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For a glimpse of the New New Russia—and its struggle to supplant the Old New Russia of a few years back—you could do worse than venture up to the deck of the O2 Lounge on top of Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel. Four years ago, when the club first opened, it was mostly empty except for a few prostitutes in glinting lamé and spiky heels. Today the hookers are gone, and though there are still a few archetypal Russian businessmen hanging around the O2 with their coltish model-wives, you’re more likely to run into hotel guests like Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in town for a tech talk.
Moscow is a city heading in opposite directions. Look southwest from the deck of 02 and there’s the tower housing RusNano, a $5 billion state-funded nanotech foundation that aims to foster “top-down innovation.” Not far from there is Digital October, part of a techie complex that features an art institute and bar, an outdoor amphitheater, and a nightclub named Progressive Daddy. These roughly reflect the priorities of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s current President, who has sought to diversify Russia’s oil-addicted economy and turn Moscow into a high-tech hub. Across the boulevard from O2 sits the Kremlin, which is determinedly heading into the past. On Sept. 24, Vladimir Putin announced that he, not Medvedev, will be the ruling party’s candidate for President in 2012, effectively ensuring his election. Putin could serve legally until 2024, which would tie him with Leonid Brezhnev and Joseph Stalin as the longest-serving Kremlin rulers who weren’t tsars appointed by God.
Moscow, accordingly, is divided into antipodal camps: Putin/Medvedev, Oil/Internet. There is one public figure who skates the line between them—someone who, though dismissed as a lightweight by many elites, is nonetheless a perfect encapsulation of Russia’s present contradictions. I persuaded that person to meet me on the O2 deck, though it didn’t go quite as planned. She is, after all, a former spy.
Here are some things I can tell you about Anna Chapman. Her hair is redder in real life than in photos, a brilliant Kodachrome blaze falling over her shoulders. I can tell you that she wore a cream-colored dress with a modest-length hem and a black sash belt. Chapman, 29, is also disarmingly attractive, not because of the dress or the hair, but because of the way she looks at you. Right in the eyes. Like she wants to, you know, connect.
She may have done unremarkable work back in the U.S. as a spy for Russia, but the woman the Russian media calls Agent 90-60-90 (for her measurements, in centimeters) is, somehow, everywhere. It’s been a little over a year since her return, a year of centerfolds, talk shows, and political rallies. The media, largely controlled by the authorities, still reports each of her many moves. Clearly the Kremlin has found her a useful hero.
Days after she was unmasked by the FBI along with nine other spies living as unassuming professionals in Boston, New York, and New Jersey and traded for four Russian prisoners on a tarmac in Vienna, Chapman received a hero’s welcome at the Kremlin. She and her fellow spies sang a patriotic song from the Soviet film Sword and Shield with Putin and, a few months later, were given medals by Medvedev. She was appointed to a high post in the ruling party’s youth brigades and was the subject of a fawning one-hour interview special on government-controlled Channel One. She attended an innovation forum led by Medvedev and showed up at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to cheer on a Russian rocket launch.
Chapman was in Baikonur because she had been hired as an “innovation consultant” by a little-known bank that specializes in financing Russia’s space industry and whose initials are, coincidentally, FSB, the same as those of the successor of the KGB. She did a lingerie-and-weaponry photo shoot for the Russian Maxim and another for the magazine Zhara (Heat). She even got her own show, Secrets of the World on Ren TV, one of the few independent TV stations left in Russia.
