Book Review - The Wizard of the Kremlin
Giuliano da Empoli’s assured debut novel, winner of the Grand Prix de L’Academie Francaise, dares to get under the skin of Vladimir Putin, offering a compelling portrait of the Russian leader and his inner circle. Originally published in French in 2022, The Wizard of the Kremlin charts Putin’s rise to political power, and the main events that have helped consolidate his position. It is told from the perspective of a fictional political strategist, Vadim Baranov, clearly inspired by Putin’s real-life adviser Vladislav Surkov.
Like Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, da Empoli uses a double narrator. Putin’s machinations are relayed through the transcription of a nameless character who listens to the account of Baranov, a former television producer and Putin’s chief spin doctor who nicknamed him “the tsar”. The narrator is invited to visit Baranov when it transpires that they both have an interest in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 dystopian novel We, which critiqued the Soviet system as it was being erected. Just as Zamyatin’s depiction of “a society governed by logic, where ... each person’s life is regulated down to the tiniest detail for maximum efficiency” spoke “directly to our era”, The Wizard of the Kremlin plays at being similarly visionary, and predicts a dark future.
Over one long night Baranov tells his tale, sticking close to historical facts, regarding the conflicts that have helped shape Putin. The novel takes in the second Chechen war; the K-141 Kursk submarine disaster in 2000; the 2004 Beslan school massacre; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Baranov describes the tumultuous world Putin entered after “the collapse of the Soviet dream”, and the political vacuum left by Boris Yeltsin: “The new heroes, the financiers and the supermodels took over, and the guiding principles of three hundred million inhabitants of the USSR were overthrown. They had grown up in a nation and now found themselves in a supermarket.” He observes the moment, following the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999, that Putin, “the ascetic official”, was transformed into “the angel of death”. When Putin threatened to kill the “terrorists” in the “shit house”, Russians recognised “the voice of command and control”, Baranov suggests. “It was the voice their fathers and grandfathers had grown up with ... there was again someone at the top who could guarantee order.”
Baranov took on the mantle of the tsar’s right-hand man and served him for 15 years. Unlike the real-life Surkov, who was removed as personal adviser in February 2020, da Empoli’s protagonist recognised when he was no longer needed, tendering his resignation and fading into the background.
Although based on true events, The Wizard of the Kremlin, seamlessly translated from the French by Willard Wood, reads like a thriller. A political scientist as well as a novelist, da Empoli clearly knows the world – he was senior adviser to former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi – and builds a vivid sense of the exhilaration of being close to the seat of power. Writing a novel clearly freed him in a way non-fiction could not.
Da Empoli has been criticised for painting Putin’s strongman approach too sympathetically. According to the New York Times, “Several Russia experts have expressed dismay at the novel’s enthusiastic reception. They say the book is mostly indulgent about Mr. Putin, portraying him as fighting oligarchs for the good of the people and ‘putting Russia back on its feet’ in the face of Western contempt.”
You will have to read da Empoli’s book to decide, but I was swept up by this propulsive account of Putin’s reign and its terrifying vision of what may follow.
Originally published by New Humanist