Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible – A Brilliant Discourse on Russia’s Fake Democracy

“In a country of nine time zones, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific, comprising one-sixth of the world’s land mass, where television is the only force that can unify and rule and bind – the great battering ram of propaganda couldn’t possibly ever rest.”

Peter Pomerantsev is a Kiev-born British Journalist, who having graduated from a film school in London started working as a producer for Russian television from 2001. His decade-long TV career in post-Soviet Russia that’s obsessed with ‘image’ is vividly detailed in his incredible collection of essays titled Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (published November 2014). Peter left Soviet Union at the age of two when his father Igor Pomerantsev, a novelist and radio broadcaster, was persecuted by KGB for proliferating anti-Soviet literature. After moving to West Germany, and later to London, Igor Pomerantsev started worked for the BBC World Service.

Peter produced documentaries and reality TV shows for TNT (owned by Russia’s natural gas giant Gazprom). It was the time Putin was consolidating power and Kremlin started utilizing television as the central tool for propagating authoritarianism. “And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: It will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment,” writes Peter. Through a series of vignettes exuding novelistic effervescence, the author meets interesting subjects from different rungs of the social ladder – from prostitutes, naive supermodels, gangsters to suave millionaires and political technologists. Through inquisitive and humanist examination of their lives, Peter looks beyond this simulacrum of the new Russia. 

Earlier in the book, Peter calls Putin’s Russia, ‘a sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends’. Although Kremlin power-circle perfectly mimics the operating procedures of a Western democracy, the system is entirely built on lies, tyranny, and repression. And it is the duty of Russian television networks to peddle alternative realities to the public which either manufactures delusions of grandeur or blames everything on religious, ethnic minorities and Western powers while always stoking the fires of nationalism. In this new Russia, the critics of government are created by the government itself. The master plans by Kremlin to keep the opposition within a ‘manageable’ spectrum are something even George Orwell couldn’t have imagined (“The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd…The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside its walls.”)

Although the book shines a light on the fake realities inside Putin’s Russia, Peter does this by wearing a humanist lens. If you seek a thorough report on the unimaginable corruptive nature of Kremlin, it’s better to read Steven Lee Myers’ The New Tsar or Bill Brower’s Red Notice (or Mikhail Zygar’s All the Kremlin’s Men which I haven’t yet read). He rather studies the Russian psyche that has been molded by the system from the days of Stalin’s purge, perestroika to Putin’s oligarchy. Even though he is not a Svetlana Alexievich to artfully construct the original voices of the subjects, Peter is very empathetic to his subjects. His humane descriptions reminded me of the poignant Russian stories of Anthony Marra in 'The Tsar of Love and Techno'.

The book opens with the devastating tale of a cheery, undaunted 22-year-old Oliona, a beautiful girl from the ‘Gold Digger Academy’. Oliona ran away from her native Ukrainian mining town to Moscow in search of a better life. She worked as a stripper, and before long she attended the gold digger schools with an ambition to become a mistress to one of the ‘Forbseses’ (billionaires in the Forbes rich list). Oliona acknowledges that her shelf life is not long as she has to compete with angelic 18-year-olds. Dinara is from Chechnya and works as a prostitute. When she wonders how Allah will judge her, Peter empathetically (and ironically) replies, “I’m sure Allah keeps things in perspective.”

Peter’s portrait of Russia shows how power and money is very centralized, while television keeps selling the people an idealized vision of moneyed society. The result is a population that keeps thinking it’s clever to do anything to achieve this idealized vision. Some like the super-models – Ruslana & Anastasia – Peter describes later in the book only discover the perversity and emptiness at the core of such idealizations. The path they seek to redeem themselves only happens to be more dangerous (caught under the influence of a lifestyle cult).  “Everyone is for sale in this world. Even the most ‘liberal’ journalists have their price,” writes Peter about this diseased Russia, making us deeply hope that these ‘effective’ strategies aren’t emulated by the sociopathic politicians across the world (or is too late to stop that infection?).

Say Nothing – An Immersive Account of Lives Caught in the Web of Violence and Political Skulduggery

“When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as ‘whataboutery’ took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.”

Investigative writer and staff writer at the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe’s narrative non-fiction, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (published February 2019) chronicles the complex and messy history of the bloody warfare in Northern Ireland with a great deal of clarity. Troubles is the descriptor of the brutal sectarian violence that haunted Northern Ireland in the late 20^th century. More than 3,500 people were killed during the Troubles and at least half of them were civilians. The Irish republicans/nationalists, predominantly Catholics (minorities), fought for a United Ireland (for the Northern Ireland to leave UK) whereas the Protestant loyalists were determined to keep Northern Ireland under British rule. The British government brought in the troops to serve as peacekeepers  although they ended up running their own campaign of terror by infiltrating IRA (the republican paramilitary organization that sough to end British rule in Ireland) and adopting other ruthless ways to curb the rebellion.

