361kb - Brett Forrest

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IN THE LAWLESS CORNERS OF THE FORMER SOVIET UNION, A DANGEROUS RUSSIAN CAR THIEF HAS TURNED HIS LIFE STORY INTO ONE OF THE HOTTEST SHOWS ON TELEVISION—THE REAL REALITY TV. SAY “DAS VIDANYA,” HOLLYWOOD. WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRETT FORREST Y ou can’t have fun when you’re famous. Behold Vitali Dyomochka, laid-back in a Land Cruiser, just trying to enjoy himself with a few close associates. It’s dead night in a dead end, and they’re waiting for a girl to tiptoe out of the sauna. A Kalashnikov rides shotgun. Russian synth pop is beating up the quiet. Everyone’s feeling up their cheek scars and buzz cuts with their tattooed fingers. The door to the hothouse squeals open, revealing the cutout of something with a skirt on. “Hey, girl,” Vitali mumbles into the dark. The shadow steps into the shaft of a street lamp, illuminating a pretty face that’s touched up with unease. Vitali reaches out to put a palm on her. And there is a moment just then, a gap, when her doubt disappears, when she is suddenly feeling giddy. “I know you,” says the girl. “You’re the guy from TV.” This is what it has come down to for Russia’s most infamous television idol. Vitali Dyomochka has traded in a life as the brutal leader of a car-theft ring in Russia’s Far East for a life as the creator and star of Spets, a TV series based on his own wild times. They watch The Sopranos even in the farthest reaches of nowhere. The world isn’t so big anymore. And when a bona fide killer like Vitali gets his hands on a digital camera, he can tell the real story in a way that big Tony couldn’t dream up on that shrink’s couch. There is a side effect, however. Vitali has been having trouble maintaining the fear, since it works out that you’re either a villain in the everyday or you simply play one on TV. And what kind of fun can you have if nobody’s spooked? “AREN’T YOU AFRAID OF ME?” Vitali asks Complex, shaking hands in greeting, clearly expecting a yes, hoping for one even. His voice is faint and scratchy. He is in Moscow now, cruising around and looking for a synthesizer on which he’ll compose and mix music for Spets. Vitali is particular about his purchase, sitting in shops and playing piano with slender, delicate fingers and a studied, upturned profile, his bald head parched white in the mercantile fluorescent lighting. Once he finds what he needs, he packs up his tracksuits and makes for the airport. He flies the nine hours back over the expanse of Russia. It is the same swindle. The main difference between Moscow and Russia’s far eastern capital of Vladivostok is the sum total of Chinese guys named Vladimir. Unlike in Moscow, where the Mercedes jeep plays khan to the cars that swat each other along the roadways, in videotape 51 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2005
Vladivostok it’s Toyota’s Land Cruiser that affects top-down order. A day trip across the Sea of Japan and there’s an easy markup waiting for anyone who can front some cash and sail on back with an SUV, steering wheel tucked on the right-hand side. On Vladivostok’s rain-polished hillside streets, it’s still possible to hear the conspicuous grinding of the lawn mower engine encased beneath the hood of a Zhiguli. But by local consensus this is a national indignity, best tuned out, then forgotten, much like a certain 75-year period in the country’s history. All Soviet revolutionary statues are still firmly in place here, watching over the whalers in Vladivostok’s distended port. All the while, fleets of halogen-lamped Japanese rides encircle them, pumping Russian club mixes through slits in the blacked-out windows, cracked just wide enough to ash a cigarette and watch the particles disintegrate in the sea-salt gust. This is the only thing that Russia’s Far East has in common with California, across the Pacific: car culture. But this is a culture of stealing cars, rather than waxing them for the ride to the house party up the 405. In Ussuriysk, a settlement of 250,000 souls, there are countless ways to go about appropriating a car. Vitali has two favored methods. He can frame it to appear as though you have negligently collided with his car in traffic. He will then demand your vehicle as compensation for damage, a demand made more