Recent sightings of the 71-year-old Vladimir Putin tend to be described in the hushed tones of a concerned matron. Did you see his arm tremor? Why is he looking so puffy and pale? What’s all that table-gripping about? The desire to know what is going on behind the scenes at the Kremlin has grown exponentially since the war in Ukraine began over 18 months ago. Into this imaginative vacuum strides Giuliano da Empoli’s first novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin, an acute and timely dissection of Russian power, told through the eyes of a shadowy political adviser to Putin.
The so-called “wizard” of the novel is Vadim Baranov, a fictional figure whose penchant for avant-garde theatrics and disruptive propaganda bears apparent similarities to Putin’s former political adviser Vladislav Surkov — known for establishing Russia’s political doctrines of “sovereign democracy” and the “vertical of power”, a system in which the buck stops with one man and one man alone.
“The only thing that matters in Russia is privilege, proximity to power. Everything else is secondary,” Baranov tells his urbane interlocutor — seemingly a version of the author himself — during a nighttime meeting in Moscow. Baranov, who is retired from political life at the time of the interview, recounts his contributions to the political rise of Putin, whom he revealingly nicknames “the tsar.”