The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

powerful combination, if you know how to use it.”
    “Precisely. Orwell wrote about it, back in the day.”
    Vadym ignores Orwell like another fart.
    “This is a very serious shift, Daryna. A historical one. The masses no longer choose an idea, or a slogan—they are choosing
a brand
. And they’re not doing their choosing rationally either—they vote purely with their emotions. Bread and circuses? Here you go—public politicking itself becomes a circus! What are presidential debates if not the same old gladiator fights? September 11 is the most successful reality show in history: every soul on Earth who could find a TV set watched it. Putin is a TV superhero now, and seventy percent of Russian women have erotic dreams about him. In Stalin’s days, they threw people in jail for dreams like that. A public politician today is a showman first and foremost, the registered trademark of the company behind him.”
    “And the company—who is that?”
    “A corporation of those who do the actual governing,” Vadym answers calmly. “The world has always been ruled by such corporations. Only the post-information society is much easier to rule than societies were sixty years ago. He who ensures the best show for the masses wins. He who, to put it bluntly, puts the picture into the TV. Meaning, ultimately, whoever has the most money. And that’s that.”
    “You really believe that?”
    Vadym smiles. He does have a really nice smile.
    “Believing belongs in church. And Daryna, I am used to dealing with things that are real. You just remember that history is made by money. That’s how it’s always been and will be.”
    An unpleasant chill begins to fill me, like in a dentist’s waiting room when I was little.
    “The Soviet Union had enough money to wipe its ass with it,” I tell him, mustering as much crudity as possible. “And fat lot of good it did them.”
    “Whoa there one minute!” Vadym exclaims, astonished. “Half the world under control—that’s not good enough for you? You couldn’t swing a dead cat in the twentieth century without hitting Soviet cash! Take even what happened in ’33—Stalin got the West right where he wanted them when he flooded the world market with all that genocidal Ukrainian wheat! And remember, it was the Great Depression—d’you think Roosevelt just happened to roll over and recognize the USSR exactly then? There’s your fat lot of good, right there. In ’47, Moscow sent grain to France in silk sacks, and French Communists waved those like flags at the elections: look how the working class in the USSR lives! All those Western Communist parties, leftist movement, terrorism, Red Brigades, all the rumbles in the third-world jungles—do you think it all fed and clothed itself? No, dear, the hand of Moscow could be very, very generous when it needed to be. And not a single peep from anyone—so, alright, they let a couple dissidents out, and maybe the Jews stood up for their own, but that’s it; that’s your entire Cold War right there...Americans can tell themselves they won it all they want since it makes them so happy—but they’re living in a fool’s paradise. In reality, if oil prices hadn’t collapsed in the eighties, and if the Politburo hadn’t started squabbling, you and I would still be living in the USSR. You can be sure about that.”
    He is talking like a sports commentator reflecting on the rise and fall of some team like Manchester United, and in that regard I also hear something else in his voice: the time-tested ardor of a soccer fan, a boy’s admiration for the forward—the same intonations with which old retired military remember the USSR. Thereare so many of them—people who are always ready to see all kinds of good in any crime as long as it goes unpunished.
    “That’s exactly what I am not so sure about.” For some reason, my voice goes low; shit, could I possibly be nervous? “I know nothing about any squabbling in the Politburo, but as far as I can tell, if one were to try to find a single reason for why the USSR collapsed, it was under the burden of its own lies. All of it, accumulated over seventy years. Because virtual reality—it is this thing, I’m here to tell you, that can hit back very hard if you play with it for too long. You can’t keep lying and maintain your own sense of how things really are at the same time. If you keep ordering a certain picture on TV, you eventually start believing it yourself. Inevitably. And