Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia QUOTES

41 " Firestone still smiles when he relates this, playing out each line of the dialogue in Americanized, but nearly perfect, Russian. And he tells me of the time he had to hide out in a government hospital to hide from corrupt cops (they could grab him anywhere apart from a hospital full of ministers); and when his first office was raided by thugs working for his neighbor and his staff were handcuffed to the furniture and threatened at knifepoint; or when he had to fly to New York and buy up all the bugging equipment at the Spy store to give to the antifraud squad in Moscow so they would have the equipment with which to bust other bent cops trying to extort money from him. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

42 " The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

43 " Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status,” Sergey told me with a smile that seemed to mimic Surkov’s (who in turn mimics the KGB men). “How do you define your political views?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was a fool to ask, then smiled: “I’m a liberal . . . it can mean anything! "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

44 " in twenty-first-century Russia you are allowed to say anything you want as long as you don’t follow the corruption trail. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

45 " Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status,” Sergey told me with a smile that seemed to mimic Surkov’s (who in turn mimics the KGB men). “How do you define your political views?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was a fool to ask, then smiled: “I’m a liberal . . . it can mean anything! "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

46 " ...every time the heroes turn to villains, saviors are rewritten as devils, the names of streets are changed, faces [are] scrubbed out from photographs, encyclopedias [are] re-edited. And so every regime destroys and rebuilds the previous city. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

47 " the true nature of time. The drama of human lives is written in the buildings. We will be gone; only places remain. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

48 " This is the genius of the system: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother, and your family become part of the network of bribes and fears and simulations; you learn to become an actor playing out his different roles in his relationship with the state, knowing already that the state is the great colonizer you fear and want to avoid or cheat or buy off. Already you are semilegal, a transgressor. And that’s fine for the system: as long as you’re a simulator you will never do anything real, you will always look for your compromise with the state, which in turn makes you feel just the right amount of discomfort. Whichever way, you’re hooked. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

49 " Lenin and Trotsky ripping up the memory of the tsars, Stalin ripping up the memory of Trotsky, Khrushchev of Stalin, Brezhnev of Khrushchev; perestroika gutting the whole Communist century . "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

50 " А тим часом Кремль прив'язує людей до себе спочатку приниженням і знущанням з допомогою перевертнів у погонах і баронів-чиновників, а потім піднімає країну за допомогою дивовижних військових завоювань. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

51 " 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. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

52 " It’s the reverse of the situation in the West, where politicians try to act like upstanding citizens while films and TV shows are obsessed with the underworld; here the politicians imitate mobsters but the films are rosy. Whenever "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

53 " And the argument I hear from everyone is “Well, if the money doesn’t go here it will go somewhere else”: well, here ain’t going to be here if you take that attitude, here is going to be there. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

54 " The weekly news round-up show is on. The well-dressed presenter walks across the well-made set and into shot, briskly summing up the week’s events, all seemingly quite normal. Then suddenly he’ll twirl around to camera 2, and before you know it he’s talking about how the West is sunk in the slough of homosexuality, and only Holy Russia can save the world from Gay-Europa, and how among us all are the fifth columnists, the secret Western spies who dress themselves up as anti-corruption activists but are actually all CIA (for who else would dare to criticise the President?), while the West is sponsoring anti-Russian ‘fascists’ in Ukraine and all of them are out to get Russia and take away its oil, and the American-sponsored fascists are crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns because the West is organising a genocide against Us Russians and there are women crying on camera saying how they were threatened by roving gangs of Russia-haters, and of course only the President can make this right, and that’s why Russia did the right thing to annex Crimea, and is right to arm and send mercenaries to Ukraine, and that this is just the beginning of the great new conflict between Russia and the Rest. And when you go to check (through friends, through Reuters, through anyone who isn’t Ostankino) whether there really are fascists taking over Ukraine or whether there are children being crucified you find it’s all untrue, and the women who said they saw it all are actually hired extras dressed up as ‘eye-witnesses’. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

55 " We used to have this self-centred idea that Western democracies were the end-point of evolution, and we're dealing from a position of strength, and people are becoming like us. It's not that way. Because if you think this thing we have here isn't fragile you are kidding yourself. This, '- and here Jamison takes a breath and waves his hand around to denote Maida Vale, London, the whole of Western civilization, -'this is fragile. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

56 " May I use this opportunity to show a sign of my respect for you?” “Of course you may, "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

57 " Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching "modernization" to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: "managed democracy," "conservative modernization." Then he steps back, smiling, and says: "We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself." And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

Elsewhere Surkov likes to invoke the new postmodern texts just translated into Russian, the breakdown of grand narratives, the impossibility of truth, how everything is only "simulacrum" and "simulacra" . . . and then in the next moment he says how he despises relativism and loves conservatism, before quoting Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra," in English and by heart. If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov's genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representations to validate tranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

58 " Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

59 " If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

60 " I hear the same chorus of confused despair from the teens that I heard from Yana Yakovleva: ‘It’s like they can define reality, like the floor disappears from under you. "

― Peter Pomerantsev , Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia