Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev

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. 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. “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. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia All cultures have differences between “public” and “private” selves, but in Russia the contradiction can be quite extreme.” 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. 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. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. “So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?” And then straight after we would listen to ‘Deep Purple’ and the BBC.” “Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them.

“But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?”

“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.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev