In the new Russia, 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 glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, … 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.
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This book is a hard look at modern Russia from a former documentarian. It covers everything from cults, to the failure of the rule of law, to poverty, to hazing, to bribery, to compulsory military enlistment. An amazing and detailed look into the dark heart of a modern kleptocracy.
Winston Churchill famously called the Soviet Union “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”Opaque was the typical description for the black box of the USSR; many an intelligence analyst made a career of charting the ups and downs of high Soviet government officials by seeing where they stood on Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square during the May …
A window into current culture and daily life in Putin’s Russia. Very surreal. Orwell is very much alive and well and living in Moscow.