Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

by Peter Pomerantsev

‘Stability’ – the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the President is an enemy of the great god of ‘stability’.

‘Effective’, ‘stability’: no one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is ‘effective’, but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.

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.

London is the perfect home for money launderers: terrific lawyers to defend your stolen assets; great bankers to move them; weak cops who don’t ask where they came from.

“Well, if the money doesn’t go here it will go somewhere else”: well, here ain’t going to be here if you take that attitude, here is going to be there.