posted on 03 Sep 2019

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev

In aristocratic circles and amongst the families of landed gentry, the practice of sending one’s daughters to finishing schools prior to them being presented at court and ‘coming out’ as debutantes in fashionable society existed for several centuries. Indeed, in this country the practice of being formally presented at court ended only in 1958 when Queen Elizabeth II abolished the ceremony.

While dressed up in all kinds of social and class convention, this ‘finishing’ of young women was really about securing them a good marriage and a place in upper class society. We should perhaps not be surprised to find that in modern Russia, with an impeccable sort of gangster-capitalism logic, a similar practice has been reborn in the form of ‘gold digger academies’ – tuition colleges for women seeking to find themselves a ‘sponsor’, a millionaire (or better, billionaire) oligarch who will set them up for as long as their looks and sexual allure last. These men are known colloquially as Forbeses – for obvious reasons – and a generation of young women now exists in Russia that regards the pursuit of Forbeses as a valid career choice. The collapse of communism seems to have led seamlessly to the ultimate commodification of relationships.

This is the story that opens Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, his exposé of the bizarre hall-of-mirrors world of Putin-era Russia.

Pomerantsev is a TV producer living in Russia during the early-2000s – I’m guessing but I think the period covered comes roughly up to about 2008 or so – and it is his experience of working in the margins of reality-TV and documentary-making that provides the book’s insights. But ultimately, I think, it is also the weakness of the book. It begins in something approaching a methodical fashion – an investigation of various cultures and sub-cultures – but the last third or perhaps quarter of the book seems to lose this forward momentum. It becomes more autobiographical – his career is failing; he can’t come up with the stories or formats the TV channel he works for needs, while also meeting its insistent demands for ‘positive stories’. Back home in London, he finds that the worst and trashiest excesses of Russia’s super-rich are now on his own doorstep.

Don’t get me wrong: this does make for fascinating reading, although by comparison with Russia’s more recent and much darker excesses – its black propaganda and troll factories, its Novichok poisonings, its election tampering, its toxic manipulation of social media platforms, the annexation of Crimea – the targets seem rather soft.

We read about the Siberian gangster who knows nothing about film-making beyond what he teaches himself, but who makes a rather successful six-hour mini-series about gangsters – but with real guns, real blood, real violence, real car crashes and real gangsters.

There is the 23-stone 11-year old schoolboy – the biggest child in the world – who is his mother’s golden ticket for a better future, even as he is gradually being killed by his voracious appetite and addiction to junk food. An even fatter boy emerges in Mexico and the TV appearances and media coverage dry up and he is forgotten.

There are the two sisters from the North Caucasus, one a prostitute and one a ‘Black Widow’ – a jihadist suicide bomber who dreams of being sent on a Moscow mission. But it has a happy ending: the Black Widow also becomes a prostitute.

Our rather tame spin doctors and political fixers and éminence grises – say, Blair-era Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson, or Dominic Cummings from Boris Johnson’s – are rank amateurs when compared with the new Russia’s ‘political technologists’, such as Vladislav Surhov, the “privatiser of the Russian political system”, as he describes himself. He and others like him have the power to reinvent political and social reality, to make the fake real and the real fake. “The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism,” Pomerantsev says, “is that instead of simply oppressing opposition…it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.”

Surhov, for instance, funded civic forums and NGOs, producing a spurious ‘civil society’ that would help convince Eurocrat consultants that Russia was well on the way to democracy and free organisations. He then funded nationalist movements to accuse the civil society organisations and NGOs of being tools of the West, promoters of decadence and weakness and homosexuality. He funded lavish art exhibitions by the most extreme of modernist artists, while also funding Orthodox religious fundamentalists to attack the exhibitions.

The Kremlin’s aim, Pomerantsev makes clear, is not just to determine the nature of political reality but to “own all forms of political discourse” and at times the book reads as if a bunch of wildly inventive Situationists are running amok with state funding. There is Sergey Kalenik, for instance, freelance PR specialist and the hipsterish young leader of a pro-Kremlin youth movement called Nashi, and himself a protégé of Vladislav Surhov’s. “Politics,” says Kalenik, “is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status". Chillingly amoral as this may be, one imagines that it is a sentiment that the likes of Tony Blair and Nick Clegg might both find agreeable. (In the latter case especially so, as Kalenik has also said: “I’m a liberal…it can mean anything.”)

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible lifts the dusty stage-backdrops and gives us a bewildering – and frankly terrifying – glimpse of what makes these particular marionettes dance. Its weakness is that in focusing on the bizarre (but perhaps the bizarre is all that exists?) it runs the risk of seeming a ragbag of the exceptional (darkly funny as this sometimes is). It also already seems a little dated (it was published relatively recently in 2015, but as Pomerantsev notes, Moscow is a city living in fast-forward).

Nonetheless it is an important book and gives more of a sense of the lived texture of life in Putin’s Russia than can be gained from news coverage alone. It may well be that Pomerantsev’s latest book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, is both more fully realised and more politically important. I shall certainly read that too.

 

Alun Severn

September 2019