This is a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, a Swiss-Italian political scientist, who was born in France. It was published in 2022.

The first thing that's interesting here is that it was written in a language other than the author's native tongue. He explains in an interview: "Italian is my first language. It's something more natural. On the other hand, I read more in French than in Italian. French was quite natural for me for this book. It was linked to the large amount of reading that I had done, which had inspired me." He also wrote "an original Italian version". The book was well received in both countries, "but had more resonance in France, because that country has more of a tradition of political literature and an overlap between the political and the literary".

I read the French version (entitled Le mage du Kremlin). There's an English translation, and its title is the one I've also adopted -- although "wizard" doesn't convey the ambiguity of the French word "mage", which can be translated as magician, mage, wizard, or sorcerer, and is also the word used for the three wise men of the gospels, who are "les (trois) Rois mages".

And the identity of this wizard or wise man or sorcerer? Well, he's Vadim Baranov. Vadia to his friends. His grandfather was one of the old Russian nobility, who by staying under the radar, managed to live in peace (and even conserve his extensive library); his father was a loyal servant of the Communist Party, whose position assured significant levels of privilege for his child. With Gorbachev's reforms, and the disintegration of the old Soviet Union, Baranov's father, like many others in his position, loses everything. His job, his privileges, and his honours.

Now it's the 1990s, and everyone has to forge a path in this new Russia. The Soviet dream had been very simple, one character explains -- being a civil servant or a teacher, having a dacha, taking holidays in Sochi -- and yet that model had its power and its dignity. When it was swept away, in just a few months, Russians found their world upended. The new heroes were not soldiers and teachers and workers, but bankers and top models: People who had grown up in a fatherland now found themselves in a supermarket. Baranov is part of this new world.

After spending a while in the theatre, he moves into television, working under millionaire Boris Berezovsky. His boss, trying to steer Russia onto a new course by promoting one Vladimir Putin, pushes Baranov towards a political career. But the disciples rapidly outgrow the master. Putin is too wily to be run by a newspaper magnate, and Baranov, seeing which side his bread is buttered, starts to work directly for Putin, leaving Berezovsky to his fate (he eventually dies, an exile in London, in mysterious circumstances). Baranov goes from strength to strength, establishing himself as the "new Rasputin", feeding ideas to Putin, and helping him operationalize his own.


Cool, if stereotypical, cover design

Several things to note at this point:

1. The book starts with a narrator (never named). He arrives in Moscow a few years after the "wizard" has retired into the shadows (officially, he has resigned, but it's all a bit mysterious, and rumours abound). This narrator is studying the life and work of Yevgeny Zamyatin, and encounters a fellow-enthusiast on social media. When he's invited by this person to visit his home (just outside Moscow, and luxurious), it turns out he is Vadim Baranov. By Chapter 3, our original narrator has pretty much faded out, and what we get is a monologue by Baranov, explaining his rise, his long-time starring role, and his ultimate withdrawal. I'm not entirely convinced by this framing narrative, or by the highly artificial monologue it encases. But Baranov is easy to listen to, so you glide easily on.

2. Slavist Gary Saul Morson finds da Empoli's understanding of the workings of the Kremlin "plausible, interesting and often profound"; Konstantin Akinsha, on the other hand, laments the author's "imperfect knowledge of Russian realities [which] is combined with an exoticising zeal". This matters because there's a grey overlap in this book between the real and the fictional. The vast majority of the characters in the book are real people. Baranov, one of the few to be given a fictional name, is modelled on Vladislav Surkov, who served Putin as advisor and spin doctor for close on two decades. Putin is Putin (reviewers working from the English text say he is referred to only as "the tsar", and not named, but he is certainly named in the French version). The other key players -- Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Eduard Limonov, Alexander Zaldostanov, Garry Kasparov, Yevgeny Prigozhin... -- are real. Indeed, a large part of the frisson of reading this book is thinking to yourself, "Surely not...", and then looking it up, only to receive the answer, "Yes, really"... In this area, truth is way, way stranger than fiction. And yet, and yet -- these characters are "fictionalized real"... At the close of the novel, the author states that it is inspired by facts and by real persons, to whom he has attributed a private life and imaginary remarks; it is nevertheless, he maintains, "a true Russian story". In an interview, he explains: "The blurring of fiction and reality runs through the novel. But there is also a clear line: All the facts are real, the dialogues are invented. I have not met the people I am quoting. But I have met people from their environment -- both critics and people who support the system." Yet Akinsha points out several discrepancies. I don't know... I guess I'm never entirely comfortable with "faction".


