Anybody interested in trying to make sense of Vladimir Putin's Russia ought to read "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible" by Peter Pomerantsev, the British TV producer/writer whose parents emigrated from the Soviet Union during the 1980s.

nothingHe outlines Putin's dark vision of globalization, "in which instead of everyone rising together, interconnection means multiple contests between movements, corporations and city states."

The Kremlin plays each faction against each other in order to get an edge. "European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin's fight against homosexuality.

"And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT," wrote Pomerantsev.

Putin views Russia as the corporate raider inside globalization, "convinced that it could see through all the old ways of the slow West to play at something more subversive. The twenty-first century's geopolitical avant-garde."

Every Russian TV station features Putin, who bursts upon the scene cutting ever quicker between "gangster-statesman-conqueror-biker-believer-emperor, one moment diplomatically rational and the next frothing with conspiracies."

Pomerantsev wrote of a TV scene of Putin chatting via video with factory workers at a tank factory who vowed to travel to Moscow if protests against him continue. It turns out those factory workers didn't exist. The scene was a piece of acting put on by local political technocrats.

The author wrote: "The TV spinning off to someplace where there is no reference point back to reality, where puppets talk to holograms when both are convinced they are real, where noting is true and everything is possible. And the result of all this delirium is a curious sense of weightlessness."

Welcome to Vladimir's World. It's not a good place.