Book Review: ‘This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality’

Abstract

Pomerantsev has been essential reading for understanding the contemporary operating environment since authoring Nothing is True & Everything is Possible, a reflection on his time as a television producer in Russia and more broadly on the sophistication and occasional absurdity of the Kremlin’s manipulation of Russian public opinion. In This Is Not Propaganda, Pomerantsev documents Russia’s development and export of its misinformation model through elegiac reflection on his parents’ experience as dissidents in the USSR and later as emigrés in London, alongside examples of contemporaneous manipulation – sometimes sophisticated, sometimes crude, frequently startling.