Nothing is true and everything is possible about Russian propaganda
If there’s any doubt that an “information war” exists between Russia and the West, look no further than how the new book by self-proclaimed “Russian TV insider” Peter Pomerantsev has exploded into the Western mainstream media. Before the annexation of Crimea, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” would have been shrugged off as just another in the long line of “you won’t believe how surreal Moscow is” tales told by a Western expat. However, given the current geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West, Pomerantsev’s book has been transformed into the definitive study of Russian TV propaganda at work and yet more evidence of the morally dubious Russian political culture created by the Kremlin.
But something’s wrong here.
Ellen Mickiewicz, an expert on Russian media and a professor of political science at Duke University, has pointed out on Facebook that there is actually very little in the book that qualifies as an “insider account” — Pomerantsev himself was simply a junior Western expat in Moscow during the 2000s who was trying to sell “junk” reality TV shows to TNT (their TNT, not our TNT). In the book, Pomerantsev even admits that Western expats were closed off from the inner sanctum where key decisions are made, leaving them as outsiders.
The one scene that everyone’s talking about as the result of a prominent Feb. 13 profile in the New York Times — the one where Pomerantsev is the most junior person at a meeting in a conference room at the top of the Ostankino Tower in Moscow and producers are talking about how to script the weekly news for a credulous Russian TV audience — is from nearly a decade ago.
In 2001, at age 24, he goes to visit Moscow and works on junk shows: soap operas, gangsters, and what the New York Times calls “sinister cults.” He says he was “at a meeting” with a “prominent news anchor” who actually, yes actually, reviewed upcoming issues and “mused on how best to entertain the audience and questioned who that week’s enemy should be.” That a newspaper—national and international, of great stature and history could devote more than half a page to this naive “OH, MY GOODNESS!!” REVELATION is unbelievable. And it gets worse: thanks to “slick” new TV techniques the Kremlin has the world at its feet—no longer the boring Soviet TV.
As a result, in “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,” we get what you would expect from a young twenty-something finding himself in Russia still in the middle of radical transformation: a fast-paced narrative in which Russian society appears to be rapidly falling apart at the seams. As a young reality show TV producer in Moscow, Pomerantsev was there to lap it up — the impossibly beautiful Russian women who take courses on how to become gold-diggers, the mafia toughs from the Siberian provinces who learned how to act like mafia dons by watching “The Godfather,” the self-made multimillionaire bankers literally throwing money around the streets of Moscow, the seedy underworld of mystical cults and Hell’s Angels-like biker gangs.
And yet, these are exactly the types of stories you might expect to see on an American reality show segment on any given night in America. The show Pomerantsev seems to be most proud of — the Russian version of “How to Marry a Millionaire” — is a good example. It was a show he produced. Those Russian gold-diggers he describes could be the Kardashians cavorting around Los Angeles, those impossibly blond and perky girls working at Ostankino could be the blonde anchor girls of CNN and Fox News, and the bizarre characters appearing on reality shows from across the vast expanse of Russia could be the bizarre characters on America’s never-ending virtual reality shows such as “The Real Housewives” or “Duck Dynasty.”
So what’s the big reveal?
The crux of the book — and the reason why it is being promoted so heavily in Western media circles — is that a chance meeting in Ostankino shows the rot at the heart of Russia’s “scripted reality.” (Putin appears in the book, but only as “the President,” presumably to make it past Western, not Russian, censors.) Everything takes on sinister tones. The gleaming Ostankino tower becomes the “nerve center of the Russian media machine.” Russian TV becomes a strange form of “Soviet control with Western entertainment.” Russia becomes a “vast scripted reality show” with a “puppet opposition,” cartoon-like businessmen, and a citizenry on the brink of becoming unwitting victims of mystical soothsayers and fast-buck scam artists.
Where the new book fits into the current information war with West is clear — it’s part of a broader effort by the Western media elite to paint modern Russia as a morally bankrupt nation, as a rogue state outside of the Western value system. In the West, the information war is not be waged on TV, as in Russia, but on the op-ed and culture pages of America’s best newspapers. The review of the book that appeared in the New York Times on Nov. 30 was written by Miriam Elder, who has turned BuzzFeed into a buzz saw against Russia. The review of the book in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8 was written by Karen Dawisha, who has written her own book about Putin’s Russia called “Kleptocracy.” The same weekend that a sweetheart Valentine’s Day profile of Pomerantsev appeared in the New York Times, there was also a rave review in the Washington Post.
More importantly, Pomerantsev — who freely admits he was a junior producer always on the lookout for new scripts to sell while in Moscow (and even back home in London) — has parlayed his writing for a number of elite Western media outlets and critical success of the book into a think tank tour featuring a report (“The Menace of Unreality”) on “how the Kremlin weaponizes information,” financed in part by Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. (Not directly, of course, but the way the Russians do it — through a “shell organization” known as The Institute of Modern Russia. In the increasingly crowded American media landscape, apparently, the only way to stand out now is to pitch your book like a reality TV show and then find a wealthy donor to support it.
