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

A journey into the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia, where even dictatorship is a reality show.

“A gripping and unsettling account.” ―Washington Post

Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet masters, Hells Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors: welcome to twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality.

When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He meets with propaganda gurus running the nerve center of the Russian media machine, explores Siberian mafia towns, and visits the salons of the international, super-rich oligarchs. As his experience takes him ever deeper into the maze of Putin’s Russia, Pomerantsev begins to see the country with new eyes.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is a piercingly insightful voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.

Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of This Is Not Propaganda and How to Win an Information War. He writes for publications including Granta, The Atlantic, Financial Times, London Review of Books, and Politico, among others.