‘Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth’

On a cold, sunny New Year’s Eve in 2014, I am sitting at the edge of my king-size bed at the Four Seasons hotel in New York, munching through a stack of Wagyu beef slices and demolishing a bottle of pinot noir while watching a woman play a man playing a bearded woman on Russian state television. Standing on a stage lit by gleaming chandeliers before an audience of Russia’s elite celebrities, the parodist Elena Vorobei sings to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” in a crude impersonation of Conchita Wurst, the Austrian drag queen who won the 2014 Eurovision song contest. Vorobei is dressed in a sparkling gown, winking cheekily, scratching at her bearded face and swishing her lustrous wig around. “I have a beard!” she belts. At one point she throws out a Hitler salute, a gesture that’s meant to evoke Austria, Conchita’s homeland. The camera pans the laughing audience, cutting for a moment to a well-known actor-singer-writer-bodybuilder and then to one of the show’s M.C.s, Russia’s pop king, the also-bearded Philipp Kirkorov (widely assumed to be gay). The men, who are almost all tanned, in sharply cut suits, grin with unconstrained glee. The bejeweled women wear tight, knowing smiles. Everyone sways and claps.

With the exception of fishing, soccer and the Orthodox Church, few things are taken more seriously in Russia than Eurovision. Indeed, much of the sequined musical fare on Russian television looks like an endless Eurovision rehearsal. When Conchita won, back in May, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist in Russia’s Parliament who is roughly equivalent to Michele Bachmann, said her victory meant “the end of Europe.” The deputy prime minister and the Orthodox Church issued statements essentially denouncing the collapse of Christian civilization as we know it. On tonight’s show, broadcast to millions of Russians, the message is clear: Europe may have rejected homophobia, a value it once shared with Russia, by giving a musical prize to a drag queen, but Russia, like Gloria Gaynor herself, will survive, never to succumb to the rest of the world’s wimpy notions of tolerance. A country where gangs of vigilantes who call their cause “Occupy Pedophilia” attack gay men and women on the streets of its major cities will now carry the mantle of the European Christian project.

“I love you, Russia,” the bearded singer intones in English at the end of her number. “Russia, I’m yours,” she adds in Russian.

Seven more days of this, I think, as I crawl over to the minibar.

You might be wondering why I left my home and family and started watching Russian drag-queen parodies. I am the subject of an experiment. For the next week, I will subsist almost entirely on a diet of state-controlled Russian television, piped in from three Apple laptops onto three 55-inch Samsung monitors in a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. (If I have to imbibe the TV diet of the common Russian man, I will at least live in the style of one of his overlords.) Two of the monitors are perched directly in front of my bed, with just enough space for a room-service cart to squeeze in, and the third hangs from a wall to my right. The setup looks like the trading floor of a very small hedge fund or the mission control of a poor nation’s space program. But I will not be monitoring an astronaut’s progress through the void. In a sense, I am the one leaving the planet behind.

I will stay put in my 600-square-foot luxury cage, except for a few reprieves, and will watch TV during all my waking hours. I can entertain visitors, as long as the machines stay on. Each morning I will be allowed a walk to the New York Health & Racquet Club on West 56th Street for a long swim. Vladimir Putin reportedly takes a two-hour swim every morning to clear his head and plot the affairs of state. Without annexing Connecticut or trying to defend a collapsing currency, I will be just like him, minus the famous nude torso on horseback.

Ninety percent of Russians, according to the Levada Center, an independent research firm, get their news primarily from television. Middle-aged and older people who were formed by the Soviet system and those who live outside Moscow and St. Petersburg are particularly devoted TV watchers. Two of the main channels — Channel 1 and Rossiya 1 — are state-owned. The third, NTV, is nominally independent but is controlled by Gazprom-Media, a subsidiary of the giant energy company that is all but a government ministry. Executives from all three companies regularly meet with Kremlin officials.

