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Peter Pomerantsev

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible Paperback – November 10, 2015

by Peter Pomerantsev (Author)

4.3 3,224 ratings

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A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of 21st century Russia, where 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 wild and bizarre 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.

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Editorial Reviews

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

"This is a gripping and unsettling account of life in grim post-Soviet Russia."―Washington Post

"A scintillating take on a twisted reality."―Prospect Magazine

"A patchwork tapestry that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief."―The Guardian

"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 Review

"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

"Enthralling... his exquisite rendering of mind-control techniques is chilling."―Times Literary Supplement

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

"Hauntingly perceptive and beautifully written."―New Statesman [UK]

"[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)

"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."
―P.J. O'Rourke, World Affairs Magazine

"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

About the Author

Peter Pomerantsev is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, an author and TV producer. He studies propaganda and media development, and has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He writes for publications including Granta, the Atlantic, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Politico, and many others. His first book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages.

Product details

Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1610396006
Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.64 x 8.25 inches; 8 Ounces
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 10, 2015
Publisher ‏ : ‎ PublicAffairs; Reprint edition
Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1610396004
Release date ‏ : ‎ November 10, 2015

Best Sellers Rank: #175,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #39 in Russian & Soviet Politics
- #98 in Human Geography (Books)
- #204 in Russian History (Books)

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nadin abbott

this is a must read

Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2023

Verified Purchase

If you want to understand Russia in particular, and the role of propaganda in general. Ostenkino and Fox work the same way. We are becoming a kind of a nation where reality does not exist either.

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2023

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This 10 year old book reviews the state of Russia 10 years ago. I don't want to toss any teasers at you. If you are interested as to how Russia changed over the decades, grab this book. It is spellbinding.

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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.

40 people found this helpful

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Boomerbroadcast

sad, evocative and sobering

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2015

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Pomerantsev was born in Russia and moved to England as a child with his family. Working in broadcasting in the U.K. gave him the kind of experience Russian television was looking for when the iron curtain fell. Western cultural ideologies and practices found an entirely new audience in the millions of Russians who wanted to embrace this insurgence of new ideas. Taking this experience to Moscow where he lived for nine years, he worked originally for light-hearted local television, then later for Ostankino, the Kremlin’s official mouthpiece. What he found in his former native land was at times hilarious, sad, evocative and sobering. He describes the work of Golddigger Academies who offer classroom-style training for beautiful young Russian women on how to attract rich men to sponsor their lifestyles of nice apartments, glamorous clothes and financial security.

Russia’s attempts to embrace and emulate everything western has resulted in varying degrees of success and failure. As a broadcaster/producer, Pomerantsev describes the colossal failure of his attempt at a Russian version of Dragon’s Den or The Apprentice. After decades of Communism, corruption and graft, viewers and participants had no conception of western-style business philosophy based on hard work, market research, customer service and supply and demand. Accustomed to simply buying what they were told to buy and paying whomever and whatever they were told to pay without any consideration for market conditions, the Russian viewers simply could not comprehend the entrepreneurial concept. In fact, their entire value system is very different from our own.

Teaching Russians the capitalist principles of business resulted in growth industries in business training and education. Even the scary and questionable Western organizations like LifeSpring that were popular in the 80s gained a strong foothold as people experimented with new philosophies. The Rose of The World is based on LifeSpring and a modification of an earlier Stalinist personal growth and development program with incremental levels of training and financial outlay required to evolve into the perfect person (sound familiar?). Members are humiliated and intimidated into increasingly more controlling “personal training” and is considered by many to be a dangerous cult. Russia is also rife with racism and prejudice against segments of their own population.

In their enthusiasm to embrace everything western, Russia has undergone a circle of trial and error leading up to Putin’s current backpedaling toward old-style Communism. And like the ancient Egyptians, Russians systematically destroy physical and psychological evidence of previous rulers and governments to proclaim the virtues of the latest flavour-of-the-month running the country.

