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

by Peter Pomerantsev

Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression—from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich—that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable. “I want to try on every persona the world has ever known,” Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe would tell me.

The first thing the President had done when he came to power in 2000 was to seize control of television. It was television through which the Kremlin decided which politicians it would “allow” as its puppet-opposition, what the country’s history and fears and consciousness should be. And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment.

The journalists who cotton on to what is happening leave quickly, often keen to scrub RT out of their résumés. Some even resign or complain on air, saying they no longer want to be “Putin’s pawns.” But most stay: those who are so ideologically driven by their hatred of the West they don’t notice (or don’t care) how they are being used, those so keen to be on TV they would work anywhere, or those who simply think “well, all news is fake, it’s all just a bit of a game—isn’t it?”

The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

This is the genius of the system: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother, and your family become part of the network of bribes and fears and simulations; you learn to become an actor playing out his different roles in his relationship with the state, knowing already that the state is the great colonizer you fear and want to avoid or cheat or buy off. Already you are semilegal, a transgressor. And that’s fine for the system: as long as you’re a simulator you will never do anything real, you will always look for your compromise with the state, which in turn makes you feel just the right amount of discomfort. Whichever way, you’re hooked. Indeed, it could be said that if a year in the army is the overt process that molds young Russians, a far more powerful bond with the system is created by the rituals of avoiding military service.

Under siege from psychic spies and airborne fungi, audiences are kept in a constant state of panic and medieval ecstasies.

This struck my mother. She had always believed the stuff about the Soviet Union “liberating” Czechoslovakia. She believed the Soviet Union stood for global social justice. “You mean they weren’t happy to see you?” she asked. He looked at her like she was an idiot. Everyone who grew up in the Soviet Union had a moment when they woke up. That was my mother’s. And as she began to look at the world around her, she slowly saw how everyone was pretending, was faking belief, being one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon. But scared, too. Fear and irony together. And so many voices at the same time. One you in the morning at the Komsomol. Another you in the afternoon reading Solzhenitsyn. One you at work being a good socialist and another listening to the BBC in secret in your kitchen, yet everyone knowing you listened because they were all listening themselves.

But even when you know the whole justification for the President’s war is fabricated, even when you fathom that the real reason is to create a story to keep the President all-powerful and help us all forget about the melting money, the lies are told so often that after a while you find yourself nodding because it’s hard to get your head around the idea that they are lying quite so much and quite so brazenly—and at some level you feel that if Ostankino can lie so much and get away with it, doesn’t that mean they have real power, the power to define what is true and what isn’t? Wouldn’t you do better just to nod anyway?

Rather, the Kremlin has finally mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great, 140-million-strong population entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares, which if repeated enough times can become infectious. For when I talk to many of my old colleagues who are still working in the ranks of Russian media or in state corporations, they might laugh off all the Holy Russia stuff as so much PR (because everything is PR!), but 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?