RaveThe Jewish Review of BooksNothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is a portrait of Putin’s surreal new Russia, an alternative reality composed of intersecting alternative realities. A native Russian speaker with a slightly odd accent, the author spends a lot of time with prostitutes, gangsters, emotionally unstable supermodels, television journalists, and \'political technologists.\' He is probing, inquisitive, voyeuristic—as journalists must be if they are any good. Yet he is also a deeply decent person, who never forgets that he is dealing with human beings ... His irony veils a human empathy of which he cannot quite rid himself, even when circumstances are inauspicious ... Pomerantsev’s tone is light throughout, deceptively so, for between the lines he is deadly serious. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is arguably the most philosophically perceptive attempt to illuminate Putin’s Russia that we have
Yuri Slezkine
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review[The] chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid. Over all, Slezkine’s writing is sharp, fresh, sometimes playful, often undisciplined. The momentum suffers from the narrative’s overpopulation; and Slezkine falls into digressions about the Exodus, Armageddon and repressed memory theory. Despite meandering, he makes certain arguments clearly: Bolshevism was a millenarian sect with an insatiable desire for utopia struggling to reconcile predestination with free will — that is, working ceaselessly to bring about what was supposedly inevitable.
