It’s an impressionistic memoir more concerned with conveying an atmosphere than diligent referencing of facts but is ideal for those interested in contemporary Russia and looking for a quick pacy read. As Pomerantsev’s anecdotes are based on the interviews and subjects he used for his television work, they tend to focus on the more extreme examples of contemporary life in Russia, which doesn’t reflect the normal day-to-day reality for the majority of citizens and won’t do much to dispel the perception of Russia as a corrupt place to do business.
‘Nothing is True and Everything is Possible’ is a fitting title for a book about a country with such bizarre paradoxes at the heart of its national psyche. It is no surprise that his account of his time there shows how the boundaries between truth and reality were constantly blurred. However, Pomerantsev quickly discovered that the media remained heavily state-influenced and he was not always free to produce the content he had planned. Raised in London, he moved to Russia as an adult and his work as a reality television producer allowed him access to all sorts of people and places at the peak of the television industry boom years in the 2000s. “Fake news” had yet to become a common term when ‘Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia’ was published in the UK in 2015, but the concept is very much present in Peter Pomerantsev’s anecdotal depiction of post-Soviet Russia.
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