Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible

1,867 words

Peter Pomerantsev
Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible
London: Faber & Faber, 2015

Most people probably know the story of the Potemkin villages: When the Russian Empress Catherine toured newly-annexed Ukraine, Grigory Potemkin, her lover and the territory’s Governor, erected false villages and instructed men to act as peasants in order to deceive the Empress and the foreign ambassadors accompanying her about the region’s wealth. Whether the story is historically accurate is a subject of debate. The Wikipedia article mentions that Potemkin, being the Empress’ lover, was probably unable nor intended to deceive her. The dissimulative dwellings were probably erected for the benefit of foreigners, in order to make the Russian Empire appear stronger than it really was.

When I first picked up Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible, I ruffled through it, expecting a rather uninteresting read; iberal kvetching about authoritarianism and propaganda. Pomerantsev was born in Soviet Ukraine to a Russian-speaking Jewish family, but was raised in London, as his parents were émigrés. What I did not expect was a work that would finally help me to deeply and truly understand the story of Potemkin and the Empress, and the kind of world where it would even occur to someone to build a false village in order to simulate wealth. We are taken to Moscow as Pomerantsev saw it with his own eyes, during his period as a producer and documentary filmmaker in the 2000s, when he worked with Russian television channel TNT. At the time, they specialized in reality TV programs that had formats mostly imported from the West. As Pomerantsev observes, however, television is the great postmodern theater that unites the 143 million multi-ethnic, multi-confessional souls scattered across the Russian Federation, and is the only thing they all have in common. As such, it is central in its importance to the Kremlin, and always tightly controlled.

The world of Russian reality television is presented in the first part of the book. One constant refrain that the producers repeated is that they must have happy stories: The population needed to be entertained and given an escape from their drab existence. By seeing which programs were successful and which weren’t, we get a glimpse of ordinary Russians’ aspirations and the reality they lived in. A knockoff of The Apprentice was unsuccessful because nobody believed that hard work and innovation were the key to business success — and of course, they aren’t. In 1990s Russia, business success came from being in the mafia. In the 2000s and 2010s, it came from being close to the President, or at least a part of the Vertical of Power: Russia’s answer to the Great Chain of Being. This is the long, slimy trail of corruption which stretches from the Kremlin itself, with its fraudulent infrastructure projects and strip-mining of Russia’s natural resources; through the mid-level oligarchy, where money is made through tax rebate scams and the state’s arrest of competitors on bogus charges; to the lowliest policemen, who are dubbed “werewolves in uniform” by Moscow’s residents, accepting 500-ruble notes folded into papers they constantly demand from passersby.

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Western Civilization Bites Back here.

The most successful reality show was How to Marry a Millionaire (A Gold Digger’s Guide). Far from the image of tradition and piety that the Kremlin beams to the West’s impressionable dissidents, the reality of Russian womanhood involves a lot less child-rearing, domestic arts, or church-related activities and far more sunbed tanning, hair-bleaching, and sleeping with oligarchs in the galleries of exclusive clubs that operate precisely for the purpose of purveying young gold diggers, mockingly called cattle, to wealthy men, called Forbeses (after the magazine) or sponsors. The girls are not hookers, you see; they are being sponsored by the wealthy men who give them cars, apartments, and fancy clothes (which they retain ownership of and will take away when they get tired of the girl. In exchange, the girls sleep with them whenever it’s expected.

It may sound crassly materialistic, but that is not quite true. The central theme of the entire work is how unreal everything is; how everyone participates in an elaborate masquerade, knows it, knows it that everyone else knows it, and yet they all go along with it with a wink and a nod. Nothing is true and everything is possible. Naïve Westerners will say that Russians are obsessed with money, but Pomerantsev contends that money rushed into Russia so rapidly and suddenly that it looks unreal to the Russians themselves, as if it were fairy’s dust or fool’s gold. There’s not much separating the oligarchs and the gold diggers (who are definitely not prostituting themselves to them). All of them grew up poor in the Soviet Union, and all of them grew up wearing a false face, pretending to be good Bolsheviks in the post-Brezhnev state where nobody believed in Bolshevism anymore. The gold diggers know their sponsors could dump them at any moment, but the rich men themselves know that they could likewise lose their favor with the Kremlin, or be taken out by the authorities at the behest of a rival at any moment. Pomerantsev presents a world where everyone is dancing, laughing, and having a great time — or at least is pretending to — while standing on a marshland that could swallow them whole at any moment.

