Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible
Peter Pomerantsev
The most disturbing line in Peter Pomerantsev’s account of his adventures in modern Russia comes right at the end, in an interview with a lawyer fighting Russian corruption. “We used to have this self-centered idea that Western democracies were the end-point of evolution,” the lawyer explains, and that in their interactions with countries like Russia the West would be negotiating from a position of strength. The Cold War was over, after all, and it was the end of history.
But in fact the West has proven to be highly vulnerable to exploitation by the anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-rule of law regimes of the post-Communist world. Indeed, it is the condition of modern Russia that many in the West now openly aspire to: a “postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.” This is all very sad, and more than sad.
Pomerantsev’s Russia is mainly Moscow, a city that seems to be both imploding (with construction projects competing to be ever closer to the imperial centre of the Kremlin) and spreading everywhere at the same time (Pomerantsev works in the television business, TV being “the only force that can unify and rule and bind” such a giant nation). I suppose today we’d also want to include the Internet, but in any case Moscow is where the magic happens. Black magic to be sure, but it’s still not clear how any society can fight the real fake media.
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