"The Wizard of the Kremlin" by Giuliano da Empoli (2022)

On a magic carpet ride

The "Wizard of the Kremlin" is a fascinating book, but not for the reasons the critics think. It has nothing of relevance to say about Russia, and everything to say about life in power. The novel is essentially a monologue delivered by a brilliant Russian politician, Vadim Baranov, about how he helped Vladimir Putin attain and keep office from 1999 onwards. All of the characters are fictionalized versions of actual Russians from the post-Yeltsin era. That includes Baranov, who is based on the real-world Vladislav Surkov, a former advisor and fixer to Putin.

You may have heard of "Wizard" in the news. No wonder: the book benefitted from a stroke of luck--if you want to call it that. The novel was published in France under the title "Le mage du Kremlin" in April 2022, two months after Russia invaded Ukraine. For an entire commentariat dedicated to close-reading Putin's war, the book was, as they say, a teachable moment. The critics of two continents latched onto it as the master key to Putin's brain. They were wrong, but more about that later.

First, the virtues. The novel speaks wisely about the intricacies of 21st-century politics, and there's a reason for that: the guy who authored it was a politician. 

"Wizard" was the debut book of Giuliano da Empoli, a French-Italian European technocrat from a family of the same. Before kicking off a career in letters, da Empoli was most famous for being the good right hand of Italian centrist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. He has the general pedigree you'd expect from this kind of guy: board member of the Venice Biennale, Deputy Mayor for Culture in Florence, founded a think tank, conference circuit speaker, columnist, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. 

I mentioned Vladislav Surkov, and we have to talk about the real guy before we discuss his fictional counterpart. Surkov is under house arrest now, but for nearly twenty years he was Putin's right hand political adviser--an innovative and sharp producer of most of the Russian President’s important initiatives and God knows what else during his time in office. Surkov is generally regarded by most knowledgeable observers of the Kremlin as a behind-the-scenes innovator of the first order; really, a kind of postmodern political genius. 

"With a background in theater directing in the 1980s and public relations in the 1990s," the LA Review of Books described him as 

"... widely credited as being the chief architect of Russia’s 'managed democracy' in the 2000s: he helped Putin to consolidate power by co-opting opposing forces, whether that meant funding youth groups of various political persuasions and then revealing the sources of their funding, or creating a new political party for Putin and then a loyal opposition for that party in parliament." 

The BBC documentarian Adam Curtis described Surkov as a prophet of the disinformation era; a spin doctor who understood that a world of blurry identities and shifting national lines required a new kind of strategic thinking. Politics would now take place on a field of shifting symbolic victories, and these victories would be on TV or online, not on the battlefield. Politics as theater for the era of cable news and Facebook, in other words. In an interview, Curtis noted that:

"What Surkov does is he pushes it one level further. He buys up political parties to pretend they’re the opposition, which means the opposition vote gets split and then Putin will be in power. But what’s brilliant is he then tells everyone and says what he’s doing, which means that if you’re an ordinary Russian, you’ve got absolutely no idea whether the party you’re going to vote for is a true party or a fake party. At which point you really do mess with people’s brains. In Surkov there’s not a glimpse of the future but the transition we’re heading towards. What Surkov is saying is you can make the world the way you want it to be. He’s saying, I’m doing this, at which point you’re dazed and confused right, you don’t know what the fuck’s going on. But as soon as people realise on a grand scale that you can make the world any way you want it to be and if they find a way of coming together then they will make the world."

The idea for "Wizard" basically came from da Empoli encountering Surkov, and figuring out what to make of him. In the larger sense, the entire novel can be seen as da Empoli's attempt to riddle out the mystery of Putin's Rasputin. So we get descriptions of Baranov (that is, Surkov) along these lines:

"From time to time he would publish something, either a brief essay in an obscure independent journal, or a research article on military strategy aimed at the highest echelons of the army, or even a piece of fiction that showed off his talent for paradox, in the best Russian tradition." 

"In the best Russian tradition" is a tell there. This book covers Russia in what Antoine Nicolle called "an often exoticized and stereotyped way," and boy, is that accurate. Apparently it worked, too: da Empoli won the Académie Française's Grand Prix du Roman in October 2022 for such generalizations. 

I haven't discussed the plot, but most of us know the sad history of post-Cold War Russia: merciless gangster capitalism, national humiliation, the rule of billionaires, Yeltsin's decline, Putin ascending to power, and everything that's come after that: the Olympics, Crimea, and now Ukraine.

