Putin's charming puppet masters The Kremlin's worst schemers still make for stunning political art

Empoli’s accomplishment is to dramatise the Putinist system of intermingled force and fraud as a malign work of art executed first on a national, then a planetary, scale. Baranov-Surkov transfers the stunts, coups and illusions of his art from theatre auditorium to public square, spotlit by TV and internet channels as Russia’s media free-for-all “pushed back the frontiers of trash”. Any masterpiece requires a signature, though the novel deliberately equivocates as to whether the manipulative “wizardry” belongs mainly to Surkov, or to Putin himself. From the crushing of the oligarchs to the conjuring of nationalist frenzy among the victims of free-market kleptocracy in Russia, Empoli’s Baranov likes to wrap the Tsar’s basic instincts and drastic actions in dainty theoretical packages. It’s Putin himself who warns his court intellectual that conspiracy-prone deep thinkers “systematically underestimate the power of stupidity, forgetfulness and chance” in great events.

The novel rode high in the French bestseller lists after the Ukraine invasion, and won the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française. That august accolade fits the bill, for Empoli turns Baranov-Surkov into a wry, sly epigrammatic raconteur of a distinctively French kind. He strews his discourse with French quotations and alludes familiarly to the court of the Sun King — where his polished aphorisms and paradoxes would have shone. Some critics wondered whether Empoli — who had previously scrutinised the careers of populist spin-doctors in his book The Engineers of Chaos — was giving the devil his most seductive tunes. Did Baranov-Surkov’s worldly, ironic and elegant confession slide from admission into apologia? Only in the sense that Shakespeare’s Richard III (with whom he compares Putin) invites us to sympathise with late-medieval tyranny. Empoli’s Tsar begins and continues as an inscrutable monster, albeit one with a strikingly lucid mind and strong will, as he sets out to reverse the abject humiliations of the Yeltsin era and make Russian power speak once more in “the language of life, death, honour and fatherland”.

Empoli, though, makes us ask whether his Surkov figure might be a dead-souled ogre of another rank entirely. We even side with the thuggish ultra-nationalist biker Zaldostanov (who really exists) when, in one of the book’s strongest scenes, he rounds on Baranov. Amid the debris of shelled Luhansk, it dawns on the leather-clad militia capo that his blood-stained patriotic crusade to reunite Mother Russia is, to the cynical strategist, just another page on the playbook of spin. Zaldostanov finds a mutilated doll in the rubble of an apartment block. He thrusts it into the abashed Baranov’s face. “This little broken, dirty thing must once have had a name. And a little girl played with it for whole afternoons.”

For once, Baranov fails to fire back with a killer quip. If Le Mage du Kremlin dissects the figure of the intellectual in the corridors of power, it draws back from saluting that role. This ambivalence has a French as well as a Russian face. The original eminence grise, the elusive strategist at the ruler’s side, was Capuchin friar François Leclerc du Tremblay, adviser to Louis XIII’s minister Cardinal Richelieu. Since then, in literature and politics, the backstairs thinker-fixer has transfixed the French imagination, and sometimes adopted human form: for instance, in the shape of Charles de Gaulle’s resilient culture minister, André Malraux.

Intellectuals love, and hate, to see one of their own atop the greasy pole; in France, many have dared to climb it. In a more knockabout vein, the recent acrobatic leaps and falls of what the French would call “Anglo-Saxon” spin-masters — notably Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings — have seen those Atlanticist figures pay their own sort of tribute to a very French tradition. For sure, Russian literature and statecraft has its own tradition of scheming, amoral artists of mind-control. None is more creepily compelling than Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, or (in history) more notorious than the mystic monk Grigori Rasputin. Yet Empoli’s cerebral courtier, “a poet fallen among wolves”, often sounds as if he belongs beside the Seine rather than the Neva or Moskva.

That said, his ideas do retain a sinister allure. Empoli’s voicing of Surkov’s postmodern politics of spectacle, contradiction and disinformation may not be that original. Peter Pomerantsev has drilled down into the Surkov method in his exemplary books (This Is Not Propaganda; Nothing is True and Everything is Possible). Meanwhile, the documentary wizard of the BBC archives, Adam Curtis, seems spellbound by the Kremlin sorcerer. Surkov’s theory and practice haunts his 2016 series Hyper-Normalisation and the later Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. The theatrical stand-offs Empoli invents with the disgraced tycoons Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, and with restaurateur-turned-Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, could almost appear in a Peter Morgan screenplay. Indeed, Morgan’s most recent drama, Patriots, tracks Berezovsky’s rise.

Empoli, however, lends the Surkov code and its art of lies a glinting, lapidary clarity. Don’t be afraid of chaos, but provoke and channel it. Forget labels such as “government” or “opposition”, “liberal” or “conservative”. Sow doubt and anxiety by backing, then thwarting, every competing social movement: “bikers and hooligans, anarchists and skinheads, communists and religious fanatics, the extreme right, the extreme left…” Foster the war of all against all, turn reality inside out, and in the wake of furious unrest restore “vertical” power with the almighty state and its leader-saviour in sole charge. As Empoli’s Baranov puts it in his suave but sulphurous credo:

“Anger remains the primordial drive you must take into account. You, right-thinking Westerners, think it can be absorbed. That economic growth, technological progress and — I don’t know — home deliveries and mass tourism will make the rage of the people disappear… It’s not true: there will always be the disappointed, the frustrated, the losers, in every age and under every regime. Stalin understood that rage is a structural element… To repress dissent is crude. To manage the flow of rage, to stop it building up, is more complicated, but much more effective. Over many years my work, at root, has been none other than that.”

Le Mage du Kremlin shows us Baranov-Surkov in placid, domestic retirement. He’s happy to cherish his daughter and his library while posting pseudonymous tweets about the prophetic genius of the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the classic dystopia We (also, incidentally, a major influence on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). Reading the novel in 2023, one inevitably wonders whether the absence of Surkov from Putin’s nocturnal brooding contributed to the catastrophic blunders of the Ukraine invasion.

For Empoli portrays a ringmaster of steady-state disorder and permanent crisis — at home and abroad — who knows how to dodge final showdowns and settlements. The aim, remember, is “not conquest but chaos”. Chaos in the service of the spellbinding Tsar, a world-wide digital hubbub fed by Putin’s adversaries more than his allies, spreads “the myth of our power”. All-out war, on the other hand, drives events back from post-truth flux, blurring them back towards the old world in which binary alternatives of victory and defeat come into play again.

Without a Surkov-style counsellor, the Tsar seems to have broken his wand and retreated into an antique, analogue landscape of visible battle-lines, measurable advances and retreats. If Le Mage du Kremlin raises ethical questions, it does so not because it excuses the Tsar and his adviser’s stunts and frauds, but because it endorses their effectiveness. “I couldn’t bear the idea of losing,” Baranov reflects. But “indefatigable labour” ensured that “I was lucky; I nearly always won.” Will the real Surkov survive to re-emerge amid the ruins of the Tsar’s epoch? It would make a tasty sequel.

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Le Mage du Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli is published by Gallimard; translations by Boyd Tonkin

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Boyd Tonkin is a journalist, editor, and literary and music critic, and author recently of The 100 Best Novels in Translation.

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