Throughout these transitions, however, the one constant is corruption. No one trusts the system and everyone is always looking over their shoulder to protect themselves. Former Russian crime bosses and oligarchs have been replaced by Putin’s appointees who are once again the official manipulators and rapists of the system. Organized crime bosses have expanded outside Russia to the U.K., United States and other countries where their activities are legitimized through laundered businesses and enterprises. Pomerantsev describes hyper-projects such as the Russian Winter Olympics in Sochi. At $50 billion “the project cost $30 billion more than the previous summer games in London and five times more expensive than any Winter Olympics ever”. The extra money is siphoned off to benefit and enrich those individuals and organizations loyal to the Kremlin bosses.

My quest to become better informed about Russia and to better understand its people was somewhat satisfied but at the same time, having finished the book I know I would never like to live there although I definitely would like to visit. The country and its people are fascinating, fallible and functioning under a set of principles completely different from how we live life in the west. Many of their more unsavory characters are infiltrating western business and cultural practices and our law enforcement agencies are constantly monitoring their movements and activities. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible is a fascinating read and while it did satisfy some of my curiosity it also heightened my quest to learn even more. It was an amazing book and I highly recommend it.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Norman Housley

A society in meltdown

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 1, 2023

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Pomerantsev’s collection of essays about Putin’s Russia forms a handy companion volume to Kapuscinski’s masterly book about the last years of Soviet Russia, Imperium (1993). Like Kapuscinski, Pomerantsev makes effective use of the reportage technique of letting the experiences of individuals act as entry points to the discussion of dominant trends, either because they shape those trends or because they are its victims. So what has changed in Russia? In many respects very little. Both authors tell a bleak story of corruption, the abuse of power for personal ends, twisted judicial processes, phenomenal waste and environmental degradation. The major change is that the stale, grey ossification of the decaying Soviet system has been replaced by a frantic, kaleidoscopic hedonism. Pomerantsev’s title is an apt summary of the ‘triumphant cynicism’ he depicts, in which moral values have disappeared and PR is all. Most of his book is gripping, though it runs out of steam in the third part, when Pomerantsev is treading more familiar ground.

One person found this helpful

Ralph Blumenau

Putin's Russia: sinister, slippery and corrupt

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 12, 2015

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This is a series of devastating and brilliantly written vignettes of Putin’s Russia. The author is a TV journalist whose parents left the Soviet Union for England in 1970 and who made documentary programmes for the Russian television channel TNT for nine years from 2002 onwards. After describing the glitz of modern Moscow (throughout the book he describes the ever changing architecture of Moscow as symbolizing many characteristics of Putin’s Russia), he begins with showing how Putin’s television differs from its Soviet predecessor: it is just as much concerned with control, but avoids the deadly boredom of the latter by mixing it with western-style entertainment.

The worship of money is everywhere. He visits a course specifically designed to teach young women how to attract super-rich sugar-daddies known as “the Forbes”; they in turn regard the gold-diggers as “cattle”. Many advertisements recruiting young women specify that they must be “girls with no complexes” - i.e. who are prepared to pleasure their employers or clients. He interviews Oliona, one of these girls, at length.

Next he interviews Vitaly, a remarkable gangster turned film-maker of realistic and popular gangster films in a Siberian town which he runs. He is as open about his philosophy and activities as Oliona was. But then the government wanted up-beat films (something Pomerantsev is also under constant pressure to produce), and Vitaly turns to writing - one book satirizing the gangster state that Russia had become. (Russian TV encourages social satire, so long as noone is actually named.)

