I fear that
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of
the New Russia by Peter
Pomerantsev (Public Affairs, 2014, 254 pages, $25.99/14.49) will not
be widely enough read nor deeply enough covered by the main stream
media to have it gain the sort of attention it deserves. This is an
important book presenting the world of contemporary Russia in all the
vivid complexity and corrupt duplicity which everyone should be aware
of and seek to bring to heel. Since Russia is a land working without
a moral compass, a place where how things look and are presented have
become reality for those living and working there, its ability to
morph to meet current circumstances and to insert itself into
supposedly sacrosanct institutions in the “free” world like
London banks, world fashion, film, and the NBA always gaining power
and weakening free institutions, appears inevitable and almost
unlimited. Pomerantsev, a documentary film maker, worked for Russian
TV during the first decade of this country, writes with cinematic
vigor and intense personal detail, using the reality of his subjects
to document the moral and spiritual corruption of Russia's recovery
from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin's emergence
as a new and ever more powerful twenty-first century dictator
committed to restoring Russian power and influence.
Pomerantsev
is a British journalist/film maker of Russian heritage who spent a
decade mostly in Russia working as a producer for Russian TV network
TNT, which is one of Russia's top five television networks
specializing in portraying a light and humorous view of life. During
his years in Russia, Pomerantsev produced a series which profiled the
lives and experiences of the rich and glamorous Russians who emerged
on the world scene among the beautiful and powerful people. His
profiles of individual lifestyle and fashion leaders become
increasingly dark as Pomerantsev realizes he's participating in
helping create a vision of beauty, success, and happiness in a world
dominated by corruption, greed, and an ethic emphasizing that PR, how
things appear, eventually becomes the reality the masses believe in,
masking the real abuses of freedom, power, expression, and liberty
now dominating the reality of Russia and finding their greatest
expression in the annexation of Crimea and the current efforts to
reclaim ethnic Russian portions of the Ukraine. Perhaps the most
frequently used word in the entire book is “corrupt” and its
variations.
In
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,
Pomerantsev describes the constant remaking of Moscow, historic
buildings and neighborhoods torn down to replace them with series of
cheesy upscale high rise towers mimicking the posh buildings of
Paris, London, New York, and Monte Carlo. Young entrepreneurs, often
former gangsters, live in luxury while always on the edge of having
it all pulled out from under them if they stray too far from the
currently emerging version of 21st
century Russia. The power of Pomerantsev's writing lies in the vivid
profiles he writes of a number of representative individuals who
become metaphors for the corruption of the whole. He pictures
unbelievably beautiful Russian girls who've come to Moscow to find a
“Forbes” (rich business men who will enter their lives and make
them over). Fueled by sex and booze in Moscow's steamy night spots,
the girls, who are known as “cattle” to the Forbses, make
themselves fully available and are cast aside when the next one comes
along. He profiles Vitally, a former gangster whose school was
prison. Vitally rises and falls at the Kremlin's will, but he is a
chameleon whose colors change fast enough for him to, perhaps,
survive. This isn't a portrait of a country in transition, but some
sort of post-modern dictatorship using the language and institutions
of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends. The horrors of
double think and double speak bring Orwell's 1984
to life a generation after the year has passed.
Ruslana Korshunova
It may
be that the most remembered part of this book will be the profile of
supermodel Ruslana Korshunova and a cultish organization called Rose
of the World, which promises new recruits a total remake of their
lives as they gain control over themselves. Using group dynamics
techniques which those familiar with the human potential movement in
the U.S. during the sixties spawned, particularly a similar cult
called est or Erhard Seminars Training offered by Werner Erhard and
quite popular during the seventies, Rose of the World promised to
help participants gain control of their own lives and those of others
through intensive and harrowing workshops. Pomerantsev discovers
this cult-like movement while investigating Korshunova's unexplained
suicide in Manhattan soon after her participation in a series of
workshops in Moscow. The susceptibility of post-Soviet Russia to
salvation by cultish devotion centered on a prophet, coach, guru,
leader who presents adherents with “the answer” to the doubts and
fears plaguing them speaks volumes to the power of fundamentalist
religion and belief in other parts of the world. The power of
“optics,” how things look rather than how they are, is a central
feature of the rise of a sense of Russian purity and power in this
new world where public relations are more powerful than reality. The
awkward leaps across the fence after elections in our own country
mimic the kinds of changes typical in Russia today, and possibly
throughout its history.
Peter Pomerantsev
Peter
Pomerantsev is a TV producer and nonfiction author. His work appears
in The London Review of Books, FT, Newsweek, Le Monde
Dimplomatique, and other
publications. He spent a decade in Russia between 2001 and 2010/2011
as an international development consultant, film student, and
largely, a TV producer and director. He now lives in London and
continues to visit Russia regularly.
Nothing
is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New
Russia by Peter Pomerantsev
(Public Affairs, 2014, 254 pages, $25.99/14.49) provides a first rate
portrait of the Orwellian world that is contemporary Russia, written
with a clear vision of the social contrasts and mind-bending
contradictions between what seems and what is, who people say they
are and what they really represent, and how they represent themselves
in the kaleidoscopic world that changes every time the lens is
turned, even the slightest movement. The world of entrepreneurs,
oligarchs, politicians, and bureaucrats at the top of an
ever-changing pyramid of power and influence is one which truly needs
to be read and understood. Of course, Vladimir Putin does an
excellent job of making much of it clear in his absurd posturing. I
received the book from the publisher as an electronic galley through
Edelweiss and
read it on my Kindle
app.
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