Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev provides a mind-bending look behind the shape-shifting intersection of pop culture and politics in early-21st century Russia.

A provincial gangster turned filmmaker, a small business owner imprisoned for selling the product she legally sold for years, models brainwashed by a personal growth sect — it all makes for mesmerizing TV.

As a reality television producer in Russia, journalist Peter Pomerantsev had a front-row seat to the country's bizarre transformation as post-Cold War wealth flooded in.

Pomerantsev was hired to tell new, aspirational, positive stories about an ascendant Russia.

But as he documented his subjects, Pomerantsev found that the Kremlin's insidious co-opting of pop culture had turned all their lives into a show within the larger absurdist reality farce that was democratic Russia.

In Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, published in 2014, Pomerantsev tracks the nation's turn from nascent democracy to autocracy.