In Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev pulls back the curtain on twenty-first-century Russia, revealing the world’s biggest country may also be its most deluded and its most corrupt.

He shows readers a Russia that has “seen so many worlds flick through in such blistering progression—from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich,” and left its inhabitants with “the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable.”

Airing Russia’s Dirty Laundry

Pomerantsev is a former Russian television producer for TNT. There, he helped kickoff shows ranging from Russian remakes of Married with Children to a never-aired miniseries on a mafia-run Siberian town written and directed by a gangster. The latter mocked Russia’s mafia politics, where leaders are made to look like gangsters, unlike Western politicians, who “act like upstanding citizens,” and Hollywood “is obsessed with the underworld.”

His exploration of Russia’s underworld begins with stories of strippers and gold diggers. They come to Moscow from Siberian mining villages and St. Petersburg slums to compete with Russia’s endless supply of world-renowned beauties for a chance at a better life, one sponsored by Moscow’s newly minted sugar daddies. These “Forbeses”—so called because of their place on the Forbes list—refer to the girls as tiolki, or cattle.

The fatherless tiolki start at eighteen and hone their craft at a Gold Diggers Academy run by a 40-year-old woman with an MBA. After securing a sponsor, in exchange for exclusive sexual rights with a mega-rich man, they get an apartment, a car, a $4,000 month allowance, and twice yearly vacations in Turkey or Egypt. Once their sugar daddies grow bored, the girls land on the streets without a penny to their name. By the time the girls turn twenty-two, most Forbeses no longer want them.

Then, there’s Dinara, a young Muslim woman who fled Dagestan—a republic in the North Caucasus, near Chechnya—to study in Moscow. She wanted to escape the influence of the Wahhabi preachers from Saudi Arabia. They took over her hometown and convinced local girls to become suicide bombers. Unable to find a good job after failing her university entrance exams, Dinara turned to prostitution. She had not touched her Koran since she entered the world’s oldest profession, afraid Allah would never forgive her.

Through his research and his front-row seat to the manufacture and consumption of Russian entertainment, Pomerantsev realizes the game the Kremlin is playing. More totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union closely controlled their propaganda, forbade criticism, and failed to laugh at humor. Putin’s New Russia has transformed Juvenal’s bread and circuses from a lament into an art form. “The new Kremlin actively encourages people to have a laugh at its expense.”

Deconstructing the Kremlin Matrix

Pomerantsev also produced the story of thirty-something executive Yana Yakovleva. She was arrested by Russia’s drug enforcement agency (FDCS) for selling the chemical cleaning agent diethyl ether. Despite having a license for its importation and sale, FDCS officials charged her with distributing illegal narcotics.

“Black is white and white is black. There is no reality. Whatever they say is reality,” Pomerantsev writes.

Yakovleva then spent seven months in jail, awaiting trial, trying to understand why she was arrested for selling something she had been legally selling for years.

As Pomerantsev explains, Yakovleva was caught in a Machiavellian political trap set by former KGB officer and now head of the FDCS, Viktor Cherkesov, to break the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. He was upset Putin did not make him head of the FSB and wanted to prove his rival, FSB head Nikolai Patrushev, was a weak link.

Yakovleva ignored multiple attorneys’ advice to pay a million-dollar bribe, refusing to believe she had done anything wrong. She eventually won her trial and now leads campaigns against corruption and bribery.

In Russia, black is white and white is black. Reality is whatever those in power say is reality.

Pomerantsev admires her strength and perseverance but fears she is the exception, not the rule. After all, 99 percent of defendants are found guilty at Russian trials. And when he airs the story on Ostankino, Pomerantsev is forced to cut “the high-level political stuff,” including Putin, Cherkesov, and Patrushev, basically shielding the truth from Russian eyes.

Delirium: Any Means to Escape

Kazakh-Russian supermodel Ruslana Korshunova made world headlines when she died in June 2008 after falling from the ninth-floor balcony of her Manhattan apartment. Authorities called it a suicide, but her mother refused to believe as much. Pomerantsev theorizes her death was related to her involvement in the Rose of the World.

Modeled after Lifespring—whose methods caused mental damage in their participants and in 1980 went bankrupt after being sued—Rose of the World has been denounced as a cult and encourages participants to share their worst experiences and recall repressed memories. After three months of training sessions, Korshunova left Rose of the World. A few months later, she was found dead.

Ukrainian model Anastasia Drozdova also attended the training sessions with Korshunova. She killed herself under similar circumstances in 2009.

