A Portrait of Putin the Terrible

REPORTEDLY IT WAS a heart punch, an old KGB technique, that killed Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin’s most vocal irritant, who had earlier survived nerve gas and other agents of silence. More than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the old habits of the paranoid still lurk in the icy Arctic remoteness, where the dissident was serving the 21st-century version of the Gulag term. And throughout the Navalny saga, Vladimir Putin, perhaps the most intimidating Russian after Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin, never mentioned the name of the die-hard activist who called him a “thieving little man”. Denying your opponent the respectability of existence is straight from the dictator’s oldest playbook, and the gran­ite inscrutability of Putin, amidst the swirl and savagery of the world he inhabits, defies even the worst models of absolute power from Russian history. It’s this chilly enigma of Putin that Giuliano da Empoli, an Italian writing in French, sets out to crack in his first novel, a docufiction, The Wizard of the Kremlin (Pushkin Press, 304 pages, £16.99).

The Putin that emerges from the monologue, peppered with philosophical asides, of a former spinmeister of the Kremlin’s overlord, is a man who denies even his courtiers and counsellors access to his mind. What he demands is the surrender of the will. It was the outbreak of democracy in post-Soviet Russia, which was squandered by a Yeltsin fast drowning in rot-gut vodka, that brought him to power. It was the chaos that followed that fortified the cult of the tsar that pervades the pages of The Wizard of the Kremlin, stretching from the former secret service boss’ quiet ascension to the cold-blooded choreography of consolida­tion to the invasion of Ukraine. It is a portrait of power in which the stillness at the core is matched by the pursuit of order outside, the doctrine of grievance by the memory of greatness. It is one man’s determination not to let circumstances shape his destiny but to take control of his own and Russia’s.

Da Empoli’s nameless narrator is brought to Moscow by his obsession with the early 20th-century Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose dystopian novel We, with oracular precision, was not just targeting Stalin but “all the dictators waiting in the wings, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley as well as the mandarins of China’s single political party.” And it is Zamyatin that brings him face-to-face with the wizard of the Kremlin, or Putin’s retired Rasputin, who shares the narrator’s passion for the author of We. Now a recluse living in a neoclassical mansion deep inside the forest far beyond Moscow, “the saddest and loveliest of imperial capitals,” Vadim Baranov, a former adviser to Putin with an illustrious ancestry of scholarship and Soviet-era power, over a night, by the fireside in his library, opens up to the visitor, though he admits that “no book that I could write would ever measure up to the exercise of power.” It’s a measured soliloquy, with no trace of the retro­spective rancour of the fallen, that takes the reader through the hidden passageways leading to the fear and aura of absolute power, personalised to terrifying perfection by the man Baranov, who is apparently modelled after a real-life Kremlin insider, calls the tsar.

When Baranov, intellectual and television producer, is first introduced to Putin at the headquarters of FSB, successor to KGB, by the original oligarch of free Russia, Boris Berezovsky, the man in a beige polyester suit sitting behind a rosewood desk exuded a sense of calm. He was receptive to the ideas of Baranov, who, drawing from his experience in stagecraft, elaborated on the verticality of power, something Russia lacked in the evening of the Yeltsin era. “Mystery creates energy. Distance fosters veneration. The imagination of Russian society, of any society, plays out in two dimensions. On the horizontal axis is proximity to everyday reality, while the vertical axis measures authority,” he tells Russia’s top spy. As too much horizontality in post-Soviet Russia has brought chaos, Baranov tells Putin, “what we need in order to establish perspective is elevation.” What Russia needs is a leader “who’ll leave off momspeak and go back to using the language of the father, to laying down the law,” and Putin is that leader.

Once Putin achieves tsardom and embodies the supreme power of verticality, his story, in Da Empoli’s telling, be­comes a pastiche of Márquez’s despot in The Autumn of the Patriarch or Llosa’s Trujillo in The Feast of the Goat. If “who­ever lives in the Kremlin owns time,” Putin monopolises the loyalty of his enablers as well, and they all have a use-by date stamped on their innermost anxieties by the tsar him­self. Berezovsky, who wanted to play the kingmaker, would test the patience of his old protégé and, in the end, find himself as an exile pleading for a homecoming. He would be found dead in his Berkshire home. Another oligarch, Khodorkovsky, for no evil reason, would get jailed, only to be released at the request of the wizard. Familiar faces pass through the pages, each playing the assigned role, among them the tsar’s St Petersburg buddy and restaurateur Yevgeny Prigozhin, who, seated in a soi-disant Louis XVI chair with gold armrests, tells Baranov, “Like me, he [Putin] loves judo and he knows that its basic prin­ciple is to use your adversary’s force against him.” No puppet can take the hand that pulls the string for granted. The only living organism that enjoys immunity in the tsar’s court is his female Labrador Retriever named Koni, who once intimidated Chancellor Merkel, known for her phobia for dogs. “Caligula only made his horse a consul, whereas we promoted the dog to minister of foreign affairs,” Baranov tells the narrator.

If Baranov is the savviest producer of the Kremlin theatre, Putin is the actor who owns the script, “the actor who puts his own self on stage, who doesn’t need to act because the role is so thoroughly a part of him that the plotline of the play has become his own story.” On this stage, in different times, players of varying degrees of power and pathology enacted some of his­tory’s bloodiest plotlines. Putin, an actor schooled in the art of counterespionage, has maximised the uses of paranoia, which alone helps him reap the rewards of chaos, even as the stage gets splattered with blood. On this stage redemp­tion is remembrance, as the soliloquising wizard realises when he invites a stranger into the darker chambers of his memory. In the night of reliving, the storyteller alone seeks a closure; the man who controls the story can only take refuge in premonitions: “There’s no happy ending in politics. Even the Sun King, at the end of his life, had terrible crying spells.”

The Wizard of the Kremlin is one of those novels that make reality starker, and power the hallucination of the loneliest. And the history of Russia has always been redeemed by the imagination of its novelists, whether it’s Gogol or Dostoevsky. Giuliano da Empoli has given the venality of power the most inscrutable but recognisable face in fiction.

At some point, the tsar tells his wizard, “You know it perfectly well, Vadya, it wasn’t us. We never do anything. We just create the conditions that allow for various possibilities.” Doesn’t that somewhat explain the death of Alexei Navalny?

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