Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev
Recently I’ve had quite a few conversations with friends about Putin’s Russia. I realised that I was really not very informed about the subject, but was finding myself annoyed at hearing what I felt was a complacent apology for a corrupt, murderous oligarch.
In one of many memorable sketches from this book Pomerantsev describes his then colleagues at the state-controlled Ostankino channels. These producers, when asked how they square their liberal private lives with the fact of working at the state-controlled Ostankino Technical Center, reply that ‘everything is PR’ and reject the author’s ‘Western attachment to such vague notions as ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’ as a blunder’. Elsewhere Pomerantsev characterises this type of attitude as ‘easy relativism’, referring to a Western journalist’s justification for taking a job at Russia Today.
The conversation with the Ostankino producers falls within the context of a chapter on Putin’s personal adviser, Vladislav Surkov. I’d first heard of him through an Adam Curtis segment included on Charlie Brooker’s end of year Newswipe. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od4MWs7qTr8) The filmmaker later developed these ideas in Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation, again drawing heavily on Pomerantsev’s work. As Putin’s adviser Surkov has been credited with creating a state of constant confusion in Russian society. By funding the creation of extremist political parties on both the left and right, lending support to conservative and liberal media, and generally stirring up as many competing causes as possible Surkov created an atmosphere in which Putin alone appears as reliable. Moreover, Surkov maintains a similar policy of obfuscation with regard to his own image. Most famously he is thought to have written the satirical novel, Close to Zero, which Pomerantsev describes as ‘the sort of book Surkov’s youth groups burn on Red Square’. Surkov himself teases this dual identity by writing the novel’s preface!
After watching those Adam Curtis documentaries and while browsing follow-up material, I quickly realised that this was a book pitched at my level. (With its 100 page bibliography Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha feels like a step too far at this point). Dizzying and druggy, though held together by a focus on Moscow, the book bounds quickly through its diverse cast of characters. Indeed Pomerantsev gives the shapeshifting Surkov a run for his money in the speed with which his gaze moves from one figure to another. Yet ultimately the book is held together as much by scepticism about Surkov’s brand of unrestrained, postmodern relativism as by its focus on Moscow. This combination of a postmodern style in order to critique postmodernism also underpins Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation, which again takes much of its subject matter from Pomerantsev. (Though Curtis places the origins of this postmodern conception of reality within the Soviet era, whereas Pomerantsev seems to regard states like the USSR and Korea as ‘classic’ (modernist?) totalitarian states.)
Of these several vignettes one which seemed particularly revealing of how power is delegated within Putin’s oligarchy was the story of Yana Yakovleva. The head of a drug company importing diethyl ether, an organic compound commonly used as a laboratory solvent, Yana in 2006 was arrested by the Federal Drug Control Service and detained for 7 months while awaiting trial. She was charged with the illegal sale of the diethyl ether without a license. An absurd charge against the head of a company whose entire business had for years hinged upon the sale of this very drug. More terrifying, however, than the Kafkaesque story of the arrest itself, is Pomerantsev’s account of the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring which led to her release.
One of the key themes of the book is the interplay between the actors of Russia’s “liberal” drama and the super-rich stage managers behind the scenes. In Yakovleva’s case it becomes clear that the most important factor in her acquittal was not the bravery of her industrious lawyer Evgeny Chernousov or the inherent ridiculousness of the prosecution’s attempt to prove that diethyl ether was a narcotic. The real battle was not between prosecution and defence, but between two rival factions on ‘the Olympus of the Kremlin’. On either side were Viktor Cherkesov and Nikolaj Patrushev. It became known as ‘the war of the Chekists’ (the KGB men) and arose after a perceived snub to Cherkesov, a close friend of Putin’s who, expecting to become head of the FSB (successor to the KGB) upon Putin’s inauguration as president, instead found himself appointed to the Federal Drug Control Service (considered the least important security organ). Patrushev was chosen as head of the FSB and in retaliation Cherkesov launched an investigation into illegal smuggling at the Chinese border, overseen by the FSB. This in turn prompted Patrushev to make sure that cases such as Yana’s, part of the FDCS’ wider attempt to take control of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, received intensive media coverage and that the police allowed protests to continue against her unjust detainment. Ultimately both men were fired by Putin, who remained silent and inscrutable throughout the battle, but in the chaos of the conflict her lawyer was able to engineer an acquittal.
I hope what I’ve written so far doesn’t sound completely self-satisfied. I started off convinced that Putin’s Russia was a profoundly alienating post-mafia regime in which human rights abuse goes unchecked whilst true democracy remains elusive and I reached for a book which could confirm all of these preconceived notions. (Of course, there was the added sweetener of its fast-paced, picaresque style and a subject matter of shady political puppetry designed to appeal to the same stoner demographic as that of Adam Curtis*). In fact I think that Pomerantsev gives a very even-handed account of the West’s role (or complicity) in Putin’s Russia without ever veering into an apology. In the book’s penultimate chapter ‘Offshore’, he details the way in which areas such as Mayfair, Belgravia, and Knightsbridge have been bought up by Russian money to the extent that the traditional binary of ‘Russia and the West’ might now seem irrelevant.
In light of recent revelations about the poisoning attempt carried out by GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) agents against their one-time colleague Sergei Skripal the question of how to impose sanctions on Putin takes on greater urgency. Any serious retribution should surely include some kind of check on Russian assets in London. To put it in Pomerantsev’s terms, can we really afford to just ‘keep all that bad stuff up in the spare room of our culture’? Jeremy Corbyn, writing in the Guardian in March, voiced support for sanctions of this sort. It remains baffling, however, that he refuses to condemn the Russian state outright for its involvement in the attack. Whilst France, Germany, Canada and the USA pledged to support Britain and its assessment that Russian officers were behind the attack, Jeremy Corbyn still refused to say anything more than that the ‘evidence points strongly’ to Russian involvement.
The parallels with Trump are worrying - it seems that for the hard-right and hard-left alike in 2018 Russia and Putin represent an antidote to the corrupt centrist mainstream. But it is an image which surely says more about Corbyn and Trump’s own projection than it does about the actual functioning of Russian society. It is an extreme isolationist response to the Iraq war which runs that ‘because we intervened hastily and unsuccessfully once, we should never intervene anywhere in any form again.’ The all-or-nothing logic of the grumpy adolescent dominates and transforms Putin into a kind of anti-hero, onto whom the hard left and right can project their own sense of nobility.
In this way they start to look very much like Pomerantsev’s cynical colleagues at Ostankino. Easy relativism provides a justification for political apathy and the truth (in this case that Russian agents were sent to carry out an assassination on British soil) becomes lost, hidden in plain sight amongst countless equally valid, though obviously contradictory, versions of reality.
*I don’t mean to sound so down on Adam Curtis. I really like his use of music and archive footage - I think you can see the way that recently this has influenced more traditionally “objective” documentarians like Ken Burns. I also think he is a provocative and assured speaker. But not long ago I listened to his interview with Adam Buxton, whose podcast I follow religiously, and he came across as a bit of a tosser. Normally on that podcast I’m looking to see a different side to people and an ability to relax into a friendly chat, but he sounded like a prerecording, offering long, humourless lectures often only tangentially related to the question asked and generally sounding like a smug Oxbridge student bullshitting his way through a tutorial after one too many glasses of port the night before. I also think that he, like many journalists, is very good at convincing himself and his audience that he is presenting original research, when in fact his “subjective” style is often a means of avoiding references or bringing in voices other than his own.