persuasive by the submachine gun nosing out of his coat. Or he can sneak up while you’re changing a flat, slip unseen into the driver’s seat, and gas it once you’ve tightened the last lug. It’s a living. Vitali left prison in spring 1997, after his second “sitting,” as the Russians say. He was dressed in pants that stopped midcalf. A murdered brother, no money, no place to go, a constitution that had grown to crave prison gruel called “sechka.” It was that bad. And maybe it should have been for a guy who murdered a rival and then found the humor in it. “I aimed at his heart, but I missed,” Vitali says. “It shows you how poorly I know anatomy.” But prison in far eastern Russia, mid-’90s, was no place for weaving macramé potholders. Overcrowding, scant supervision, a shortage of sechka. “When you live with wolves,” Vitali says, “you howl like a wolf.” And on the streets of Ussuriysk, there was plenty of prey, so many right-hand-drive cars on the road that wiseguys had taken to calling the place Little Tokyo. FEBRUARY/MARCH 2005 RUSSIAN REALITY TV (FROM TOP): VITALI DYOMOCHKA IN SCENES FROM SPETS; VITALI ALSO COMPOSES THE MUSIC OFFICIALS AT THE STATION THAT AIRS SPETS ESTIMATE RATINGS NEARING 100 PERCENT VITALI STEERS HIS PANTHER-COLORED Land Cruiser among Ussuriysk’s crumbling czarist-era minipalaces, Khrushchevcommissioned apartment buildings, and patchwork dogs that leap in the alleyways, lit by an unseemly sunlight. At least the sun is shining. Soon it will be winter, when darkness rules even in the daytime. “We are famous here,” Vitali says, scanning the streets in a tight squint. “We have a morbid reputation.” It is a reputation that has been enhanced 52 by near total exposure. Officials at the TV station that carried Spets in the winter and spring of 2004 estimated ratings approaching 100 percent. “Real people, ordinary people, love this show,” says Aslan Saydaev, the director of Ussuriysk TV. “The percentage of ex-cons is higher here than in any other Russian region. It was a restricted zone in Soviet times, until 1989. The government paid undesirables to move here from other parts of the country.” Add to that the area’s high concentration of prisons and work camps, and the result is a population that has been operating off the Spets playbook for as long as anyone can remember. The seven episodes that aired in 2004 depicted brutal murders, bloody rumbles and genuine, unsimulated sex (you can tell), all of it produced without the detached gloss of a network budget. “For people from the West, this show would be a shock,” Saydaev continues. “But for us, it’s natural—it’s who we are.” Spets, however, has found detractors within Russia as well. Saydaev says that after viewing the show, officials from the FSB (the successor to the KGB) in Moscow “recommended” that Ussuriysk TV shut down. Now Saydaev, a Chechen, operates the channel underground, and is anxiously seeking safe passage to another country. All this over a series whose mission statement expounded on one simple ideal: authenticity. Spets may be cruel and violent, but, Vitali says, the program is redeemed by the fact that everything contained therein is true to life. All of it actually took place, and nearly all of the actors are themselves the genuine perpetrators. “We were tired of watching TV and movies that weren’t real,” Vitali says. “When a bomb is ticking, you know the timer will stop at the last second. When you see a movie with Steven Seagal, you know he will kill everybody singlehandedly. When you watch a Jackie Chan movie, you know he will also win, but at the same time be funny. But no one can criticize our show, because it is our real life.” Part Miami Vice, part senior class project, Spets spends a lot of time with its digital video cameras burrowing deep into the recessed pits of Vitali’s forever-focused Sinatra blues. Vitali has plenty of appeal— enough to persuade city officials to allow him to crash a car through Ussuriysk’s main movie theater, enough to convince his reallife wife to appear in the same episode with his real-life mistress. His eyes are, as the Russians might say, bez nichevo: without nothing. And he is always in character. Rappers and hoods make good actors.
Page 1: BASED ON A TRUE STORY VITALI DYOMOC

361kb - Brett Forrest

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