Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Peter Pomerantsev was born in 1977 in Kiev, Ukraine. He has written for London Review of Books, Newsweek, Le Monde Diplomatique, El Pais, and Internationale. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. It won the Royal Society of Literature 2016 Ondaatje Prize in the UK.
He has worked as a consultant for the EU and World Bank on development projects in Russia.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
The new Russia has caught on to the West, adopting its language of democracy and capitalism, all while still state-controlled as it has moved from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich, declares Pomerantsev. The son of Russian émigrés, raised in England, a self-described third-rate assistant to others' projects, Pomerantsev returned to Russia to work in the fast-growing television and film industry. With little to recommend him other than having lived and worked in London, he was given enormous power and entrée to observe Russia's propaganda machine. He chronicles encounters with leggy blondes studying at gold-digger academies, gangsters turned television producers, legions of expats returning to make money, and international development consultants evangelizing on behalf of democratic capitalism but blind to the realities of the new Russia. Pomerantsev offers a scathing and totally engaging portrait of corruption and illusion in a place of gangsters and glitterati, of sudden dizzying oil wealth, numbing old poverty, and the same old politics wrapped up in exciting new packaging.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist