He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were.
This is a cracking little book. Vladislav Surkov, a businessman and politician with a background in theatre, was Putin’s “grey cardinal” for twenty years, behind some of Russia’s creepiest psyops. da Empoli was so fascinated by this man and the mystique behind him that he created a fictional version, Vadim Baranov, who came from an aristocratic family line, avant-garde theatre and reality tv to help place Putin in power and become the Wizard of the Kremlin.
A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics.
When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you. Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant-garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.
This is Baranov’s story, often apparently closely paralleling Surkov’s – and pretty much all the other characters in the book are not fictional, and neither are many of the things that happened, really. Yes, it’s fiction, but it rides alongside the actual facts of twenty years. The framing of the story is gloriously classical: a writer looking for Baranov is conveyed to Baranov’s house in the woods at night, and Baranov tells his story by the fireside.
“Ah, Baranov,” he said, “there you are, the Wizard of the Kremlin, Putin’s Rasputin. Do you know what people are saying about your ‘sovereign democracy’? That it is to democracy what an electric chair is to a chair.”
da Empoli is a political scientist, and he provides an interesting angle on Russia as humiliated by the Yeltsin years, feeling like it was colonised by the West in those years, and Russia as a country of extremes. From one perspective, they even did laissez-faire capitalism bigger than anyone else. It’s funny, scary, completely fascinating and a little melancholy. Recommended without reservation.
There’s a film adaptation coming, with Paul Dano as Baranov and Jude Law as Putin.
THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN, Giuliano da Empoli (UK) (US+)
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