Each channel has a slightly different personality. Channel 1 was the Soviet Union’s original channel, which beamed happy farm reports and hockey victories at my parents and grandparents. It features lots of film classics and a raucous health show whose title can be roughly translated as “Being Alive Is Swell!” Rossiya 1 is perhaps best known for a show called “News of the Week,” featuring a Kremlin propagandist, Dmitry Kiselev, who once implicitly threatened to bomb the United States into a pile of “radioactive ash.” (Sadly, for me, Kiselev is taking this week off from ranting.) NTV is more happy-go-lucky, blasting noirish crime thrillers and comedy shows, like a “Saturday Night Live” rip-off shamelessly titled “Saturday. Night. Show.” But during regular breaks for the news, the three networks are indistinguishable in their love of homeland and Putin and their disdain for what they see as the floundering, morally corrupt and increasingly lady-bearded West.

Here is the question I’m trying to answer: What will happen to me — an Americanized Russian-speaking novelist who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child — if I let myself float into the television-filtered head space of my former countrymen? Will I learn to love Putin as 85 percent of Russians profess to do? Will I dash to the Russian consulate on East 91st Street and ask for my citizenship back? Will I leave New York behind and move to Crimea, which, as of this year, Putin’s troops have reoccupied, claiming it has belonged to Russia practically since the days of the Old Testament? Or will I simply go insane?

A friend of mine in St. Petersburg, a man in his 30s who, like many his age, avoids state-controlled TV and goes straight to alternative news sources on the Internet, warns me in an email: “Your task may prove harmful to your psyche and your health in general. Russian TV, especially the news, is a biohazard.” I’ll be fine, I think. Russians have survived far worse than this. But, just in case, I have packed a full complement of anti-anxiety, sleep and pain medication.

I glance from monitor to monitor, muting the volume on Channel 1, pumping it up on Rossiya 1, lowering it two bars on NTV. On one channel, Asiatic dwarves are shooting confetti at one another. Another screen shows a musical number performed by cadres of athletic dancers celebrating the 33 medals Russia won at the Sochi Olympics. Each line is met with the English refrain “Oh, yeah!” Another channel has two men dressed as giant bears, break dancing.

Russian TV has lovingly preserved all eras of American and European pop culture, and it recombines them endlessly, the more nonsensically, the better. Two frosted-haired individuals — a small bearded man and a middle-aged giantess — belt out a cover of the 1989 Roxette hit “The Look.” On another monitor, the famed Tatar crooner Renat Ibragimov, a dapper elderly man, performs a rousing version of Tom Jones’s 1960s dark pop ballad “Delilah.” If Spinal Tap actually existed, it would be touring its heart out in Vladivostok right now. But no matter what the style of the music, the studio audience goes bananas with the clapping and cheering. I send a few clips to my friend Mark Butler, who teaches music theory and cognition at Northwestern University, to help me understand the Russian style of enthusiasm. “The audience is not clapping solely on two and four, as listeners versed in rock do,” he writes back. “Nor are they ‘one-three clappers’ (the stereotype of people who don’t get rock rhythm). Instead, they are clapping on every beat.”

I remember all this clapping from my early teenage years, at bar and bat mitzvahs in the Russian nightclubs of Queens and Brooklyn, and my constant need to slink away from the applause so I could be shy and alone in the parking lot. The happiest applause, in my memory anyway, belonged to my grandmother and her generation, who seemed amazed to still be walking the earth and to be doing so in the relative wonderland of Rego Park, Queens.

Slightly drunk off a frisky Clos Du Val pinot noir, which I’ve been sipping along with another helping of Wagyu, I can’t help myself. I begin clapping too, mouthing the lyrics “Forgif me, Deelaila, I jas’ kudn take anymorr.” In my high spirits, I take an affectionate look at my surroundings. The Four Seasons is a fine choice of hotel for my task. The lobby is filled with Russians, trendy grandmas sparkling from head to toe in Louis Vuitton and Chanel, guiding their equally gilded granddaughters past an enormous Christmas tree. The view from my room faces the nearly completed 432 Park Avenue, a 96-story luxury condominium building, which will be one of the tallest habitable towers in Manhattan (apartments start at nearly $17 million). If I had checked in for New Year’s Eve 2015, by which time 432 Park Avenue is expected to be complete, some of the tenants staring back at me would very likely belong to the class of Russian oligarchs who have helped transform the real estate in London, and now in New York, into the priciest on earth.

