Peter Pomerantsev

Russia as the liberal unconscious, source of all that the West finds abject and unsettling? There is something to be said for this theory, says Peter Pomerantsev in conversation with his father Igor, the émigré dissident and poet. But where does it put the myth of central Europe as ‘kidnapped West’, not to mention contemporary Ukrainian occidentalism? 

Until 1991, Ukraine had largely failed to establish a narrative for itself in the world. Peter Pomerantsev shows how, thereafter, a new literature emerged that made contemporary Ukrainian writers Europe’s grittier Latin Americans, mixing magical realism with domestic abuse, folklore and mafia.

Peter Pomerantsev enters the matrix of managed democracy that underpins postmodern dictatorship in Russia. A society of pure spectacle, with fake parties, fake opposition, fake scandals and fake action: this is the political technologists’ project, in which (almost) everything becomes PR.