Gangsters turned artists and Pushkin-spouting gold-diggers in a bleakly entertaining chronicle
The war in eastern Ukraine, rumbling into life once more after the collapse of an unsteady ceasefire, has created a widening breach between Russia and the west, with relations now worse than they have been in decades. In Russia, the hardening of the domestic consensus behind Putin has been helped along by the media’s increasingly strident nationalism, and by a propaganda chorus about western plots to undermine and destroy the country. The Kremlin’s control of the airwaves has been central to this effort; indeed, the capacity to bend public perceptions has been an integral part of Putin’s rule since he first came to power 15 years ago. But although his PR gurus have proved adept at blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, they didn’t create the widespread disorientation on which Putinism thrives. As Peter Pomerantsev’s new book makes clear, it has much deeper roots, in the tumult and delirium of the country’s post-Soviet transformations.
Pomerantsev, born in the UK to Russian émigré parents, spent almost a decade in Moscow working as a TV producer, making documentaries and reality shows for Russian audiences. He arrived in the early 2000s, in the midst of an oil boom that brought a measure of prosperity to many and huge wealth to a select few, creating a tidal wave of glitz and extravagance, especially in the capital. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an entertaining if at times bleak chronicle of these years, depicting a world “where gangsters become artists, gold‑diggers quote Pushkin, Hells Angels hallucinate themselves as saints”. The cast of characters is so bizarre they must be real, from bearded nationalist bikers to self-help cultists and their supermodel victims. (Pomerantsev tells us that while only 15% of the world’s oil comes from the former USSR, it accounts for half the catwalk models in Paris and Milan.) We also meet Vitali Dyomochka, a Siberian hoodlum turned cineaste. Dissatisfied with the quality of crime dramas on Russian TV – “it was all fake” – he took to making his own series, giving starring roles to several of his henchmen. There were no scripts, stuntmen or makeup: “all the blood you saw on the screen was real”, Pomerantsev writes, adding that “the guns and bullets were all real, too; when they filmed a shoot-’em-up in a bar the place was wasted”. Djomochka allegedly got the series broadcast by getting his goons to threaten local TV stations; needless to say, it was a huge hit.