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?).