Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Peter Pomerantsev)

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev

A gonzo journalism account of early 21st-century Russia told by a documentary-television producer working in Russia during the time period for a television producer largely creating Russian versions of popular Western television.

Peter mixes general social commentary with journalistic portraits of friends that he makes during his time there (ranging from club girls looking to land a “Forbes” to street mafia members turned novelists to a local business owner caught in a proxy battle between government officials).

Peter paints a portrait of a Russia that is “some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.” He is in a position to understand, to a degree, the way that the media landscape is a battlefield of what he refers to as “political engineers” who use a “new type of Kremlin propaganda, less about arguing against the West with a counter-model as in the Cold War, more about slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside.”

This propaganda is everywhere in the media including in the bad ports of western sitcoms. It’s not clear to what extent people truly believe it and to what extent it’s understood that everyone must act as if it was true. Peter highlights a billboard advertisement as exemplary of this phenomenon:

Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it shows two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan “Life is Getting Better.” It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious, either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules).

[…]

The flip side of this triumphant cynicism […] is despair.

I find Peter’s account a compelling portrait of this culture of mish-mashed contradictions where the rules are constantly shifting but no one’s allowed to talk about it. His portrait is not a desperate one, which I think helps. He shows how many people, including himself for a time, are thriving in this environment rather than showing a scene of total misery and repression (although he certainly points to its existence in sections).

The gonzo component helps as throughout the book one is able to see him as in the mix, someone who is also profiting from the vast swathes of money being thrown around in the post-Soviet Moscow. The details from his life (like being worried about having enough money to bribe someone when many of his labyrinth of identity papers has expired) help make the world’s day-to-day experience more real.