Explore the Unconventional Reality of Russia: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

Dick Tenerelli: This 10 year old book reviews the state of Russia 10 years ago. I don't want to toss any teasers at you. If you are interested as to how Russia changed over the decades, grab this book. It is spellbinding.

United States on Sep 11, 2023

Norman Housley: Pomerantsev’s collection of essays about Putin’s Russia forms a handy companion volume to Kapuscinski’s masterly book about the last years of Soviet Russia, Imperium (1993). Like Kapuscinski, Pomerantsev makes effective use of the reportage technique of letting the experiences of individuals act as entry points to the discussion of dominant trends, either because they shape those trends or because they are its victims. So what has changed in Russia? In many respects very little. Both authors tell a bleak story of corruption, the abuse of power for personal ends, twisted judicial processes, phenomenal waste and environmental degradation. The major change is that the stale, grey ossification of the decaying Soviet system has been replaced by a frantic, kaleidoscopic hedonism. Pomerantsev’s title is an apt summary of the ‘triumphant cynicism’ he depicts, in which moral values have disappeared and PR is all. Most of his book is gripping, though it runs out of steam in the third part, when Pomerantsev is treading more familiar ground.

United Kingdom on Jul 01, 2023

Uf: Waste of time, suitable only for youngsters who wanna be spies in a fantasy world.

Spain on Apr 24, 2023

North Yorkshire: The author talks us through his time as a TV producer in Russia after the end of Communism. He presents Russian society as feeling the need to catch up with the West but instead of reading through long and boring textbooks they just went straight for all the sensationalist pulp (Hello magazine, true crime, spoon-bending psychic power, macho sci-fi, and err the London property market), and they took all their lessons from there instead.

I imagine a near similar book (based upon selective case studies) could by written about the US and (in a more downbeat key) the UK. But, Pomerantsev is putting forward the view that this is more the official culture in Russia, rather than a subculture. It is readable and well-crafted - those documentary-maker skills show through. If you haven't already, though, I would read his more recent book first.

United Kingdom on Apr 26, 2022

Boingboing: Hidden amongst Peter Pomerantsev's collection of musings on the state of modern Russia, between the tales of mind-blowing corruption, control and egotism, you'll find some stories that really are heart-breaking. The beautiful young women throwing themselves off high buildings because they can't live up to standards imposed upon them by a cult, the businesswoman locked up for trading an innocuous substance that somebody in a ministry has just decided is to be viewed as a drug, and the young soldiers heading for Chechnya but more afraid of the treatment they're receiving INSIDE the army, all will leave you with a terrible sense that nothing really changed when the USSR became Russia again. The leaders remained corrupt, the secret services stitched up random people at the bidding of others, and human rights abuse didn't go away - it just changed. We read of people trying to stop the new Moscow developers from flattening everything that was ever beautiful, of obscenely rich dilettantes dressing up and playing silly games, horrifying racism and of the role of the media in telling the little people what the big people want them to believe.

Pomerantsev has a privileged position as...

United Kingdom on Sep 03, 2016

Boomerbroadcast: Pomerantsev was born in Russia and moved to England as a child with his family. Working in broadcasting in the U.K. gave him the kind of experience Russian television was looking for when the iron curtain fell. Western cultural ideologies and practices found an entirely new audience in the millions of Russians who wanted to embrace this insurgence of new ideas. Taking this experience to Moscow where he lived for nine years, he worked originally for light-hearted local television, then later for Ostankino, the Kremlin’s official mouthpiece. What he found in his former native land was at times hilarious, sad, evocative and sobering. He describes the work of Golddigger Academies who offer classroom-style training for beautiful young Russian women on how to attract rich men to sponsor their lifestyles of nice apartments, glamorous clothes and financial security.

Russia’s attempts to embrace and emulate everything western has resulted in varying degrees of success and failure. As a broadcaster/producer, Pomerantsev describes the colossal failure of his attempt at a Russian version of Dragon’s Den or The Apprentice. After decades of Communism, corruption and graft, viewers...

United States on Feb 22, 2015

Ralph Blumenau: This is a series of devastating and brilliantly written vignettes of Putin’s Russia. The author is a TV journalist whose parents left the Soviet Union for England in 1970 and who made documentary programmes for the Russian television channel TNT for nine years from 2002 onwards. After describing the glitz of modern Moscow (throughout the book he describes the ever changing architecture of Moscow as symbolizing many characteristics of Putin’s Russia), he begins with showing how Putin’s television differs from its Soviet predecessor: it is just as much concerned with control, but avoids the deadly boredom of the latter by mixing it with western-style entertainment.

The worship of money is everywhere. He visits a course specifically designed to teach young women how to attract super-rich sugar-daddies known as “the Forbes”; they in turn regard the gold-diggers as “cattle”. Many advertisements recruiting young women specify that they must be “girls with no complexes” - i.e. who are prepared to pleasure their employers or clients. He interviews Oliona, one of these girls, at length.

Next he interviews Vitaly, a remarkable gangster turned film-maker of...

United Kingdom on Feb 12, 2015

Philip L. Tudor: I hope this book has a lot of sales, not only to reward the author for a first class job, but also to give the reader an inside, and immensely entertaining, look at the cogs that make the Russia machine work.

Peter Pomerantsev was a producer for a Russian television station which gave him an inside pass to virtually anyplace he wanted to go in Russian culture, with the exception possibly of Putin's office (but Pomerantsev gets pretty close to there also). For those who have never seen Moscow, the author has the ability to make you feel you are in all parts of Moscow, usually its most expensive highrise center closest to the Kremlin, then past the endless concentric circular freeways around the center but further and further away from it, where you at last end up way out in the suburds in the muddy polluted yard of a complex of iconic Soviet block slum apartments and charmless cheaply made office buildings.

But the essence of the book is not the author's expert setting of the scene, its the inside look at how the society functions: the opposition political parties paid for and directed by the Kremlin; the male dominated world of the oligarchs living grandly off the...

United States on Jan 06, 2015