Peter Pomerantsev
Sam Leith, March 2024 My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Peter Pomerantsev. Peter’s new book How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler tells the story of Sefton Delmer, the great genius of twentieth-century propaganda. Peter tells me about Delmer’s remarkable life, compromised ethics, and the lessons he still has to offer us.
Winner of the European Press Prize 2022 Peter Pomerantsev
"Memory in the age of impunity", written by Peter Pomerantsev and published by Coda Story
Ukraine must negotiate from a position of strength. But the world’s attention is fading
Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022 because, after its 2014 invasion, Putin thought he could get away with it
When I met President Zelenskiy, together with colleagues from the Atlantic magazine a few weeks ago, his greatest fear was that the victory in the battle for Kyiv meant that too many people would think the war over when it was just shifting to a different, more deadly phase in the Donbas. The world’s attention has faded. Allies are being slow to arm Ukraine sufficiently. Positions are being ceded daily because of a lack of basic munitions for artillery. This needs to change fast. Any eventual negotiations have to be taken from a position of Ukrainian strength, not weakness, or else they risk being another deal that gives up all the leverage to Russia, only augmenting the threat it poses.
We shouldn’t be worried about “humiliating” Putin and his henchmen on the battlefield – humiliation in Russian politics and society comes from within, centuries of not dealing with a history of repression and mass murder has produced a political culture that seethes with resentment and fear. All that can be done is encourage Russian elites and society to face up to the reality and the limits of their power. It’s up to us whether negotiations – if and when they happen – take place in the far east with Russia exhausted – or at the gates of Kyiv, with Russia ascendant.
Peter Pomerantsev, The Guardian, 29.5.2022
"As I drove back to Kyiv, I reflected on her story, and what Zelensky had told us days earlier. Irina seemed to believe that all she had done was survive, but in reality she and her family had done far more. Zelensky, through his endless search for empathy, and the Horbonoses, through their remarkable dialogue with their Russian enemies, had shown us how this war could actually end."
1.5.2022 ‘We Can Only Be Enemies’ One family’s experience of Vladimir Putin’s invasion offers a path to the end of the war. By Peter Pomerantsev, The Attlantic
Ukrainian and foreign intellectuals talk about the experience of the war and share their own observations.
Speakers of the 16th episode: PEN UKRAINE, 8.4.2022
– Volodymyr Yermolenko, journalist, philosopher, Editor-in-chief at UkraineWorld
– Peter Pomerantsev, journalist.
Revealing this disparity between the elites and normal people will require independent, investigative Russian journalism. Since the war, however, much of this is largely based abroad. They will have to rely on tracing documents and open-source investigations. We will need a whole new iteration of what the Russian journalist and editor Roman Badanin, founder of the investigative online media outlet Agentstvo, calls “offshore journalism”: exile media that uses modern tools to stay as close to the home country as possible. Peter Pomerantsev, 20.3.2022 "How do we solve a problem like Putin", The Guardian
Is Russia A Real Country With Peter Pomeranzev (James Carville & Al Hunt)
20.3.2022 James and Al welcome John Hopkins’ Agora Institute Senior Fellow Peter Pomerantsev to examine Putin’s plans in Ukraine and the role of propaganda in the conflict. They discuss what the West needs to do now, Russian public opinion, how to win the information war, and what it will take for democracies to triumph over authoritarian regimes while staying true to their innate strengths
Der Journalist und Schriftsteller Pjotr Pomeranzew über Russland – das alte, auf Korruption aufgebaute, und das neue, in dem die Ideologie gewinnt
4.3.2022
Language defines reality
Language defines who is a “real” person, and who isn’t. He who controls language controls life and death.
That was the conclusion of the literature professor Viktor Klemperer, as he tried to make sense of Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and 40s. As a German Jew in Dresden, Klemperer lost his home, his academic position, his health. But he kept his life, thanks to being married to a non-Jew. He spent the war doing odd jobs in factories, being interrogated and beaten by the Gestapo, and keeping a diary where he tried to figure out how ordinary, pleasant Germans became spellbound by Nazi propaganda.
At the centre of its power, he concluded, was how the Nazis developed a certain language, which he called Lingua Tretii Imperia, or LTI. LTI defined new in-groups and out-groups. When the Nazis came to power Propaganda Minister Goebbels claimed grandly that “the individual will be replaced by the Community of the People”—Die Volkskommune, populated by Volksgenosse driving Volkswagens, reading Der Völkischer Beobachter listening to Volksempfänger. Anyone outside the Volk weren’t ‘real people’, and were underserving of rights or even life. Furthermore, when the Nazis defined the world in terms of “Übermensch” (superman) and “Untermensch” (inferior person)—Germans felt they were part of a special caste, unique and valued, while the “Untermenschen” deserved to be wiped out. When the Nazis reinforced this distinction with the concept of being “Aryan,” people got to feel ever more superior, while the Jews were classified as vermin, a blot upon the world that needed to be erased.
