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Peter Pomerantsev

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia Hardcover – November 11, 2014

by Peter Pomerantsev (Author)

1,230 ratings

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In the new Russia, even dictatorship is a reality show.

Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship—far subtler than twentieth-century strains—that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.

When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system.

Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

PublicAffairs
Publication date

November 11, 2014
Dimensions

6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1610394550
ISBN-13

978-1610394550
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2014: When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90s, the West rejoiced with the relief that came with the end of the Cold War and the possibility of an era of peace and cooperation. At the same time, its corporations and conglomerates trained a beady eye toward its newly opened markets, and a seemingly virgin economic landscape soon became home to icons such as Coke and McDonalds and Levi’s. But the door was open wide, and tagging along with big business were some seedier characters: organized crime, a youth-and-glamour-obsessed oligarchy, and an entertainment complex hungry for the new concepts of its Western counterparts. That’s where Peter Pomerantsev comes in. Born in Kiev but raised in Great Britain, Pomerantsev returned to Russia as a consultant to its burgeoning film and television—especially “reality” television—industries. What he found was a capitalist’s wet dream: an unfettered cash and service economy with no apparent limits on cash or available services--one where everything is possible, if you can pay for it. At the top of it all sits Vlad Putin, infusing the old TASS tactics with Hollywood flair to create a vision of a bare-chested (bear-chested?) virility and power, of both self and state. Pomerantsev finds himself gazing deeper into this looking-glass world—willingly and otherwise—and he finds it impossible to look away, as will his readers. This is not your father’s Russia, and yet it kind of is.--Jon Foro

Review

Shortlisted for the 2015 Guardian First Book Award
Longlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize
An Amazon.com Best Book of the Month, November 2014

“Captivating…keen observations”—New York Times Book Review

“Sparkling collection of essays”—Wall Street Journal

“Enthralling… his exquisite rendering of mind-control techniques is chilling.”—Times Literary Supplement

“This is a gripping and unsettling account of life in grim post-Soviet Russia.”—Washington Post

"Brilliant collection of sketches...powerful, moving and sometimes hilarious"—Washington Times

“Hauntingly perceptive and beautifully written”—New Statesman (UK)

“A patchwork tapestry that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.”—The Guardian

"[A] tale of descending into and eventually emerging from Moscow's hallucinogenic reality.”—Foreign Affairs

“[A] riveting, urgent book ... Pomerantsev is one of the most perceptive, imaginative and entertaining commentators writing on Russia today and, much like the country itself, his first book is seductive and terrifying in equal measure.” —The Times (UK)

“A scintillating take on a twisted reality”—Prospect Magazine

“Everything you know about Russia is wrong, according to this eye-opening, mind-bending memoir of a TV producer caught between two cultures… the stylish rendering of the Russian culture, which both attracts and appalls the author, will keep the reader captivated.”—Kirkus, STARRED

"Sometimes horrifying but always compelling, this book exposes the bizarre reality hiding beneath the facade of a ‘youthful, bouncy, glossy country.'"—Publishers Weekly

“It is hard to think of another work that better describes today's Russia; Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible may very well be the defining book about the Putin era. This might seem like excessive praise for a relatively short, non-academic memoir by a reality-TV producer now living in London, but it is justified by the author's gimlet eye and reportorial skill."—Commentary Magazine

“A brilliant, entertaining, and ultimately tragic book about not only Russia, but the West.”—Tablet Magazine,

“This is the strangest book of note I have ever read… a dark and grotesque comedy of manners… His reporter's straightforward and unlimited curiosity, his willingness to plow and harrow the widest fields for facts, and his exacting descriptive details give him credibility. Plus, what he tells us is so incredible.” —World Affairs Journal

“A riveting portrait of the new Russia with all its corruption, willful power and spasms of unforgettable, poetic glamor. I couldn't put it down.”—Tina Brown

“Peter Pomeranzev, one of the most brilliant observers of Putin's Russia, describes a country obsessed with illusion and glamor, but with a dangerous, amoral core beneath the surface. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible is an electrifying, terrifying book.”—Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag and Iron Curtain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ PublicAffairs; 1st edition (November 11, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1610394550
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1610394550
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #639,777 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #274 in Russian & Former Soviet Union Politics
- #1,162 in European Politics Books
- #1,590 in Russian History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
1,230 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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Terrifying