Which is not to say that the book does not have its merits. Did I mention that it has lurid details of “suicidal supermodels,” “oligarch revolutionaries,” “professional killers,” and “Hell’s Angels as Holy Warriors”? There’s a fascinating sketch of Russian “puppet-master” Vladislav Surkov. It reads convincingly — until you check out the endnotes and realize that the entire chapter of the book on Surkov has been cobbled together from news accounts and a brilliant article by Zoya Svetova (“Who is Mr. Surkov?”). If you haven’t been in Moscow lately, you will also learn some nice bits of Russian slang — a “Forbes” is apparently the term of the moment for what Americans for years have called a “Sugar Daddy.”
Take a step back, and you realize that the reason why the West and Russia are now headed on a geopolitical collision course is not because they have moved further apart on the ideological spectrum, but because they have moved so close together. Russia is the “nouveau riche” geopolitical upstart trying to take over from the “old money” West, and as a result, there’s a lot of sniffing and huffing about a bunch of Russian multimillionaires throwing their money around and acting so crassly.
Russians, the Western media elite gatekeepers say, are “co-opting” the West, borrowing all of our terms and expressions and using them in dubious new ways. That is actually a key insight from Pomerantsev that emerges from his narrative almost accidentally. Westerners came to Russia in the political vacuum created by the collapse of Communism and the failed policies of Yeltsin’s gangster oligarchy and flooded it with all the perks and goodies of Western society: the high-priced MBA consultants selling democratization projects, the new business models, the political technologists, the democracy specialists, the elusive goal of a civil society and the fetishization of luxury consumer products.
In Russia, after “faking it” for so long under Communism, it’s now easy to simulate just about anything — including the trappings of Western democracy. And that’s why the current Russian media world almost seems to be mocking the West with its “pretend Western society.” According to Pomerantsev, there’s a media exec at RT who dresses up like an Edwardian-era dandy, speaks brilliant English, and invites Brits for a nice round of golf — in Moscow. (Pomerantsev says he must be an FSB spy.) There’s also Julian Assange and Larry King hosting shows on RT. (Larry King!)
That’s what scares Pomerantsev. Russia is co-opting everything the West has ever created and turning it inside out. That’s never more true than when he’s describing Russia’s “Golden Youth” at play in London. As Pomerantsev points out, “The Kremlin has been co-opting the West for years.”
But isn’t that what the West wanted all along from Russia — a “pretend” Western society that looked and acted just like the West, only filled with gleaming onion domes and white, fluffy snow? The West wanted a pliant Russian society filled with new consumers — not just of its products, but also of its culture and ideology. That’s what all the Western NGOs preached to Russia in the 1990s and 2000s — democratization and privatization. So whose fault was it that “privatization of business” was soon misinterpreted by Surkov to mean the “privatization of politics”?
No doubt, there is a new visual aesthetic emerging in Russia made possible by state-run TV, in which the strange mélange of Orthodox figures, revolutionary oligarchs in exile abroad, and slick gangsters all play a part. But is that really any different from the cartoon-like political figures that have emerged in America? Watch the Sunday news talk shows on American cable TV. You couldn’t make up someone like Sarah Palin. Americans, just like modern Russians, “laugh and ignore the propaganda and watch the good stuff.”
As a thought experiment, imagine a particularly clever Russian working in New York City media and advertising circles for a decade and coming back to Moscow with wonderful zingers about the “liars” at NBC (sorry, Brian), the buffoonish political characters that populate our political universe, the junk programming on cable TV that placates America’s consumer masses. If Russian political life is scripted, what exactly should the Russians think of the potential for another Bush-Clinton presidential campaign race in 2016? When it’s 3 Bush family members rotating in the presidency, it’s OK (wink, wink), but when it’s Vladimir Putin 3 times in a row, there’s something fishy going on.
If you’re looking for insights into how the Russian elites use modern media, you’re better off reading one of Ellen Mickiewicz’s books. As a fast and loose account of Moscow during the oil boom years, Pomerantsev’s book is a fun and entertaining read. When it tries to show Russia as being a surreal sham society, though, the book turns into an uncomfortable mirror of what Western society has become, in which democracy and freedom have become buzzwords that America’s politicians throw around the world indiscriminately and apply as they see fit. Viewed from that perspective, Mickiewicz asks a valuable question about how the New York Times opted to promote its profile of Pomerantsev: “Does the headline ‘Russian TV Insider Describes a Modern Propaganda Machine’ make any sense at all?”
