“If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share
“Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share
“If the West once undermined and helped to ultimately defeat the USSR by uniting free market economics, cool culture, and democratic politics into one package (parliaments, investment banks, and abstract expressionism fused to defeat the Politburo, planned economics, and social realism), Surkov’s genius has been to tear those associations apart, to marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share
“So you were dissidents? You believed in finishing the USSR?''No. It's not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There's like several "you"s.' Seen from this perspective, the great drama of Russia is not the 'transition' between communism and capitalism, between one fervently held set of beliefs and another, but that during the… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share
“How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present. As the President looks for a way to validate his own authoritarianism, Stalin is praised as a great leader who won the Soviet Union the war. On TV… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share
“And the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. The task is… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share Image
“At the front door I pat my trouser pocket to check for the thin outline of my passport and realize it’s not there. Always… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share Image
“How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned.… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share Image
“Ostankino’s strategies became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share Image
“We used to have this self-centred idea that Western democracies were the end-point of evolution, and we're dealing from a position of strength, and… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share Image
“When my parents died I could remember them through the building that we lived in. Buildings aren’t so much about recollecting time as about… — Peter Pomerantsev Copy Share Image