Pomerantsev himself investigated Korshunova’s death. He includes it—along with the other tragedies about strippers, gold diggers, and prostitution—in his book to illustrate how desperate Russians are to escape, to find life and meaning in a nation without either.

“Look at these girl, they’re all lost,” he quotes former model and psychologist Elena Obukhova.

Meet the Russians

Pomerantsev closes with the story of a $5.8 billion lawsuit over ownership of an oil company between Russian oligarchs Boris “Godfather of the Kremlin” Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich.

The suit was less about money and more about power. After all, Berezovsky took credit on his own Facebook page “for bringing the president to power…for destroying freedom and speech and democratic values.” He understood how television could bring men to power. He created the “fabricated documentary.” He invented barely credible scandals to topple Vladimir Putin’s opponents. He “invented the fake political parties, television puppet constructs, shells without any policy whose point was to prop up the president.”

He became a victim of the very people he elevated, the very entities he created. His own channel, Ostankino, “cast him as an eternal bogeyman…blaming him for everything from sponsoring terrorism to political assassinations.” He created the Russian system and molded [Putin] before being exiled by his own creation.”

Berezovsky’s confession was lost on the English judge presiding over the suit, who found the progenitor of modern Russia “an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness,” who, like so many Russians, regards “truth as a transitory, flexible concept…to be molded to suit his current purposes.”

The trial cost Berezovksy everything. Legal fees alone totaled $100 million. Six months later and rumored to be destitute, he sold an Andy Warhol silk-screen print of Red Lenin for $202,000. Three days after that, following what has become a common theme in the country with the world’s third-highest suicide rate (former Soviet states Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Latvia also top the list), Berezovsky hung himself in the bathroom of his ex-wife’s Ascot mansion.

Though the master is dead, his teachings live on. “Make, steal, siphon your money off in Russia. Stash it in New York, Paris, Geneva, and especially London.” Berezovsky’s apprentices took his lessons to heart.

Abramovich is Russia’s eleventh richest person, Israel’s first, and between 2000 and 2008 served as governor of Chukotka, the Russian province opposite Alaska on the Bering Sea.

Vladimir Putin rose from obscurity to the presidency in a few short months. He then became prime minister, then president again. As the head of state, he has replaced Berezovksy as Russia’s godfather.

Godfather of Russia

Putin purged Russia of its Boris Yeltsin-era oligarchs, those men who got rich helping Russia transition from a command to a market economy. Those remaining had brokered deals with Putin and his inner circle, trading political allegiance for economic favors.

At the same time, the mafia dons running protection rackets in towns and cities across Russia have been replaced by equally violent, immoral friends of Putin.

Russian defector and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko accused the FSB of staging apartment bombings and other terrorist attacks to bring Putin to power. He accused Putin himself of ordering the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Within a month of the accusations, Litvinenko was hospitalized and died from poisoning by radioactive polonium. Investigators found he was murdered by the FSB. His death was likely approved, if not ordered by Putin.

Under Putin, Russia backed a rights-violating government in Syria and invaded Ukraine. His regime granted asylum to American political dissident qua traitor Edward Snowden. Many say Putin’s cronies meddled in the 2016 election, placing a pro-Putin president in the White House.

In effect, Putin is the master of Russia’s own puppet show, giving its citizens just enough cord to let them think, act, and speak as they want without ever questioning what’s going on behind the curtain. He lets the press mock his government, his tough-guy public image, his nation and its culture, provided they only tell half the truth. Like some Orwellian propagandist, Putin and his Kremlin allies “switch messages at will,” allying themselves with European right-wing nationalists to ridicule the EU, with the far left to condemn US hegemony. He is whoever Russia needs him to be.

Russia Has Become a Mafia State

Anarchists often compare the state to a mafia, a crime syndicate that demands your money in exchange for your protection and your life. For this, we are laughed at; our observations are dismissed as the jaded perspectives of puerile, tinfoil-wearing psychopaths struggling with modernity.

Yet twenty-first-century Russia, Litvinenko observed, is a mafia state. Pomerantsev agrees, painting a surreal image of a land where oligarchs and dons have filled the post-Soviet political void, where postmodernism has become the unofficial state religion: Truth is transitory and mutable; it is whatever those in power say it is. Like those woken from the Matrix, nothing is true and everything is possible.

Editor’s Note: This is my first review for the new Anarchist’s Bookshelf series. I read author’s against authority you don’t have to (but you can if you want).