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 4, 2022

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Peter (locally pronounced Piiiitr) is working for an "independent" Russian TV channel. Raised in the West by emigrated Russian dissident parents, he is an asset-a Western media graduate who speaks perfect Russian. He looks for stories ("always look for positive, happy endings") for reality series. That's how the book is constructed, as a series of storyboards. Each providing a narrow but in-depth glimpse into Russian reality. And the surreal content is giga-scary because it is real indeed. The ex-con would-be movie writer and producer, who graduated from running the mob that runs an entire provincial city, including the cops, courts, bureaucrats, you name it. The owner of a chemicals import business who gets arrested for seven months without bail for importing and selling ether. The classification rules were changed overnight from a basic chemical reagent to abuse narcotic. Why? A certain division of security services decided to take over the chemical industry - that's where the money is. Young women who migrate from the former Asian republics to Moscow. Better a "pros-ti-tu-te" than a rabid Islamic candidate for a suicide bomber. And so on and so forth, very well written in perfect idiomatic English but replete with the unique Russian cadence. And the background - to create an impossible web of fake facts, fake news, inverse truths, imaginary friends of the system, imaginary enemies, unreal ever-changing reality that all serve as a background and the fodder for the President and his temporarily powerful cronies and game-pieces. When the Russian cauldron is bubbling, ever-threatening to boil-over, those with quick wits and thick skins can dip a hand and fish for tasty morsels. Instant young millionaires and billionaires-from amoral regime functionaries and clerks, all the way from ex-cons to Kremlin. Does the West know? For sure, but how to refuse the laundered investments? No way! Samuel Butler published in 1872 "Erewhon", a fictional description of a fictional country in which everything is the other way around. In Erewhon you can get imprisoned for getting sick or having been robbed. You're paid to pretend to work. "Erewhon" is a brilliant and caustic spotlight on human duplicity and bigotry, but it's imaginary. To-day's Russia is "Erewhon" reality cubed. And this is led by people who have their fingers millimeters away from the world's enormous thermonuclear arsenal button. Scary? Terrifying? You bet! But what did scare me more than anything was the thought the this book might be as fake, imaginary untrue, agenda-driven as the world it described. It could be Putin, by convoluted logic, who promotes this picture of himself and his Russia. Why? Perhaps in ten years we'll find out, or perhaps never. And even scarier thought - is our "Western Democracies" reality unreal and fake? In ten years we may find out. Or not. A must for those that want to stay awake night after night.

3 people found this helpful

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Philip L. Tudor

Please Read This Book If You Want An Entertaining Primer On Modern Russia

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2015

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I hope this book has a lot of sales, not only to reward the author for a first class job, but also to give the reader an inside, and immensely entertaining, look at the cogs that make the Russia machine work.

Peter Pomerantsev was a producer for a Russian television station which gave him an inside pass to virtually anyplace he wanted to go in Russian culture, with the exception possibly of Putin's office (but Pomerantsev gets pretty close to there also). For those who have never seen Moscow, the author has the ability to make you feel you are in all parts of Moscow, usually its most expensive highrise center closest to the Kremlin, then past the endless concentric circular freeways around the center but further and further away from it, where you at last end up way out in the suburds in the muddy polluted yard of a complex of iconic Soviet block slum apartments and charmless cheaply made office buildings.

But the essence of the book is not the author's expert setting of the scene, its the inside look at how the society functions: the opposition political parties paid for and directed by the Kremlin; the male dominated world of the oligarchs living grandly off the graft, corruption and theft of the national assets, with how much any particular oligarch gets determined by how close he or she is to the Kremlin. Then, right when you believe you know how it all works, you meet a millionaire who earned his money honestly in the confusion of the conversion to "capitalism" (in quotes because Russia really only barely looks now like a capitalist state on the surface), who became legitimately terrified of being killed by customers on his accounts revievable list.

Then there are the women. The wives of the oligarchs seldom spend time in Moscow. They are living an exquisite jet set existence with a primary base in London, while the husbands toil away stealing in Moscow living in penthouses of new luxury highrises with littered halls. The wealthy wives have reason to worry about what their husbands are doing alone in Moscow, as the husbands are not alone. There is a whole cottage industry of mistresses who trot from oligarch to oligarch as their sugar daddies tire of them, and learn their skills at places such as "Golddiggers' Academy." One step down from the mistresses are the bar prostitutes who do the best when they don't look like prostitutes.

Pomerantsev shows us the active self help industry such as the US had in the late Seventies and Eighties (remember "EST"?), and how it caused the death of two supermodels. He also surprisingly shows Russia's domination of the international modeling industry.

What is certainly a wake up call is Pomerantsev's descrption of traditional "Russian values" in a very new state. He explains first off, that Russia has no positive role models to use as national historic heroes. After all, even Peter the Great was a tyrant who killed thousands building St. Petersburg. Now, the Putin supported values are racism directed towards anyone not pure Slav white, dangerous homophobia accompanied by torture, and supposedly Russian Orthodoxy though hardly anyone goes to church (with the exception of the biker gang Putin belongs to - the "Night Wolves."

