“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.”
I read this in 2 days because it was so damn well written.
Russia has always been a rough place. Behind its mask of oil money and propaganda lies an illusionary nation. Peter Pomerantsev lived and worked in Moscow as a TV producer, and this book is his firsthand account of what modern Russia actually looks like from the inside — not the geopolitical version you get on the news, but the surreal, day-to-day reality of living in a country where truth itself has become optional.
I can’t compare my own literary capabilities with what the author was able to show. The writing is vivid, fast, and cinematic. Pomerantsev doesn’t lecture you — he drops you into scenes. Oligarchs throwing money around like confetti. Young women reinventing themselves overnight. Propaganda machines churning out contradictory narratives on purpose, because the goal isn’t to convince you of anything specific — it’s to make you give up on the idea of truth altogether.
Instead of summarizing every chapter, I’ve decided to provide my top quotes describing Russia — the how and the why of what it is now. Then I’ll share what stuck with me.
Quotes on Russia
“Russia experimented with different models (of government) at a dizzying rate: Soviet stagnation led to perestroika (reconstruction), which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal euphoria, economic disaster, oligarchy, and the mafia state. How can you believe in anything when everything around you is changing so fast?”
“Over the last 20 years, we’ve lived through communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are all illusions, that everything is PR (public relations)”
“To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated”
“Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status”
“Every new regime (in Russia) rebuilds the past so radically. Lenin and Trotsky ripping up the memory of the tsars, Stalin ripping up the memory of Trotsky, Khrushchev of Stalin, Brezhnev of Khrushchev; perestroika (reconstruction) gutting the whole Communist century… and every time the heroes turn to villains, saviours are rewritten as devils, the names of streets changed, faces [are] scrubbed out from photographs, encyclopedias [are] re-edited. And so every regime destroys and rebuilds the previous city.”
“No one cares to band together and redecorate the stairwells. Care stops at the threshold of your own apartment. You lavish and stroke your personal world, but when you reach the public space, you pull on your war face.”
“[About Moscow] I advise him to take care on the corner where the traffic police like to change the signs from ‘single lane’ to ‘no way’ overnight to catch out drivers and extract their rent. The city is an obstacle course of corruption, and your options are to get angry or pay up and play the game and just enjoy it.”
“When the Soviet floor gave way, millions of Russians just kept falling and falling, deconstructing reality to the point where they thought they could see the very core of the universe.”
“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 they carried on living as if they did, and now they can only create a society of simulations.”
“It’s not so much about denial. It’s not even about suppressing dark secrets. You can see everything you do, all your sins. You just re-organize your emotional life so as not to care.”
What Stuck With Me
The thing that hit me hardest is the idea that Russia’s problem isn’t that people believe the wrong things — it’s that they’ve stopped believing in ANYTHING. When every government you’ve lived through turns out to be a lie, when every hero gets rewritten as a villain by the next regime, you stop investing in truth. You just ride the wave and look out for yourself.
That last quote — about reorganizing your emotional life so as not to care — is one of the most chilling lines I’ve read in any book. It’s not ignorance. It’s not brainwashing. It’s a conscious decision to disconnect from reality because engaging with it is too exhausting and too dangerous.
And here’s what really gets me: this isn’t just a Russian phenomenon. You see versions of it everywhere. When people are bombarded with contradictory information 24/7, the natural response isn’t to figure out what’s true — it’s to throw your hands up and say “who knows?” That apathy is the real weapon. Pomerantsev understood this back in 2014, and it’s only become MORE relevant since.
The Propaganda Machine
Pomerantsev worked inside Russian television, so he saw the propaganda machine from behind the curtain. What’s fascinating is how deliberate it all is. The Kremlin doesn’t push one single narrative. It pushes ALL of them simultaneously — funding nationalist groups and liberal groups at the same time, promoting conspiracy theories that contradict each other, keeping everyone confused and divided.
The genius of it — and I use that word reluctantly — is that it makes opposition impossible. How do you fight a system that agrees with you one day and contradicts you the next? How do you organize resistance when you can’t even establish basic facts? You can’t. And that’s exactly the point.
If you’ve ever wondered why Russian politics feels so impenetrable from the outside, this book explains it better than anything else I’ve read.
Final Thoughts
I recommend this book if you are interested in the new Russian state where, as the title implies: “Nothing is true and everything is possible.” It reads more like a thriller than a political analysis, and Pomerantsev’s writing is absolutely first-rate. 5/5
P.S. I’m under no illusion that the “Western” nations are any better. The New Asian Hemisphere outlines issues within the “West” as well, and I’ve seen Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States and the American military complex. Every system has its illusions — Russia just happens to have turned the manufacturing of illusions into an art form.
Thanks for reading.
— Leonidas