Putin and his cronies are using similar linguistic tactics in order to pave the way the destruction of the Ukrainian state—which they frequently define as “not a real country” unlike the “real (for that read mythical) unified people of Russia-Ukraine-Belarus.” Meanwhile patriotic Ukrainians, anyone who doesn’t agree to Russian colonial suzerainty, are dismissed as Nazi: “de-Nazification” is the supposed reason for Putin’s invasion. The charges are obviously absurd: unlike the U.S. and many Western European countries where the far-right are in parliament (and sometimes funded and supported by the Kremlin), Ukraine has a Jewish President, a multi-ethnic cabinet and the far-right don’t even make it into the current legislative chamber.
But though ridiculous, Putin’s language is intentional and strategic. He is using the term “Nazi” in exactly the same way the Nazis used “Untermensch.” After all who is more despicable than Nazis? Using the term enables the mass murder of civilians with illegal cluster munitions that are already pulverising residential areas. It also paves the way for the repressions that are meant to come with occupation: the Russian “kill lists” of civil society activists and journalists and the mass arrests. After all if you are fighting “Nazis” then every measure is acceptable, the perverse logic goes, it says just look at the lengths the Allies went to in World War II when firebombing German cities (most notably Klemperer’s own Dresden). After World War II the Soviet leadership, which Putin claims to respect, crushed the countries of Eastern Europe by killing many who dared to speak their mind, and carting many more off to the gulag. Putin will likewise need to get rid of any free-thinking people if he is ever to make real his dream of wiping a sovereign Ukraine off the map. His plan is proving faulty—but that is clearly his intent.
As Putin and his propaganda lackeys repeatedly misuse the term “Nazi” this once powerful word becomes drained of meaning, it gets reduced to meaningless sound, and becomes bled of its power as a taboo against the worst behaviour. A word that is meant to contain the memory of all that is horrendous in history loses its power to define the world- and thus makes Putin’s own essence-of-fascism easier to pursue. “You’re behaving like a Nazi” we want to scream at Putin—but he’s already sucked the meaning out of that term in this debate. “Oh no it’s you lot who are Nazis” he taunts back. Instead of a powerful word that acts as a check on evil, all one hears is endless twittering with each side calling the other Nazis until it is rendered meaningless.
Ultimately, however, it’s not audiences in the West who are the targets of Putin’s sadistic word games. His main target is domestic, where the state-dictated cult of World War II is all pervasive. The Language of Putin’s Putative Imperii bellows non-stop from all the Kremlin media, especially on TV, readying the linguistic ground for very real murder. But in between the barking of his propaganda attack dogs, something strange occurs. You will likely see adverts, for western fast food and cosmetics, western tooth paste and western banks. We fund this murder propaganda every day, pouring in advertising dollars. And before the vicious vomitarium of Kremlin political talk shows come the entertainment programs: western reality shows and movies, which help reel the viewers in who then stick around for the politics. All these TV shows run on western editing systems, multi-channel mixing boards and video equipment.
All this can stop. We can undermine the Russian system if Western companies stop empowering the Kremlin with ad money, Western companies stop licensing programs and formats to Russian TV, the companies who provide editing equipment stop providing online updates to their software. This will put a thousand spanners in the workings of the hate machine.
Putin, meanwhile, is attacking Ukrainian media infrastructure. Among his latest missiles attacks on densely populated urban areas was an attempt to bomb the Kyiv public broadcaster. His weapons hit next door Babyn Yar, the site of the Nazi genocide of Kyiv Jews, where 33, 771 were executed in two days in 1941. To that horrific figure we can now add, according to Ukrainian authorities, at least five more innocent civilians.
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Putin’s metaphorical “denazification” literally, lethally continues in the traditions of the Nazis.
Memory in the age of impunity
The collapse of the Soviet Union should have spurred introspection and encouraged us to exclude no one from the greater story of human rights against political repression. And, for a moment in the 1990s, this seemed possible. As the wave of democratization overturned both pro-Soviet and pro-American dictatorships across the world; as the International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 1998; as humanitarian interventions were waged successfully from the western Balkans to East Africa, it seemed that justice would be meted out more equitably.
But then something different happened. Instead of letting more characters into the human rights story, the whole story collapsed. A situation where some victims got more attention than others was replaced by a situation where no victims got any sustained attention. The horrors of World War II had compelled the world to adopt the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at least in principle, and the post-Cold War catastrophes in Srebrenica and Rwanda had encouraged humanitarian interventions and created a momentum towards a “right to protect.”