Keith follows Russian TV closely, and he has noted a shift in the last few years. “You’re watching the news, but the news is the news. Not from the information they’re giving you but from how they’re presenting the information. You feel like it’s a message being sent to you by the Kremlin.”

As the television drones on about the glory of Russia-backed rebels in Ukraine, he asks me if I’ve heard of the murder of Batman, an especially lawless rebel commander in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine.

“Apparently,” Keith tells me, “he was attacked and killed by Russian forces or other rebels because he was out of control.”

I snap open my laptop and take a look at the uncensored Russian websites. Batman’s murder is top news. The New York Times has already posted an article about Batman’s demise. The only places where he’s not mentioned are Rossiya 1, NTV and Channel 1.

After Keith leaves, I focus on the Christmas service, currently reverberating live across two networks. There are blue-eyed women in kerchiefs, bearded priests in gold, gusts of incense. From the proceedings at the ornate Cathedral of Christ the Savior, we suddenly cut to a small, humble church in an equally small and humble town to the south of Moscow.

Dressed in a simple sweater, his gaze steady and direct, Vladimir Putin celebrates the holiday surrounded by several girls in white kerchiefs. In the solemn act of religious contemplation, Putin’s expression is as unknowable as ever. Here he is, the self-styled restorer of the nation. But who is he? We are briefly shown people in the back pews reaching upward, straining to snap a photo of him with their smartphones. We are told that children who are refugees from rebel-held Luhansk are staying on the grounds of the church. The Kremlin has given them “candy and historical books” for the holiday. Are the girls in white kerchiefs standing next to Putin the very same ones who had to flee the violence his regime has backed, if not itself unleashed, in Ukraine?

Putin stands there, the centerpiece of his tableau, a contented man. Therein lies the brilliance of Russian television and why watching a week of it has been so painful. Unless you’re a true believer, its endless din just reminds you of how alone you are in another man’s designs. That man is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. These are his channels, his shows, his dreams and his faith.

On my last visit to Moscow several years ago, a drunken cabdriver from a distant province drove me through the city, nearly weeping because, he said, he was unable to feed his family. “I want to emigrate to the States,” he said. “I can’t live like this.”

“You should try Canada,” I suggested to him. “Their immigration policies are very generous.”

He mock-spit on the floor, as he nearly careened into the sidewalk. “Canada? Never! I could only live in a superpower!”

It doesn’t matter that the true path of Russia leads from its oil fields directly to 432 Park Avenue. When you watch the Putin Show, you live in a superpower. You are a rebel in Ukraine bravely leveling the once-state-of-the-art Donetsk airport with Russian-supplied weaponry. You are a Russian-speaking grandmother standing by her destroyed home in Luhansk shouting at the fascist Nazis, much as her mother probably did when the Germans invaded more than 70 years ago. You are a priest sprinkling blessings on a photogenic convoy of Russian humanitarian aid headed for the front line. To suffer and to survive: This must be the meaning of being Russian. It was in the past and will be forever. This is the fantasy being served up each night on Channel 1, on Rossiya 1, on NTV.

A generation from now, Channel 1 news circa 2015 will seem as ridiculous as a Soviet documentary on grain procurement. Young people will wonder at just how much nonsense their parents lived through and how, despite it all, they still emerged as decent human beings. As for me, I am escaping from Russia once more. Three satisfying clicks of three Samsung remotes and my whole week fades to black.

Gary Shteyngart is the author of “Little Failure,” a memoir, and the novels “Super Sad True Love Story,” “Absurdistan” and “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page MM118 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth’. Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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