Crowning Act I is a profile of Vladislav Surkov, whose real name is Aslambek Dudaev. He is the Kremlin’s half-Chechen chief political technologist, a thoroughly postmodern figure who directs not only television and media, but also Russian political life as if it were an avant-garde theater play. He is behind, among other things, Nashi, the radical anti-fascist patriotic youth organization which was instrumental in stamping out Russian White Nationalism during the 2000s and 2010s, culminating in the arrest, torture, and murder of Maxim Martsinkevich Tesak. But it doesn’t end, or even begin, with Nashi. Surkov sets up organizations, news media, magazines, non-governmental organizations, political parties, and movements and directs them all to do this or that, all in the service of building up the image of Putin and Putinism, or to present a Potemkin political system to the West. Sometimes he lets it slip that he is behind this or that organization so that the Russian population starts believing that everything is postmodern theater, and that no political movements are genuine. That way, even if they do not like Putin or his acts, they trust no one who could challenge him and are thus depoliticized, turned into cattle who easily accept the current ruling class by default. Over time, they find themselves nodding along with the official story, which they know is false because Surkov’s postmodern theater has gaslit them into believing what they know is false.

The book’s main message is already clear in Act I: the dissolution of the very notion of truth in the midst of the impermanence of everything apart from the all-pervading President (who is never referred to by name), who is everything to everyone. The rest deals with the consequences. Act II speaks about what corruption looks like in practice. This includes the ongoing architectural self-mutilation to which Moscow subjects itself, as well as the annual draft and all the ways young men seek to escape it, because Russian patriotism is all for show and everyone knows that you’re likelier to get raped in the army than receive any useful training. It documents some ways in which the facade presented on state television occasionally cracks and reveals what Russia really is. It’s a worthwhile read for Westerners, but for me it is a painful reminder that the Communist criminal dynasties have not yet been rooted out of the Eastern state apparatuses. The West, for all its problems and decadence, is still a much better place to live than the benighted Orthodox part of the old Bolshevik occupation area.

In Act III we lean of the rise of the new religiosity, which is not an Orthodox revival as much as a resurgence of cults and sects: groups of lonely men and women sequestered from broader society and orbiting a charismatic leader. What begins as Pomerantsev’s investigation of Ruslana Korshunova’s suicide results in the uncovering of a “life training”-style cult, based on the defunct American Lifespring but reborn in a Russian context. We see in this chapter the psychological results of living in a society where nothing is true and everything is possible, and where the very possibility of truth is questioned. Pomerantsev ends the book with an indictment of a West that enables the corrupt Russian system and also the beginnings of the same epistemic nihilism taking root there. Indeed, the parts concerned with Korshunova’s suicide (Pomerantsev calls her Ruslana throughout, bringing her and her family vividly to life) and the self-improvement cult she was sucked into eerily resemble the recent proliferation of self-help and lifestyle gurus such as Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, or Bronze Age Pervert in the West. Tellingly, all three of these self-help grifters have been stalwart supporters of the Putin regime and enemies of the notion of Aristotelian truth. A does not equal A if your goal is to sell books and self-improvement courses to lonely and alienated young men.

Pomerantsev is obviously a liberal, but since the book was written in 2014, and thus before the rise of wokery in earnest, he does not hector the reader, nor try — ineffectually — to demonize conservatism in general by using his insights into Putin’s Russia as a means of demonizing his political opponents in the West. Rather, he contents himself with reporting facts, feelings, scenes, experiences, conversations, and moods. His prose is captivating and light, although one feels as if great truths are being revealed. He reads very much like a Russian author: Every word seems to have metaphysical undertones and tectonic meaning, even when he’s describing the banality of an obscenely rich tech bro’s fancy dress party.

What angers me as a nationalist and identitarian in the West, however, is that so many of the people who ought to be on our side and ought to know better, seeing as how they’ve rejected the Western propaganda matrix, have allowed themselves to be sucked into the postmodern theater of Russian propaganda. Some persist to this day, being willing or unwilling players in the recently-purged Surkov’s ongoing surrealist show. When I spoke to my friends about this book, one phrase kept cropping up in our conversations: “The liberals knew about this and they weren’t suckered in. We were, en masse.” In other words, we allowed ourselves to believe the great myth of Traditionalist Russia; the great myth of Holy, Orthodox, strong, masculine, etc., etc. Russia. We allowed ourselves to be stupid, and some have persisted in this error, compounding it with pride. We were a day late and a dollar short, or maybe the liberals were several steps ahead, but to introduce a third and viscerally effective metaphor, we screwed the pooch on Russia something fierce.

I strongly recommend Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible as an antidote to the mind-screw. You may have to read past his liberal biases, but there is much of value to be found in this artful deconstruction of the greatest Potemkin village the world has ever seen.

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