"The Wizard of the Kremlin" - French novel cutting to the bone regarding PUTIN [View all]

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/30/le-mage-du-kremlin-novel-french-putin-russia-vladislav-surkov/

The Wizard of the Kremlin
A French novel offers a fascinating, fictionalized look at Vladimir Putin’s longtime spin doctor.

.... It is not that the author, Giuliano da Empoli, a Swiss Italian political scientist who teaches at Sciences Po in Paris, has a lively imagination. The opposite, rather: Most of the book, whose title translates into English as “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” is one long monologue by Baranov, who is modeled on Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s longtime spin doctor. Surkov, who was a close advisor of Putin for almost two decades, is one of the oprichniki who seems to have fallen from grace recently—although that may well be spin, too. ....

Putin found Surkov’s theories on “vertical power” and “sovereign democracy”—which involved plans to set up an autocratic system that looked like a democracy, complete with fake opposition parties controlled by the Kremlin—highly appealing. These theories and many others of Surkov’s that Putin put into practice, slowly turning Russia into a dictatorship over the years and starting to subjugate neighboring countries such as Ukraine, are center stage in the novel. ....

In the book, the tsar (in real life, PUTIN) remains distant, cold as a fish. He trusts no one and lives a secluded life out of town. He sleeps until late in the morning and then does sports. When he steps out of the pool, his advisors are waiting. One by one, they tell him what he needs to know. Then they are dismissed. The tsar is driven to the Kremlin, where he stays until deep in the night. These descriptions remind us of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s biographies of former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, who were so out of sync with the outside world that they relied on the brutality of the secret service for survival.

In the end, Baranov, like Surkov, does not work in the Kremlin anymore—though the circumstances of their dismissals remain unclear. There is, however, nothing reassuring about this. On the contrary: It means that the genie Baranov has cultivated and orchestrated for two decades in the Kremlin is out of the bottle. In the novel, Baranov tells one of the provocateurs whom he has instructed to destabilize the Donbas: “You are actors in a much bigger drama, which goes beyond this here.”

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