He describes the way the Kremlin runs apparent opposition parties who are given just enough scope to make general criticisms, but are never allowed to point to the corruption that prevails everywhere. They are manipulated by Vladislav Surkov, the eminence grise and PR man of the regime. He had been the PR man who built up Mikhail Khodorovsky, then for Boris Berezovsky, then for Putin as Putin exiled Berezovsky and jailed Khodorovsky. (Pomerantsev has no sympathy for Berezovsky: his television channel had turned Putin “from ‘grey moth’ into macho leader” and had invented the fake political parties which Surkov took over.) In earlier years Surkov had been a brilliant impersonator of a series of characters, and he has sublimated this skill in promoting all these different and apparently mutually contradictory attitudes in public life. In that, he represents all those individuals who manage to combine liberal attitudes with service to fundamentally illiberal institutions without believing in either. Nothing is consistent, everything is mutable except for the puppet masters, the manipulators. As for truth, forget it: nobody expects the government to tell the truth, so it might as well tell lies that it doesn’t expect anyone to believe (e.g. that Russian troops played no role in the events in the Crimea or the Ukraine)

Pomerantsev tells the story of a woman who runs a business making making industrial cleaning agents. Someone probably wanted to take over her firm; in any case FDCS, the Drug Enforcement Agency, accused her of selling the liquid as a narcotic; she spent seven months in prison without bail. But there was a turf war between the FDCS and the FSB (formerly KGB), and the FSB backed human rights demonstrations on her behalf, and she was released on bail and subsequently acquitted. Pomerantsev was allowed to make a TV documentary about “the bottom-up campaign against corrupt bureaucrats” - as long as he did not mention the role of the FSB or its rivalry with the FDCS. This rivalry had been encouraged by Putin, who subsequently sacked the heads of both organizations.

Bribery is rampant in Russia: to pass driving tests; to appease the traffic police who have claimed, often falsely, that you have infringed some regulation; to evade conscription and, if that hasn’t worked, to avoid being posted the Chechnya or sometimes to avoid being beaten to a pulp by earlier recruits.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many cults and sects sprang up. After describing one such and the devastating effect it had on two young women, Pomerantsev provides a short history of other such sects, some of them religious, messianic, picking up on the slavophiles of the 19th century. One of these cults sees no contradiction in glorifying both God and Stalin - and it is patronized by Vladislav Surkov!

Back in London Pomarentsev made a nine-part TV series called “Meet the Russians” in which he anatomizes the wealthy Russians who have bought up so much of London property, football clubs, newspapers and even some politicians. And a similar story can be told about Russians in other countries. In the process of making the TV series, he meets people who try to secure posthumous justice for Sergey Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who exposed some of the corruption sanctioned by the highest people in the Kremlin and who was arrested, tortured and killed. But when Pomarentsev wants to include that story in “Meet the Russians”, the British editorial producers cut that material - just as Russian editors would have done.

69 people found this helpful

Uf

Youngsters who wanna be spy

Reviewed in Spain on April 24, 2023

Verified Purchase

Waste of time, suitable only for youngsters who wanna be spies in a fantasy world.

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.

Boingboing

The Beautiful and the Damned

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

Hidden amongst Peter Pomerantsev's collection of musings on the state of modern Russia, between the tales of mind-blowing corruption, control and egotism, you'll find some stories that really are heart-breaking. The beautiful young women throwing themselves off high buildings because they can't live up to standards imposed upon them by a cult, the businesswoman locked up for trading an innocuous substance that somebody in a ministry has just decided is to be viewed as a drug, and the young soldiers heading for Chechnya but more afraid of the treatment they're receiving INSIDE the army, all will leave you with a terrible sense that nothing really changed when the USSR became Russia again. The leaders remained corrupt, the secret services stitched up random people at the bidding of others, and human rights abuse didn't go away - it just changed. We read of people trying to stop the new Moscow developers from flattening everything that was ever beautiful, of obscenely rich dilettantes dressing up and playing silly games, horrifying racism and of the role of the media in telling the little people what the big people want them to believe.

Pomerantsev has a privileged position as an outsider who's not completely outside due to his Russian origins but western up-bringing. Anybody willing to reveal this New Russia, and doubly so anybody happy to mention Stalin and Putin in the same sentence, must spend a lot of time looking over their shoulders both at home and in Russia.

Amazingly, it's also a very readable book

4 people found this helpful

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