This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

“The Cold War split global civilization into two alternative forms, both of which promised people a better future,” he told me when I interviewed him from the BBC’s studios. “The Soviet Union undoubtedly lost. But then, there appeared a strange Western utopia with no alternative. This utopia was ruled over by economic technocrats who could do no wrong. Then that collapsed.” In this identity and ideological flux, political campaigners in the West have ended up adopting strategies strikingly similar to Pavlovsky’s, though enhanced by social media and big data. “I think that Russia was the first to go this way, and the West is now catching up in this regard. In general, the West can be considered to follow a proto-Putinism of sorts,” remarked Pavlovsky, wryly. This is the great paradox of the end of the Cold War: the future, or rather the futureless present, arrived first in Russia. We in the West are just catching up. Maybe there’s a simple cultural logic at work here. If our own ideological coherence was based partly on opposition to the Soviet Union’s, when it collapsed, we inevitably would follow.