Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible Quotes

“Care stops at the threshold of your apartment. You lavish and stroke your personal world, but when you reach the public space, you pull on your war face.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“The Kremlin idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside its walls.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“Whenever I ask my Russian bosses, the older TV producers and media types who run the system, what it was like growing up in the late Soviet Union, whether they believed in the Communist ideology that surrounded them, they always laugh at me.
“Don’t be silly,” most answer.
“But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?”
“Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them. And then straight after we would listen to ‘Deep Purple’ and the BBC.”
“So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?”
“No. It’s not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There’s like several ‘you’s.”
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. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshiping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease—a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the “orthodox” oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism—and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“There is a spate of prime-time documentaries about "psychological weapons." One is The Call of the Void. It features secret service men who inform the audience about the psychic weapons they have developed. The Russian military has "sleepers," psychics who can go into a trance and enter the world's collective uncounscious, its deeper soul, and from thence penetrate the minds of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One has entered the mind of the US president and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the US had hatched has failed to come off. The message is clear: if the secret services can see into the US president's mind, they could definitely see into yours; the state is everywhere, watching your every thought.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“That unique Moscow mix of tackiness and menace. One time I see a poster advertising a new property development that captures the tone nicely. Got up in the style of Nazi propaganda, it shows two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan "Life is Getting Better". It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it's not quite serious either. It's sort of both. It's saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we're just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we're making money playing it and won't let anyone subvert its rules).”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“In the twenty-first century the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk on which were phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. 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. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern art exhibitions. 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.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“And though Russia does officially have a free market, with mega-corporations floating their record-breaking IPOs on the global stock exchanges, most of the owners are friends of the President. Or else they are oligarchs who officially pledge that everything that belongs to them is also the President’s when he needs it: “All that I have belongs to the state,” says Oleg Deripaska, one of the country’s richest men. 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.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“- Hogy van a húgod?
- Jól - mondta Dinara. - Jól.
- Még mindig vahhabita?
- Annak a rémálomnak vége. Hazamentem, és meggyőztem, hogy jöjjön ide hozzám. Hál' istennek, imádja Moszkvát, már nem érdekli a dzsihád. Most már együtt dolgozunk, mindketten pros-ti-tu-ál-tak vagyunk.
Dinara nagyon örült. Hál' istennek. Végre egy happy end.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“At the front door I pat my trouser pocket to check for the thin outline of my passport and realize it’s not there. Always the passport, always the “dokumenti!” You can get stopped and checked for papers at any moment. It might only actually happen once or maybe even twice a year, but you still have to stand in queues and knock on doors to obtain the whole library of little stamps, regulations, permits—the legal stipulations and requirements that are themselves always changing. A little trick to keep you always on tenterhooks, always patting your pockets for your papers, always waking up worried that you might have lost them in a bar. Over time you begin to pat for the passport instinctively, your hand going down unthinkingly to check your pocket so many times a day you don’t even notice any more. That’s true power—when it starts to influence the unconscious movements of your arms.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. 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 himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“A megvesztegetés bizonyos fokú fineszt igényel. Az oroszoknak több szavuk van a kenőpénzre, mint az eszkimóknak a hóra. A kedvenc szófordulatomat használom:
- Élhetek ezzel a lehetőséggel, hogy kifejezzem az önök iránti tiszteletemet?
- Hogyne élhetne - mondják a vérfarkasok hirtelen elmosolyodva, és becsúsztatják a pénzt a rendőrsapka alá. Másra sem vágytak soha, csak egy kis tiszteletre.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“Ostankino’s strategies became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hate-mongers were put on prime time to keep the nation entranced, distracted, as ever more foreign hirelings would arrive to help the Kremlin and spread its vision to the world.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“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.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present. As the President looks for a way to validate his own authoritarianism, Stalin is praised as a great leader who won the Soviet Union the war. On TV the first attempts to explore the past, the well-made dramas about Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, are taken off screen and replaced with celebrations of World War II. (But while Stalin’s victory is celebrated publicly and loudly, invoking him also silently resurrects old fears: Stalin is back! Be very afraid!) The architecture reflects these agonies. The city writhes as twentyfirst-century Russia searches, runs away, returns, denies, and reinvents itself. “Moscow is the only city where old buildings are knocked down,” says Mozhayev, “and then rebuilt again as replicas of themselves with straight lines, Perspex, double glazing.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“كيف تبنون تاريخًا قائمًا على نحر الذات والخيانة بدون توقف؟ هل تنكرون الأمر؟ أتنسونه؟”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“When Surkov finds out about the Night Wolves he is delighted. The country needs new patriotic stars, the great Kremlin reality show is open for auditions, and the Night Wolves are just the type that’s needed, helping the Kremlin rewrite the narrative of protesters from political injustice and corruption to one of Holy Russia versus Foreign Devils, deflecting the conversation from the economic slide and how the rate of bribes that bureaucrats demand has shot up from 15 percent to 50 percent of any deal. They will receive Kremlin support for their annual bike show and rock concert in Crimea, the one-time jewel in the Tsarist Empire that ended up as part of Ukraine during Soviet times, and where the Night Wolves use their massive shows to call for retaking the peninsula from Ukraine and restoring the lands of Greater Russia; posing with the President in photo ops in which he wears Ray-Bans and leathers and rides a three-wheel Harley (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler); playing mega-concerts to 250,000 cheering fans celebrating the victory at Stalingrad in World War II and the eternal Holy War Russia is destined to fight against the West, with Cirque du Soleil–like trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle reenactments, religious icons, and holy ecstasies—in the middle of which come speeches from Stalin, read aloud to the 250,000 and announcing the holiness of the Soviet warrior—after which come more dancing girls and then the Night Wolves’ anthem, “Slavic Skies”:
We are being attacked by the yoke of the infidels:
But the sky of the Slavs boils in our veins . . .
Russian speech rings like chain-mail in the ears of the foreigners,
And the white host rises from the coppice to the stars.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“On the Ostankino channels the President's personal confessor, the Archimandrite Tikhon, dressed in a long black cassock and walking through Istanbul, is telling a prime-time tale about the fall of Byzantium, of how the great Orthodox Empire (to which Russia is the successor) was brought low by a mix of oligarchs and the West. Professional historians howl in protest at this pseudo-history, but the Kremlin is starting to use religion and the supernatural for its own ends. Byzantium and Muscovy could only flourish under one great autocrat, the Archimandrite states. This is why we need the President to be like a tsar.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter?”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“You know, one of the problems I have living in London is that if I actually tell the truth about my story people just assume I’m lying. They never call me back.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“This is a new type of Kremlin propaganda, less about arguing against the West with a counter-model as in the Cold War, more about slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside. In the ad for Larry King’s show, keywords associated with the journalist flash up on screen: ‘reputation’, ‘intelligence’, ‘respect’, more and more of them until they merge into a fuzz, finishing with the jokey ‘suspenders’ (i.e. braces). Then King, sitting in a studio, turns to the camera and says: ‘I would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf. That’s why you can find my new show, Larry King Now, right here on RT. Question more.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