Surkov and Putin. Surkov was relieved of his roles (or resigned...) in 2020

3. One of the fictional characters is a woman called Ksenia. In da Empoli's story, she abandons Baranov for Khordokovsky, and then returns to him. She seems to have faded out again by the end, but the child she has borne the now-isolated wizard is his biggest consolation. This whole scenario is the book's major weakness. Ksenia is in one respect larger than life, a kind of indomitable lioness figure. But she's also pretty vacuous. And you just have too many questions about how a child would fit into the golden cage that our original narrator depicts for us at the beginning of the book, when the narrator is first spirited off to meet Baranov. It doesn't gel somehow.

4. In fact, Baranov's whole descent of the mountain doesn't work that well for me. His disillusionment, if we can call it that, starts in Donbas. Whereas Zaldostanov wants some kind of resolution to the military campaign, Baranov wants to use it as an ongoing bargaining chip. War is a process, he tells Zaldostanov, and the objective in Donbas is not conquest but chaos. Everyone needs to see that the "orange revolution" has plunged Ukraine into anarchy, he says. The Ukrainians need to see that. Hostilities will go on until they're no longer useful. At which point, Zaldostanov presents him with a dirty and broken doll that he has fished up from the battlefield. To me this is a distinctly overwrought bit of symbolism. But it makes Baranov think: I'm the man with sophisticated solutions, and I've just told a mercenary that he has to continue the war, that he has to continue to bombard hospitals and schools, because that's what was required by the subtle design that my subtle intellect had come up with. Meanwhile, Baranov's Putin-enabling activities have put him on a list of persons to be denied entry to America or Europe. Before this restriction kicks in, he enjoys a final weekend in Stockholm with the pregnant Ksenia. He is suddenly a changed man. So, he withdraws. That whole scenario I found hard to buy...


The Altai, 1993

These negatives aside, I found a lot that was perceptive and thought-provoking.

Several years ago, I wrote a post called Walking in the Altai Mountains, which described travelling to Russia not very long after the demise of communist rule: "With the shackles of a controlled economy removed, any number of people became 'businessmen', convinced that this path would make them very rich very soon. At that point, there hadn't really been time for all this new entrepreneurial ambition to shake down, succumb to a bit of healthy regulation, adjust to the limitations of the infrastructure, or otherwise acquire a dose of reality. I wonder if this affected our trip. While the people at the coal-face of our little trekking expedition were hard-working, dedicated, and downright wonderful, somewhere further up the tree, someone had planned this whole expedition rather badly, and left it dangerously under-staffed and under-equipped." As we travelled, I remember hearing about the pitiful salaries that left schoolteachers dependent on finding some sort of extra-curricular top-up; I remember seeing protestors in Moscow who were already regretting the changes; I remember being embarrassed when our laundry lady was disproportionately happy to receive not only dollars but a pot of jam we'd brought back from the country; I remember registering that a massive income gap had already opened up between the guys with the smart suits and the flashy watches, and the shabby old folks on the streets, apparently selling items they'd scoured their attics to find.

All this is reflected in Baranov's account. The 1990s, he says, was a time full of ideas and projects, full of a "black electricity" and utter unpredictability, as people who had envisaged nothing other than a grey, repressed life now found themselves suddenly let off the leash. It was easy to lose your head, and "the level of violence was incredible". Television was relishing its freedom, and the zanier the idea for a reality TV show, the better; barbaric, vulgar, and trashy was the name of the game. But when audiences are asked to divulge the names of their heroes, they cite dictators. Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin. "That's when I understood," says Baranov, "that Russia would never be just another country." He -- who? Baranov? or da Empoli? -- is a little heavy on this determinist thing, I think, too keen to emphasize that you never escape your destiny, and the destiny of the Russians is to be governed by the descendants of Ivan the Terrible...

