Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

What Readers Say

Pomerantsev lived inside Putin's Russia for years as a TV producer, and what he describes has the quality of a fever dream rendered as clear-eyed journalism. Readers mention it alongside This Is Not Propaganda (his follow-up) as essential reading for understanding how information warfare actually works — not as theory but as something you watch happen to real people. The cast of characters he profiles reads like a Bosch painting: suicidal supermodels, Kremlin puppet-masters, Hell's Angels who've reinvented themselves as holy warriors. It's not a comfortable book, but readers describe it as one that makes you understand how a country's grip on reality can be deliberately loosened.

Who It's For

Readers who want to understand propaganda not as a historical phenomenon but as a living, present-tense system. If you've read the other books in a media-literacy stack and want the case study that shows it all in operation, this is it. Pairs with This Is Not Propaganda as a natural diptych — the same author, a more focused argument, five years later.

Reading Context

Published in 2014, though the dynamics it describes only became more globally relevant in the years since. Pomerantsev went on to lecture at Cambridge and LSE on propaganda and information warfare. This Is Not Propaganda (2019) is his follow-up that broadens the argument beyond Russia. Both books are worth reading together.