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

by Peter Pomerantsev

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

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?

But look underneath the Kremlin’s whirligig, and don’t you see the most precise, hard calculations? For if one part of the system is all about wild performance, another is about slow, patient co-optation. And the Kremlin has been co-opting the West for years: “The English likes to make fun of us,” said a Kremlin tabloid after Meet the Russians was released, “but is it prepared to lose our investments?”