Hot Type: 'America Has Chosen to Destroy Itself' — A Q&A with Peter Pomerantsev

Heidi Siegmund Cuda interviews the propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev on how the echoes of Russian information warfare are now reverberating across America

Peter Pomerantsev author and journalist on stage at the Hay Festival, 26 May 2024. Photo: Steven May/Alamy

“What we're dealing with, whether historically or now, is the construction of identities and stories that lead to the destruction of democracy and ultimately, terrorism, war and violence.”—Peter Pomerantsev

Author Peter Pomerantsev spent a decade working in Russia during its rise into a modern propaganda powerhouse. In his books about contemporary and historical propaganda, he warned democratic nations that this stuff was poison. He literally handed over the recipe of how propaganda bombs were made and told us what their devastating impacts would be when detonated in target nations.

So we can’t say we weren’t warned. But we did ignore those warnings. In the US, a country where large swaths of the population have completely lost interest in truth, no one at a government level put up a fight, because it simply wasn’t profitable, says Pomerantsev.

In this Q&A derived from a podcast interview I conducted with Pomerantsev last Sunday, he breaks down how democratic nations misdiagnosed the Great Propaganda Wars, but how any billionaire who wants to fund the fight back, can still do it.

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Heidi Siegmund Cuda: Can you summarize your unique background that positioned you to understand narrative warfare so well?

Peter Pomerantsev: I work at Johns Hopkins University now, teaching courses about propaganda and how we should fight it or do it better. I've written three books now about contemporary and historical propaganda, really focused on authoritarian propaganda — Russia, and all sorts of violent extremist movements across the world, and now about the Nazis. I'm working on my fourth book, but my background is deeply rooted in the history and presence of Eastern Europe.

My parents are from Soviet Ukraine. They were dissidents. My father was arrested by the KGB in 1978 and exiled. I grew up in London. My dad worked for the BBC World Service and then Radio Free Europe. So I was very much born… into the middle of the great propaganda wars between dictatorships and democracies, and part of my books are about that historical context and what's changed.

After university, I lived in Russia for 10 years. I worked for part of that time in the burgeoning Russian entertainment industry making entertainment shows for Russia… There were many Western companies there at the time making the Russian version of The Apprentice, or Come Dine with Me, and all these wonderful products of Western culture. It gave me a kind of a ringside seat to watch the emerging propaganda model of Putinism, which I wrote my first book about, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. I try to capture this new strain of propaganda, which is less about convincing with some grand ideology, but more about destroying the concept of truth. It’s really embedded in cynicism, which paves the way for unbridled aggression and a kind of very, very toxic tribalism.

So that was a decade ago, and I've literally just written the afterword for the third edition. The book has become depressingly relevant over and over again, because what I saw in Russia has multiplied.