The only Kremlin official Pomerantsev analyzes in detail is Vladislav Surkov, the man who has "directed Russian society like on a great reality show." The author has written extensively about him in his journalistic work, but in "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," Surkov's rise from the head of PR at Ostankino under the "then grand vizier of the Kremlin court, Boris Berezovsky," to Putin's "gray cardinal" is just as surreal as the Siberian gangsters Pomerantsev films. Neither does the author name the propagandists who orchestrate the show - they are just "the men in Ostankino," a reference to Moscow's Soviet-era headquarters of state broadcasters, now transformed into a glittering TV empire "the size of five football fields that is the battering ram of Kremlin propaganda." Ostankino's power grows steadily throughout the book, as it sucks more producers and journalists - many of them Russia's finest - into its orbit, slowly killing Russian journalism.
In a country where even the critics are created by the Kremlin, this Orwellian image is far more frightening than his name. But he never calls Putin by his name, referring to him instead as "the president." "Created from a nobody, a gray fuzz via the power of television," Pomerantsev writes, "the president is at the center of Moscow's fake reality." The reader feels Putin's presence throughout the book. The author shows how everything in Russia is directed from the top downward. But there is no evading the Kremlin in Moscow. While his editors demand that he find "happy" or "uplifting" stories, Pomerantsev looks behind the screen and finds suicidal supermodels in mysterious sects and revolutionary oligarchs who long for their uncomplicated provincial childhoods.Īs President Vladimir Putin's grip on Russians tightens, Pomerantsev's bosses increasingly ask that he steer clear of politics. But, as the author discovers, there is a dark side.
He finds a world where "everything is PR" and where "effectiveness becomes the raison d'etre for all." At first glance, this may seem bearable, harmless - at times, even a strength. Through a series of vignettes, Pomerantsev illuminates a society obscured by lies. The result is a book that reads like a film. And its people reciprocate: They have become actors in the state's masquerade. Television "is the only force that can unify and rule and bind this country," British producer and journalist Peter Pomerantsev says in his superb debut book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," which follows the author's decade-long career in factual television set against the backdrop of Moscow's mega-rich parties, Siberian gangster cities, North Caucasus villages, London courtrooms and New York penthouses.Īt the center of the book is a state that can mold itself into any system it likes: democracy, oligarchy, dictatorship.
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