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.
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