The book:
This month’s choice is a foray into 21st-century Russia. A country that has had more than it’s fair share of less-than-democratic forms of rule, Putin’s Russia is no stranger to scrutiny – but Peter Pomerantsev’s account is still thrilling and terrifying.
Born in Kiev and raised in England, Pomerantsev lived and worked in Moscow as a television producer before becoming a journalist in Britain. His experience in reality TV in Russia mirrors the illusions peddled across the country by its media. Revealing bizarre and surreal characters in a dizzyingly corrupt and cynical system, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible reflects the reality of an idiosyncratic modern Russia. The brilliant stories encountered are highly entertaining and eye-openingly troubling.
Through these stories, Pomerantsev’s journey illuminates the deeper and more sinister nuances of post-Soviet Russian life and the influence, both obvious and surreptitious, that Putin and Russia have in Europe.
What the Guardian thought:
In Russia, the hardening of the domestic consensus behind Putin has been helped along by the media’s increasingly strident nationalism, and by a propaganda chorus about western plots to undermine and destroy the country. The Kremlin’s control of the airwaves has been central to this effort; indeed, the capacity to bend public perceptions has been an integral part of Putin’s rule since he first came to power 15 years ago. But although his PR gurus have proved adept at blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, they didn’t create the widespread disorientation on which Putinism thrives. As Peter Pomerantsev’s new book makes clear, it has much deeper roots, in the tumult and delirium of the country’s post-Soviet transformations.
Pomerantsev, born in the UK to Russian émigré parents, spent almost a decade in Moscow working as a TV producer, making documentaries and reality shows for Russian audiences. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an entertaining if at times bleak chronicle of these years, depicting a world “where gangsters become artists, gold diggers quote Pushkin, Hells Angels hallucinate themselves as saints”. The cast of characters is so bizarre they must be real, from bearded nationalist bikers to self-help cultists and their supermodel victims.
“Stability” was one of the watchwords of the 2000s in Russia, supposed to convey a sense of calm after the upheavals of the 1990s. But what Pomerantsev describes is actually another period of dramatic change, most visible in the frenetic remaking of Russia’s urban centres. He calls Moscow “a city living in fast-forward”.
The feeling of constant flux goes far beyond the architecture, though. For Pomerantsev, it’s the product of recent history: Russia, he writes, “had seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression – from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich – that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable”. As Pomerantsev points out, one key to the success of this new authoritarianism is that “instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting them and rendering them absurd”.
Tony Wood - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy by Bill Browder
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The Snowden Files by Luke Harding
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The Man Without a Face: The unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen
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