Russia they flourish. You want everything to be like you. The West has been sending us its influencers of corruption. The kabbalah of the usurers. A Russian who is trained in a Western company starts to think differently: self-love is at the root of Western rationality. That is not our way. You have been sending us your consumer culture. I don’t think of Washington or London as being in charge. Satan commands them. That is why you want to bomb Syria, the homeland of holiness. The devil wants to take the road to Damascus, but Putin is defending it. You have to learn to see the holy war underneath the everyday. Democracy is a fallen state. To split “left” and “right” is to divide. In the kingdom of God there is only above and below. All is one. Which is why the Russian soul is holy. It can unite everything. Like in an icon. Stalin and God. Like everything you see here in the Night Wolves, we take bits of broken machinery and mould them together.’
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In the Duma the familiar Kremlin-run pseudo-parties are threatened with being shut down. Their ratings are plummeting: in the Moscow elections the Liberal Democrats and A Just Russia could barely clear 3 per cent, despite the backing of the main TV channels. It’s every Duma deputy for himself. The challenge is to propose a law so flamboyant in its patriotic burlesque that it will get you noticed. Vitaly Milonov is now a celebrity thanks to his ‘anti-gay propaganda law’; Elena Mizulina performed beautifully with her proposal to ban ‘untraditional’ sex – for the next week the news was dominated by talk of oral sex and whether it would be made illegal. The point isn’t whether these laws ever get enacted: the point is to fill up the conversation. Evgeny Fedorov, a member of the ruling party, United Russia, explains that the Duma and the government are in the pay of the CIA and that Russia pays ‘Dane-geld’ to the US. Putin, Fedorov says, knows this but he can’t force a way out.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n19/peter-pomerantsev/forms-of-delirium