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

by Peter Pomerantsev

In this new world no one knew quite how to behave: all the old Soviet role models had been made redundant, and the “West” was just a story far away. But the gangsters had their own prison code, which had survived perestroika. And this made the gangsters more than just feared bullies. They were the only people in this lost, new Russia who knew who on earth they were and what they stood for. And now in the twenty-first century, although many gangsters were out of a job, their way of behaving has become ubiquitous.

This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.

The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with twentieth-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.

How can you believe in anything when everything around you is changing so fast?

Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act.

Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose.

Russian literature and thinking brims with the messianic. Dostoevsky’s heroes profess that Russians are the only “God-bearing people” and that the second coming of Christ will take place in Russia.

It’s as if the only way the city can make sense of itself is in the messianic; it has to envision itself as the place of the great battle of good and evil.

Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the “transition” between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the final decades of the USSR no one believed in communism and yet carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations.

All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.

It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you’re always split into little bits and can never quite commit to changing things.