Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

This is a page-turner that I read in one go from front to finish. It reads like a thriller and keeps you hooked, although it is also a very serious analysis of contemporary Russia by one of the UK’s most skilled journalists and authors. It is as thrilling as it is frightening because there are so many signs that western countries are heading in a similar direction—a country that “is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away”, as Peter put it in one… show more.

Not a traditional history or political-science book, the London-raised Pomerantsev provides a series of telling vignettes, culled from his ten years of working as a television executive as part of the Kremlin’s state-run media. Through these stories, he conveys how the Russian state utilizes television propaganda to convey the image of competent political leadership, while smearing the opposition. The public largely understands that they are subjected to pro-Kremlin propaganda, leading people to adhere to different public and private notions of themselves. By convincing people that everything is “spin” or “PR”—either for or against the Kremlin—the entire notion of objective, knowable… show more.

With all the hype about Russian disinformation and propaganda these days, it’s worth asking just why they seem so good at it. In part it is because we are pretty gullible, but it is also because of the way Russians emerged from Soviet conformism into a surreal new world of fast money, post-modern politics and constant change, where politics was more like reality TV and yesterday’s conspiracy theory could be tomorrow’s fact. Pomerantsev, who worked in Russian TV in the wild nineties, presents a compelling and delightfully readable sense of quite how this created a world of fake politics and… show more.