The author also describes the latest hassle for the wealthy. When you are an oligarch in Russia, you really never own anything inside Russia, because the prevailing winds of favoritism in the government change constantly. Also, Russian oligarchs have learned their lesson from the aristocrats who brought back all their foreign invested money to Russian before WWI and the Revolution, and ended up penniless. Thus, there is a mad rush by oligarchs to invest as absolutely much as possible out of the country. Now, however, with the economy spinning out of control and sanctions with asset freezes, Putin has made it illegal to transfer any money out of Russia. Not only was a similar strategy used on a volunteer basis right before WWI, but this was also the rule of law in apartheid South Africa, and was a huge disinventive for whites to emigrate.

Pomerantsev is scared that Russia is a vision of the future and appears to see it growing in power. I disagree. The impression I got of the Russia Pomerantsev shows was of a skyscraper standing on an extremely shaky foundation.

25 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

JaguarJon53

Through a window, a glimpse of why Russia is what it is

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 29, 2017

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This is an enthralling wander through some aspects of Russia not usually seen. The book's title is apt - it's not just a matter of substance that makes Moscow 'real' but the hallucinations that are more real than the bricks and mortar.
The author spent the best part of a decade in Russian TV which has given him special insight into what amounts to the filming of a fiction of a fiction masquerading as fact.
The people he knows are from different walks of life, friends as much as subjects. Their stories light the scenes of role playing, decay and epic scale corruption. Some thrive, some just survive; a few don't. The feel of it all is a bit like Otto Dix's Berlin in the '20s and '30s. It's a truly scary place.
What comes across is a society which has mutated into a full-blown kleptocracy ruled by a dictator and a handful of gangster oligarchs with ever-shifting rules where law and bureaucracy are weapons in a never ending struggle for supremacy. You can never be sure which way is 'up' or rather 'out' as huge fortunes shift across the world to London and New York.
Given the current debate over the degree of penetration of the US government by Russia, now is a great moment to read this highly entertaining book.

19 people found this helpful

Adrian J. Smith

Hypernormalisation 2.0

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 25, 2018

Verified Purchase

A more correct title would be adventures among modern Russians, as opposed to adventures in Modern Russia, as the exploration main concerns social phenomena emerging in both Moscow and overseas Russians in London, but within the Russian land does not extend beyond Moscow. So those hoping for a wider panorama of Russian life may be found wanting, however, the work in itself is quite a neat little volume.
One is immediately reminded of the term Hypernormalization (popularized by Adam Curtis) when Pomerantz opens with the analogy of Russian politics as a reality TV show, and how nothing makes sense any more, if indeed, it ever did. However, Putin and his political connections play a very minor role, the book concentrates on the Russian nouveaux riche, and other social phenomena from the unhappy lives of Russian models to bizarre, cult like self help courses which take place in Moscow's All Russia Exhibition Center.
The overall message of Nothing is Real and Everything is Possible is that Russia has been overwhelmed with a sense of delirium, a kind that has taken people to a feeling beyond cynicism.
Overall, a concise and readable account of the negative social phenomena in modern Russia.

8 people found this helpful

North Yorkshire

When Russia got stuck in the 80s for 30 years

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 26, 2022

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The author talks us through his time as a TV producer in Russia after the end of Communism. He presents Russian society as feeling the need to catch up with the West but instead of reading through long and boring textbooks they just went straight for all the sensationalist pulp (Hello magazine, true crime, spoon-bending psychic power, macho sci-fi, and err the London property market), and they took all their lessons from there instead.

I imagine a near similar book (based upon selective case studies) could by written about the US and (in a more downbeat key) the UK. But, Pomerantsev is putting forward the view that this is more the official culture in Russia, rather than a subculture. It is readable and well-crafted - those documentary-maker skills show through. If you haven't already, though, I would read his more recent book first.

Shopaholic

Unconvincing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 14, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is quite an entertaining book, but after a few chapters it becomes somewhat repetitive, and begins to lack credibility as a result. The author paints a picture of a vast and sophisticated nation in the grip of a surreally omnipotent propaganda machine, in the total absence of any consistent legal system, with all dedicated and candid leaders of any field of endeavour invariably frustrated in their efforts to report their work. Readers are likely to emerge sceptical as to whether this is compatible with the same author having spent a decade of a successful career as a TV journalist within that environment, and wondering about his motives for writing in this way.

9 people found this helpful

Fonaweb

Amazing insights with literary flair

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 17, 2015

Verified Purchase

Very impressive - couldn't put it down. The heart of darkness is pretty dark - but not just in Moscow. If you live in London today and you kind of feel that something isn't quite right but you can't quite put your finger on what it is, the last chapter here will give you the answer. Pomerantsev's chilling judgement that the Russian new elite (and not just the Russians but all the new rich from emerging markets) aren't here or in Paris because they don't like being Russian or Chinese and really want to be "English" or "French". On the contrary, they are creating a new political-economic environment with sheer weight of cash, not adapting to what is here already. If you don't believe it, try buying a house in a central London postcode right now or check out the UK rich list. The fact that this is what's happening is a damning indictment on us, not them.

19 people found this helpful

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