Patrick Radden Keefe looks at this most discussed conflict in modern history through the unresolved case of one victim. On one cold December night in 1972, 38-year-old Belfast resident, Jean McConville, a recently widowed mother of ten children living in the sprawling public housing complex, Divis Flats (described as the ‘slum in the sky’) was abducted by a gang of masked intruders. The neighbors in this overcrowded projects not only watched Jean's abduction with a air of indifference, but as one of her son says some of their neighbors were among the gang. Before leaving the house and getting into a van, Jean McConville put on her coat and said to one of her older kids, “Watch the children until I come back.” The missing mother’s bones were found on a beach in 2003. The human interest story of what happened to Jean McConville serves as  a entry point to this mesmerizing as well as devastating historical account of Troubles.

Patrick acknowledges that the key information related to McConville’s disapperance and murder emerged due to Boston College’s The Belfast Project, a controversial and aborted project which endeavored to curate an oral history of the Troubles, supposed to be accessed by students of future generations. For the covert project, the members of Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries were extensively interviewed with a promise that the tapes would not be released until after all the participant’s death. But when the existence of such a project was leaked, British government engaged in a lengthy legal dispute, demanding the Boston College to turn over the tapes since it might provide answers to unsolved crimes. But of course the Police Service of Northern Ireland and UK government’s generous commitment to see that the justice is served reeked of double standards and political intrigue.

The impact of Jean’s disapperance on the McConville children is explored alongside the complex lives of IRA members Dolours Price, Marian Price (the Price Sisters), Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams (people allegedly responsible for Jean’s murder), who were the chief architects of IRA’s violent resistance in the 1970s. Gerry Adams eventually transformed himself into a politician and became the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of IRA. After the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which ended the bloodshed (alongside the republican dreams of United Ireland), Adams was hailed in some quarters as the ‘Irish Nelon Mandela’. But he is also a most hated figure in some other quarters, christened as a traitor who betrayed the true republican cause. Adams is the most divisive and compelling personality in the history of Ireland, and Patrick offers a three-dimensional portrait of the well-known public figure, dispensing with the black-and-white narrative and retaining the many shades in between. It’s not just Adams, but Patrick’s portrayal of the Price Sisters, Brendan Hughes, IRA are neither positive nor negative.

Say Nothing is as multifaceted as a historical account can be. We may not condone the philosophical discourse offered by Dolours Price in choosing a particular form of violent resistance against the British imperialism (by planting four car-bombs near London’s government buildings which injured 250 people but, fortunately, caused no deaths).  But when you read the passages where the British government decides to force-feed her to break her hunger strike inside the prison (demanding to be moved to a Northern Ireland prison) you can’t stop yourself from getting enraged by such civil rights violations (despite the force-feeding, the strike lasted for 203 days and Dolours was eventually moved to Northern Ireland prison). Patrick transports us to the foul-smelling corridors of Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh prison (in 1981), chronicling how the moral dilemma of Brendan Hughes partly led to the wider campaign of hunger strike, spearheaded by Bobby Sands. Later, Dolours Price also reminisces on the martyrdom of Bobby Sands (after 66 days of hunger strike) and wonders if she has indirectly caused his death. The author presents each of these well-documented historical events from a unique perspective which befittingly complicates the moral dimensions. Say Nothing may offer some sort of emotional catharsis for the McConville family but post-confict reconciliation still remains a distant dream.

Patrick Keefe unremittingly captures all the complexities surrounding a historical account of armed insurrection, martyrdom, state-sanctioned terrorism, and societal repression. The lingering bitterness and agony in the aftermath of armed struggle, the fine art of political backstabbing, the atmosphere of silence and denial aren’t just relevant in the context of Troubles, but could be detected in any ethnic, sectarian conflicts happened/happening across the globe [Patrick rightly quotes Claude Levi-Strauss: “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic.”] Hence I recommend this narrative fraught with violence, betrayals and loss to anyone interested in history and politics.  

She Said – A Gripping Account of the Harvey Weinstein Scandal and its Enormous Impact

“The Weinstein Story was a solvent for secrecy, pushing women all over the world to speak up about similar experiences. The name Harvey Weinstein came to mean an argument for addressing misconduct, lest it go unchecked for decades, an example of how less severe transgressions could lead to more serious ones.”

On October 5, 2017, New York Times published a shocking expose of influential Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long history of sexual harassment, power abuse, and cover-ups. Times reporters’ – Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – relentless investigation of the Weinstein’s disgusting misdeeds (Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker also simultaneously broke the Weinstein story) among other things became the catalyst for #MeToo Movement, first on social media (millions of women shared their experiences of sexual harassment), and later led to protests, asking deeper questions about sexism, gender inequality in the contemporary workplaces and society. In She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, Kantor and Twohey chronicle how they set out to investigate Harvey Weinstein, highlighting how their investigative methods, free from sensationalism or ideological fervor, dealt the monumental challenges of ‘real reporting’.

