Peter Pomerantsev on writing with a filmmaker's eye and being an 'Ost-modernist'

On the NYR Daily this week On Friday we posted an essay by the British writer and broadcaster Peter Pomerantsev about how various political movements and actors—from Putin’s Kremlin advisers, to the left-wing Spanish populist party Podemos, to the Austrian far-right Identitarian Movement—are using new media technologies not just to take over the mainstream, but to do so by disrupting the meanings of words and images themselves. His essay, “[The Info War of All Against All](,” is in many ways a primer for themes he explores more extensively in his new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which addresses the fundamental challenge to liberal democracy posed by this new world of disinformation, fake news, psyops, and influence campaigns. Photo by Eleanor Crow Pomerantsev was born in the USSR in 1977, but his parents soon emigrated, on the admonition of the KGB, after Peter’s father, Igor, was interrogated for distributing samizdat. They had become de facto dissidents, though as Peter’s mother, Lina, notes, “No one is born a dissident”—it’s something the state, the regime, thrusts upon people who have failed to conform. Some of my favorite sections of his book are passages of memoir about his parents’ journey and his own upbringing; these are interwoven, though, into a journalistic project comprising interviews, case histories, and micro-narratives. It is journalism, but also something more richly textured and kaleidoscopic, less linear. I was curious to know how he’d arrived at this method. “My aim is to collide different genres—history, analysis, reportage—so that reality emerges in the collision between them,” he explained to me in an email this week, as he travelled between Prague, where his parents now live, and his home in London. “Montage creates the space for meaning.” As he is also a TV and radio documentarian (trained, in fact, in Russia), I wondered how the narrative techniques of factual filmmaking have shaped his writing. “At film school [in Moscow], my teacher insisted we always look for a unique angle from which to film and tell a story: he had worked with the Russian literary critic [Viktor] Shklovsky and told us we needed to find what Shklovsky called ‘estrangement,’” he said. “So I’m always fixated on the question of where do I put my camera when I write, what’s my unique perspective.” Shklovsky was a leading figure in Russian formalism but Pomerantsev’s career path also owes much to his patrimony: in his book, he relates how, as a boy, he would play soccer with a friend in the marble-lined corridors of Bush House in London, then the headquarters of the BBC World Service, where his father went to work for the Russian Service. “My mother is a TV producer, my father a writer, essayist, poet, and broadcaster,” he said. “I followed in my mother’s footsteps in order to then reimagine a small aspect of my father’s craft from a TV and film perspective—a tiny rebellion, but one, nonetheless.” Father and son are united not only by common interests, but sometimes by misdirected invitations: “I’m obsessed with questions of home and identity, too. Luckily, he writes in Russian, I English, so there’s no competition. Conference organisers still get us confused: he recently turned up at a conference about information war and talked about poetry.” Literature—or, more precisely, literary theory—also seems to inform Peter’s work: his analysis of our post-truth media environment, a world of simulation and dissimulation, appears to draw on many concepts from post-structuralist analysis. And yet, in working with him, I sensed that he warily resists getting too postmodern. Is that right? “I’m an Ost-modernist: the Eastern European brand of postmodernism that flourished in the late Soviet period,” he answered. “Whether it’s the great Czech writers, or the Moscow Conceptualist artists, their aim was to find a return to reality through a world of media and language and representation saturated by power. They share traits with Western postmodernists, but they have a deep humanism at their heart, they are looking for the genuine in a world of fakery. I like them.” This explained for me something else: why, at this moment, many of us in the West have found ourselves turning to Russian émigré intellectuals—such as Masha Gessen, Julia Ioffe, and Michael Idov—who grew up in the USSR but have also watched the post-Soviet space turn into an oligarchic “pseudo-democracy” (Pomerantsev’s word). He agreed in part, but would not place himself in this category exactly: “I’m terribly British and Western European. I was nine months old when I left the USSR. “What’s really exciting,” he went on, “is seeing Russian writers finally speaking for themselves in America: [Mikhail] Zygar, [Andrei] Soldatov, and [Irina] Borogan. But the Anglo literary classes have disgraced themselves a little in their failure to tap into contemporary Ukrainian voices. What are the LRB and NYRB for, if not that sort of work?” Touché. Taken under advisement. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments on articles or this newsletter to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Matt Seaton Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](