As I mentioned, "Wizard" is mostly a monologue after the third chapter. Baranov explains his history to a curious foreigner who comes to visit him. He goes over twenty years from an inside perspective: here's what Putin thought, here's what I (Surkov) thought, here's what we did, here is why we were successful, here is what Westerners do not understand about Russia. Which is funny, since the entire book is a monument to cross-cultural misunderstanding. 

"Wizard" is not a guide to Vladimir Putin, but a rehash of every single fantasy that any educated European or American has had about post-Soviet Russia. You will not find any thoughts in here that you couldn't get in the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the Financial Times. When it comes to savvy readings of Russia or Putin, the book fails: instead of deep reading, we have Orientalizing to the greatest degree. All of the usual tropes apply here: Russia is gigantic, Russia is backward, Russia is deep and inscrutable, un-Western, the Other, cannot abide democracy, etc. "No one knows anything in Russia, and either you cope or you leave." You get the gist, right?

All of the alleged insights into Putin's character are in this hackneyed mode. There is, indeed, a bountiful harvest of what Westerners imagine to be Russian cynicism.

"But given that no one ever says anything in Moscow as a matter of principle, and this goes back centuries ..." Name a capital city where this is not true. 

"Possibly a touch lugubrious at times, but that could generally be fixed with a glass or two of vodka." I am very much surprised that the author did not fit this sentence with an ushanka. 

Yet there is a reason "Wizard of the Kremlin" can contain sentences like the above and win prizes. 

When I was writing stories about Silicon Valley or politics, I had a simple question that helped me figure out what was really happening: What is the system actually trying to do? What is actually being tested for? If you watch the Grammys regularly, you will soon realize that the Best Album of the Year is rarely the Best, is only sometimes an Album, and often irrelevant to the Year. The test is not "Best Album of the Year," but "Most Popular Album which also Sold Well and Everyone Likes." That is the actual test, the one that is not mentioned. 

Likewise, if you assume the purpose of infamous Ponzi schemes like WeWork or Theranos was to create a usable product or service, you will be confused over how these cons happened. But when you understand the actual goal was "Create enough buzz to successfully prop up a bubble until something useful could be cobbled together," then it all makes sense.

Similarly, the indicator actually being tested for here is not demonstrable truth of Putin, Putinism, or modern Russia. Rather, all "Wizard of the Kremlin" has to do is flatter the prejudices and purported insights of its audience: well-informed Europeans and Americans who once read a Wikipedia entry on the subject. And in that measure, da Empoli is marvelously successful. 

However, this is a book still worth reading, and not just because it contains passages like this:

“Do you know what the problem is? he asked me one day while we were walking in the woods in his countryside. The human eye is made to survive in the forest. This is why it is sensitive to movement. Anything that moves, even at the most extreme periphery of our gaze, the eye captures it and transports the information to the brain. On the other hand, you know what we don't see?" I shook my head. “What remains still, Vadia. In the midst of all the changes, we are not trained to distinguish things that remain the same. And that's a big problem because, when you think about it, the things that don't change are almost always the most important."

The real value of "Wizard" lies not in its view of Russia or its President, but in its political analysis, its understanding of the essential weirdness of office and power, all of which are delivered with a literary flair. Mr. da Empoli can write. The author, whatever his faults, is somebody who does know about politics, both as a profession and as a unique art. He imbues truisms with poetry, like: 

"Like the great dictators of history, Ksenia knew instinctively that nothing inspires greater fear among her subjects than a randomly applied punishment. The punishment that can occur unexpectedly, for no apparent reason, is the only one capable of keeping them in a constant state of alert."

"Wizard" has insights into how statecraft happens, how the public is manipulated, how politics works in a media-saturated age where meaning is disputed. The book understands that successful leaders --whatever other skills they have--are above all people who can make use of opportunities. Da Empoli understands something about politics; he knows truths that are unavailable to amateurs, and it is a shame this acuity is not paired with a more thoughtful and nuanced discussion of Putin's strange career.

"Wizard of the Kremlin" is the Dances with Wolves of its day: a shallow masterpiece with greater insight into the craft and the audience than its purported subject. The title's half-inaccurate: "Wizard," yes. "Of the Kremlin," no. The man behind the curtain is holding a mirror.