The investigative reporters’ work was bestowed with 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. But Kantor and Twohey’s reporting, like every other news, did not happen in a vacuum. In fact, She Said opens with describing the stormy sociopolitical climate (following the 2016 release of Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s now-infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape) and the precedent set by Times’ Emily Steel and Michael Schmidt who published an investigative report on Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s history of sexual harassment. Megan Twohey has already worked on the story concerning Trump’s treatment of women and his tax history, whereas Jodi Kantor has reported on structural gender biases in the work places (particularly in the corporate culture).

Kantor writes that, “Gender is not a topic, but a kind of investigative entry point.” The entry point in the case of Harvey Weinstein is provided by actress Rose McGowan’s tweet (in which she alleged that she had been raped by a high-profile Hollywood producer; assumed as Weinstein). McGowan didn’t take the matter beyond the tweet, and some dismissed her as a failed actress trying to seek some attention. But even before McGowan’s tweet, there were rumors of the producers’ predatory, sleazy behavior. When Megan Twohey teamed-up with Kantor on Weinstein story, they tried to center their story on the horrific experiences the A-list stars such as Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow endured while working with the producer. The actresses were still uncertain about going on-the-record. But then Kantor and Twohey decided to broaden the scope of their story (on the insistence of their editor, Rebecca Corbett) by tracking down former female employees who worked at Miramax and TWC; the women who supposedly came in close contact with the producer’s ugly side.

As Kantor and Twohey collects stories of these women, a disgusting pattern seems to emerge. The assault follows with threats and payoffs. But although the reporters were made aware of gruesome accounts, they couldn’t report it, since they had no one on the record. The list of women abused by Weinstein was bound by confidentiality agreement. Some are just terrified by the prospect of standing against a powerful film producer. Soon, Kantor and Twohey themselves are warned of Weinstein’s mode of operation, whose clandestine tactics and team of fierce lawyers do everything in their power to stop the story going public. In this process, the Times reporters learn how the wealthy repeat offenders like Weinstein exploit the weak sexual harassment laws. The journalists observe that, “Some advocates for women profit from a settlement system that covers up misdeeds.” Even female lawyers who are supposed to be the defenders of women’s rights are proven to be part of this system that aids high-profile abusers (silence in exchange for money).

She Said excels in offering a blow-by-blow account of how the reporters gradually pieced together all the evidence – from on-record testimonies of abused women sharing their experiences to including all the incendiary E-mail and legal documents. The persistent yet delicate tactics Twohey and Kantor employs to persuade the women to come forward is also impressively noted. The most thrilling parts of the book involve the journalists’ & editors’ confrontation with unruly Weinstein and his suave lawyers. In one episode, we read the showdown on phone between Weinstein and Times executive editor, Dean Baquet. By the end of this exchange, it’s made clear that the producer’s years of bullying and harassing is coming to an end (although it can’t be surely said if he is ever going to spend some time behind bars). She Said, however, doesn’t end with the beginning of Harvey Weinstein’s downfall. It goes beyond chronicling the nuts and bolts techniques of investigative reporting and looks at the huge social impact of the story Kantor and Twohey broke.

In the third half of the book, the reporters jump to Christine Blasey Ford story. Mrs. Ford reported an alleged high school sexual attack on her by Supreme Court judge nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who eventually was confirmed in office. Although Kantor and Twohey only reported the Ford story from a distance, they offer a detailed account of how the events unfolded. This might be less compelling compared to Weinstein allegations, but the authors include the event to fit into the timeline, which starts with Trump, Bill O’Reilly and culminated in #MeToo Movement. Kantor and Twohey also addresses the backlash the movement received after it was labeled as ‘witch-hunt’ directed against men. They emphasize on the need to verify and check the allegations (a sort of structural change in the workplaces), and how the movement has become extremely divisive (“In a way, those who felt #MeToo had not gone far enough and those who protested that it was going too far are saying some of the same things: There was a lack of purpose or clear enough rules. The public did not fully agree on the precise meaning of words like ‘harassment’ or ‘assault’, let alone how businesses or schools should investigate or punish them.”)

She Said has a kind of cathartic epilogue which focuses on the gathering of 12 women who had been part of Twohey and Kantor’s reporting at one time or other. The gathering takes place at actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s house. Former junior employees in Weinstein Company and McDonald’s worker Kim Lawson are part of this small circle. The episode wasn’t as strongly written (the authors hint at the obvious class differences of the women), but it stresses on the need to displace the culture of secrecy and compliance through simple communication and upholding a sense of camaraderie.