In previous crimes against humanity, ignorance was always an excuse. From Auschwitz to Srebrenica to Rwanda, leaders could claim that they were either unaware of the facts, the facts were equivocal, or that events unfolded too quickly for them to act. But now we have access to omniscient media that often brings us abundant and instantaneous evidence — yet it means less than ever before. The tableau of crimes remains a mess of broken images.
This felt different in the Cold War. Then there seemed a connection between the arrest of one, single Soviet dissident and a larger geopolitical, institutional, moral, cultural, and historical struggle. Media, books, and movies of that time told the stories of discrete political prisoners and human rights abuses as part of a larger, joined-up tale in the great battle of freedom versus dictatorship, a battle for the soul of history. And the whole story made the public in democracies feel better about themselves, was part of an identity: we are on the side of freedom versus tyranny. There were institutions that supported this narrative and identity. Political prisoners would feel less vulnerable when information about their arrest was announced on the BBC or Radio Free Europe, taken up by Amnesty International, announced at the UN, raised by U.S. presidents in bilateral summits with Soviet leadership.
Peter Pomerantsev, 29.10.2021, Coda
This Is Not Propaganda
A timely volume of analysis and memoir shows how populism is destabilising democracy and reshaping our sense of normality,
This book provides a series of Pomerantsev’s datelined dispatches from those myriad conflicts, “the digital Maginot Line”. It is required – and bleakly entertaining – reading for anyone wanting to understand the surreal scale and intent of the efforts to destabilise democracies. This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev is published by Faber (£14.99).
NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE
In the new Russia, even dictatorship is a reality show.
Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell’s Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship—far subtler than twentieth-century strains—that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.
When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system.
Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness."
Peter Pomerantsev was exiled from the Soviet Union at the age of ten months (1978) together with his family Liana and Igor Pomerantsev. He settled in London, also lived in Munich, Edinburgh, Berlin, New York, Prague. When he finished university he went to Moscow and fell in love with the place. First, he was an ex-pat working in policy advice, then he became a television director and producer, making films about the city he had become obsessed with for both westerners and Russians. He stayed in Moscow nine years. In November 2010 he returned to London. 2022 he moved to Baltimore. Peter Pomerantsev is a British author and documentary producer. His writing is featured regularly in the London Review of Books, Newsweek /Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Le Monde Diplomatique, Financial Times, the New Yorker. Since 2022 he is a senior fellow at SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Reviews & Links:
Peter Pomerantsev has written the most bitter indictment of a nation’s politics and society going wrong since William Shirer’s 1941 Berlin Diary. Pomerantsev has also written a calm and incisive report on the current state of affairs in Russia. Yet it reads like a comedy of manners, a dark and grotesque comedy of manners, a State Department white paper co-authored by Evelyn Waugh and Franz Kafka. And not only that, but Nothing Is True is a bildungsroman, too. By P. J. O'Rourke
Nothing Is True is so fun to read, so sparkling and colorful, that it’s a while before it hits you that Pomerantsev is throwing daggers not just at Putin, but at the West. (In both style and moral fervor, Pomerantsev is reminiscent of classic period Tom Wolfe.) Recently, Pomerantsev says, Russian dissidents have taken to invoking “London” and “the West” not as aspirations but “with a light disgust, as the place that shelters and rewards and reinforces the very forces that oppress them.” Ann Marlowe
That — and the question of how the Kremlin distorts reality — is no longer a question for Russians alone. The crisis in Ukraine has been fought just as much through the telling of its narrative as through its deployment of weaponry. Russia has directed its propaganda campaign to devastating effect, not only at home but through international ventures like the television news channel RT (formerly Russia Today), which continues to expand, most recently opening an affiliate in South America and announcing a London-based version to focus exclusively on Britain. It’s an information war, and the reality into which the Russians in Pomerantsev’s book have been indoctrinated is the Kremlin’s latest export. Miriam Elder,The New York Times
In “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” Peter Pomerantsev captures as well as anyone the money-soaked cynicism and manufactured media echo chamber of Moscow under Putin. “ ‘Everything is PR’ has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia,” Pomerantsev writes. His entertaining memoir recounting his adventures in the dark heart of the propaganda machine helps shed light on why Putin’s gilded, image-conscious Moscow seems so appealing to America’s TV-obsessed new president and his clan. Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post
Author Peter Pomerantsev talks to David Greene about how the Kremlin has maintained Russian President Vladimir Putin's popularity at home despite this year's challenges. NPR
Reading and discussion with Peter Pomerantsev about the book “Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart Of The New Russia (video - 50 minutes)