Of course, I start to wonder whether da Empoli didn't have an experience of post-Soviet Russia that was similar to mine, and whether the resonances I detect are the result of an echo-chamber. Who knows?



Moving on to some of the other observations dished up by the various characters, all of which make you question the way we currently deal with Russia -- and at the same time question whether this is not all just a bit simple...

-- Politics has just one goal, we're told: To respond to the things people are terrified of. Actually, our monologuist qualifies this as we go along. It's not just fear, it's anger... Westerners think anger can always be absorbed, he says; you just need to engineer economic growth, technological progress, mass tourism... But there will always be disappointed people, frustrated people, losers. Anger is a structural given, which will never entirely disappear. So, you need safety valves. For many years, organizing those safety valves was Baranov's job. And he does it by backing all sorts of people -- people who will ultimately disagree with each other, but who will absorb a lot of anger in so doing. He sweet-talks the bikies, the communists, the religious, the extreme right, the extreme left. The only ones he doesn't try to recruit are the liberals and the technocrats responsible for the catastrophes of the 1990s. He prefers to leave all these to the opposition. They're manna from heaven. Every time they stand up to say something, they boost Putin's popularity.

-- The whole question of dignity -- a phenomenon I've always been convinced is under-regarded in political studies -- is well canvassed here. In international politics the new person arrives with little in the way of credentials; s/he has to break into a circle that already exists. The Americans, it is alleged, are always ready to let you experience their superiority; underneath their cordiality there's always a streak of condescension. Da Empoli's Putin explains it like this: The problem is that the West thinks it won the Cold War. But the Cold War ended because the Russian people brought to a close a regime that was oppressing them. We weren't defeated. We freed ourselves from a dictatorship. Not the same thing. Putin is obsessed with dignity: They treat him as though he's the president of Finland, he complains. Worse than Finland. They see us as wild Russia, a kind of alcoholic tramp lurking just beyond the doorstep. And it's our fault, because we've always gone to them cap in hand... How to respond, then? Well, the only weapon a poor man can use to preserve his dignity is the capacity to instil fear.

-- We're shown again the siren call of tailored democracy. In Russia's case, it's "sovereign democracy". Garry Kasparov says sovereign democracy is to democracy what the electric chair is to the chair. In sovereign democracy, he says, the rules change, but the winner is always the same... I often used to wonder whether democracy could be cut more to the cloth of individual cultures. Now it seems that every time that happens, we end up with a travesty of democracy...

-- Uncertainty looks different, we're told, depending on your vantage-point. Whereas the West thrives on reducing uncertainty, Russia sees chaos as a friend, an opportunity. As Yevgeny Prigozhin puts it (and remember what happened to him...), people who are winning are prudent; it's the people who are losing who are willing to take risks. The West is losing. So, they're ready to make crazy choices, and Russia's task is to help them. Baranov explains that all Putin's team needs to do is to plug into the things that enrage people. We don't have to convert anyone, just discover what people believe in, and push them that tiny bit further. Push contradictory lines. Ride the chaos. Increase the chaos maybe. The rage is already there... The Russians' best propagandists will be those who accuse them of plotting against democracy, because they're the ones who will create the myth of Russian power, and anything that makes people believe in power augments it.



Da Empoli has been accused by some critics of being an apologist for Putin.

I think that's unfair. Yes, he makes us see things the way Putin's political elite might -- might -- have seen them. But in the figure of Baranov, we also see a very clear disillusionment set in. Putin, he realizes, is not so much a great actor as a great spy. For sure, Putin has found a coherent thread in Russian history. But it's the thread that connects the oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible and the tsars' secret police and Stalin's Cheka and the Prigozhins of today. After 20 years, Baranov extricates himself. No-one replaces him. The tsar is completely alone.

As Andrew Hussey puts it: "No matter how seductive and intriguing you might find the voice of Vadim Baranov, the author never lets you forget that you are in the presence of evil."