‘Nothing is True and Everything is Possible’
It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship—far subtler than twentieth-century strains—that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.
Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, by Peter Pomerantsev. PublicAffairs, 2014. 256 pages.
Have you ever wondered why they give Oscars to film editors? Editing is extremely important – only when you sit down to edit can you understand whether or not you can make a film out of whatever it is you’ve shot, no matter how many great takes you’ve had.
Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible is a testament to the power of editing; and his documentary film background is evident in the seamless transitions between the stories of characters who populate it, as well as the storytelling itself, at once rich and economical. Pomerantsev has used the years he has worked on Russian television to tell a collection of tales that, like tributaries, feed into a greater narrative of Russia’s oil-soaked heyday, before an unpredictable new course was charted with the annexation of Crimea.
The parable of a Westerner encountering Russia’s darkly irresistible folk magic, and finding that it is not entirely what it seems, is an old one; and it is a testament to the power of Pomerantsev’s writing that he dominates the trope rather than it being the other way around.
Pomerantsev is a wonderful observer of moments as odd and beautiful as they are discordant: the “bare, perma-tanned backs moist with snow” he sees on gold diggers trying to get into a nightclub popular with the ultra-rich; the spectacle of commuters who “come every day to [Moscow] to be within distance of all the platinum watches and Porsches, only to be blown back again each evening to their dark peripheries”; Russian bureaucracy’s “wide, dusty, empty corridors, where everything happens as if under water.” The windows on Russia are selective, calibrated for their greatest appeal to a reader craving tales from an “exotic” country, but at no point does one feel that Pomerantsev is sliding into caricature.
Those of us who have kept much shabbier company in Moscow – without attending lavish parties or working on stories about tragic fashion models – will still recognize Pomerantsev’s Russia, a place with no rules and no certainty in tomorrow, a place where you must live in the moment, because the moment is all you have.
The most chilling example of the unpredictable nature of life in Russia is the story of businesswoman Yana Yakovleva, swept up in a security agency’s battle against the chemical industry, snatched out of her comfortable life, and forced into the hell of Russia’s notorious pretrial detention system. Anyone who has done any reporting from Moscow’s criminal courts, where glacially calm judges usually cooperate with the prosecution and the conviction rate is over 99 percent, knows exactly just what kind of claustrophobic nightmare Yakovleva found herself in.
“[The cops] looked at her as if she were a parcel,” Pomerantsev writes. “In the morning she had been a businesswoman driving a Lexus, in a frilly white dress. Now she was a parcel.”
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