How Putin turned Russian politics into reality TV

‘We all know there will be no real politics.’ A prominent Russian TV presenter is speaking off the record at a production meeting in 2001. ‘But we still have to give our viewers the sense that something is happening. They need to be kept entertained. Politics has got to feel … like a movie!’

When Peter Pomerantsev, a Brit of Russian descent, sat in on this meeting he had recently graduated and moved to Moscow to work as a TV producer. A decade in Russian television has now provided him with the material for his chilling first book. Nothing is True… is more than an evocative travelogue or an insight into a new system of authoritarian control, although it is both of these. It’s also a hammer to the glass, an alarm rung out across the liberal world.

Taking the reality TV shows he works on as his starting point, Pomerantsev conjures a beguiling picture of modern Russia during the oil-rich years. Moscow shimmers under a veil of glamour, with beautiful women and infinite possibility. The President — all things to all men: now sugar daddy to a nation, now gangster, now Tsar — has brought ‘stability’ and ‘effective management’ to the country after the chaos of the 1990s.

The veil is soon drawn, however, and squalor revealed. The President squats on top of the ‘elite’ kleptocratic heap. Corruption entangles every layer of society, from the lowliest traffic cop to the Kremlin insiders who slurp off billions from ‘hyper-projects’ such as the Sochi Olympics. Reiderstvo — a vicious Russian form of corporate raiding which could, for example, involve bribing the security services to have the boss of a rival company thrown into jail — ensures that private property is little more than a form of words.