Owen Matthews
The Oligarchy Will Be Televised
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia
By Peter Pomerantsev
Faber & Faber 284pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Russia is at war, and the battlefield is the hearts and minds of ordinary Russians. Information is the weapon, journalists are the foot soldiers, Kremlin ideologists are the generals. Peter Pomerantsev’s perceptive and timely book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible tells the story of how the Russian state ‘weaponized’ information in grim and telling detail. Pomerantsev’s own experiences inside the belly of the leviathan as a young producer for Russian state television give him a unique and chilling insight into the way the state-controlled media in Russia really works.
The military analogy is not Pomerantsev’s but the Kremlin’s own. ‘Information war is now the main type of war, preparing the way for military action,’ says the Kremlin’s chief propagandist, Dmitry Kiselev – the infamous television anchor who also told his staff at Rossiya Segodnya on his first day as
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