“At 5 a.m. the clubs get going properly; the Forbeses stumble down from their loggias, grinning and swaying tipsily. They are all dressed the same, in expensive striped silk shirts tucked into designer jeans, all tanned and plump and glistening with money and self-satisfaction. They join the cattle on the dance floor. Everyone is wrecked by now and bounces around sweating, so fast it’s almost in slow motion. They exchange these sweet, simple glances of mutual recognition, as if the masks have come off and they’re all in on one big joke. And then you realise how equal the Forbeses and the girls really are. They all clambered out of one Soviet world. The oil geyser has shot them to different financial universes, but they still understand each other perfectly. And their sweet, simple glances seem to say how amusing this whole masquerade is, that yesterday we were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems and thinking Levis and powdered milk were the height of luxury, and now we’re surrounded by luxury cars and jets and sticky Prosecco. And though many Westerners tell me they think Russians are obsessed with money, I think they’re wrong: the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal, not something to hoard and save but to twirl and dance in like feathers in a pillow fight and cut like papier mâché into different, quickly changing masks. At 5 a.m. the music goes faster and faster, and in the throbbing, snowing night the cattle become Forbeses and the Forbeses cattle, moving so fast now they can see the traces of themselves caught in the strobe across the dance floor. The guys and girls look at themselves and think: ‘Did that really happen to me? Is that me there? With all the Maybachs and rapes and gangsters and mass graves and penthouses and sparkly dresses?’ A Hero for Our Times I am in a meeting at TNT when my phone goes off.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

“Inside, the club is built like a baroque theatre, with a dance floor in the centre and rows of loggias up the walls. The Forbeses sit in the darkened loggias (they pay tens of thousands of dollars for the pleasure), while Oliona and hundreds of other girls dance below, throwing practised glances up at the loggias, hoping to be invited up. The loggias are in darkness. The girls have no idea who exactly is sitting there; they’re flirting with shadows.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

“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 synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment. Twenty-first-century Ostankino mixes show business and propaganda, ratings with authoritarianism. And at the centre of the great show is the President himself, created from a no one, a grey fuzz via the power of television, so that he morphs as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, businessman, spy, tsar, superman. ‘The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the President,’ TV producers and political technologists liked to”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

“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. For this remains the common, everyday psychology: the Ostankino producers who make news worshipping the President in the day and then switch on an opposition radio as soon as they get off work; the political technologists who morph from role to role with liquid ease – a nationalist autocrat one moment and a liberal aesthete the next; the ‘Orthodox’ oligarchs who sing hymns to Russian religious conservatism – and keep their money and families in London. All cultures have differences between ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

“Emile Durkheim once argued that suicide viruses occur at civilisational breaks, when the parents have no traditions, no value systems to pass on to their children. Thus there is no deep-seated ideology to support them when they are under emotional stress. The flipside of triumphant cynicism, of the ideology of endless shape-shifting, is despair. ‘When was the last time you spoke to Ruslana?”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

“А тим часом Кремль прив'язує людей до себе спочатку приниженням і знущанням з допомогою перевертнів у погонах і баронів-чиновників, а потім піднімає країну за допомогою дивовижних військових завоювань.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“And the argument I hear from everyone is “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.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

“May I use this opportunity to show a sign of my respect for you?” “Of course you may,”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“Lenin and Trotsky ripping up the memory of the tsars, Stalin ripping up the memory of Trotsky, Khrushchev of Stalin, Brezhnev of Khrushchev; perestroika gutting the whole Communist century .”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

“the true nature of time. The drama of human lives is written in the buildings. We will be gone; only places remain.”
― Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia