Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

by Peter Pomerantsev

“When my pupils go to Moscow they have people on the street tell them to go home. But yet we’re part of the Russian state. Not immigrants. So what does that mean: ‘go home’? Meanwhile there’s no work here for the young,” continued Anzor, “and only the Wahhabis spend time with them.”

Connection to «Talking to the Enemy»: this sets the stage for small-group self-radicalization.

“Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened.

“What is it you want from Moscow, Peter?” he asked me another time, as we were drinking bright blue cocktails. “Well, you know, it’s a booming city. It’s up and up and up.” “Only a foreigner can think that. This city devours itself.”

The city? No, the country.

Emile Durkheim once argued that suicide viruses occur at civilizational breaks, when the parents have no traditions, no value systems to pass on to their children. Thus there is no deep-seated ideology to support them when they are under emotional stress.

Russia was the bearer of a “vigorous messianic consciousness” rivaled only by the Jews. International communism was the most geopolitically ambitious expression of this idea: Moscow as the shining city on the hill of socialism, the churning forge of the new era to end all eras.

Shining city on a hill? In a dark mirror, the twins glared at each other.

Weitz is a leading member of the Night Wolves. There are five thousand of them in the country, five thousand Beowulf-like bearded men in leathers riding Harleys. It’s Weitz who has done most to turn them from outlaws into religious patriots, riding through Moscow on Harleys with icons of Mary the Mother, of God and Stalin.

The lost-in-new-wealth world of Moscow rises and blends with the sudden global money from all the emerging, expanding new economies. And the Russians are the pacesetters, the trendsetters. Because they’ve been perfecting this for just a few years longer, because the learning curve was so much harder and faster when their Soviet world disappeared and they were all shot into cold space. They became post-Soviet a breath before the whole world went post-everything.

Poor children. No mommy and no home to go back to. They can fly with Piotyr Pan and the fairy dust of money stolen from their delusional nation, but for how long?

their triumphant cynicism in turn means they can be made to feel there are conspiracies everywhere: because if nothing is true and all motives are corrupt and no one is to be trusted, doesn’t it mean that some dark hand must be behind everything?

This is, of course, where the United States is headed. Truth is no longer an existential need, so it is flying apart into fractal shards.