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

Before Pomerantsev became the field's leading theorist of modern propaganda, he spent nearly a decade working inside Russian television. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is the account of those years — and it remains the most vivid portrait of what a society looks like when the information environment has been comprehensively weaponised by the state. The Russia Pomerantsev describes is not a place where one official narrative replaces all others; it is a place where the concept of a stable narrative has been deliberately dissolved, leaving citizens with no fixed point of reference from which to evaluate reality.

This has direct operational significance. The techniques Pomerantsev witnessed being developed inside Russian media in the 2000s — the cynical deployment of irony, the multiplication of contradictory narratives, the elevation of spectacle over substance — are now the standard toolkit of influence operations globally. Reading this book is not an exercise in Russia-watching; it is a field guide to the methodology that has since been exported, adapted, and applied far beyond Russia's borders. For anyone seeking to understand the origins of the current information environment, this is the starting point.