The Poet Among Putin’s Wolves

Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin is a study of the hedonism and cynicism of Putin’s inner circle.

The title of Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin, knowingly evokes vividly Technicolored Hollywood fantasies: There’s no place like Motherland; please pay attention to the man behind the (Iron) curtain. An Italian Swiss think-tanker, essayist, and high-end political adviser, da Empoli is fascinated by Machiavellian machinations. The book’s protagonist, Vadim Baranov, is a sorcerer skilled in the dark arts of propaganda and ideological brand management. The character is a thinly fictionalized version of Vladislav Surkov, widely regarded as the reigning trickster of twenty-first-century Russian politics, a “poet among wolves” with a direct line to the leader of the pack.

Like his real-life model, Baranov is a lapsed artist with a knack for stagecraft. He’s a former avant-garde theater director turned reality-television producer who willingly sells out and takes over the stewardship of Vladimir Putin’s public image in the early 2000s, manning his post through the Kadyrov Pact and the dog days of Russiagate in the United States to the inception of the Ukrainian war. The culture warrior-to-apparatchik pipeline makes for a fascinating and disconcerting professional case study. Resentful of what he perceives as the decadent and desultory sophistication of his fellow intellectuals—and attuned to an ambient yearning among the masses to Make Russia Great Again—Baranov styles himself as an amplifier for a strongman’s vox populi rhetoric. Putin has a penchant for appearing bare-chested in manly poses, and Baranov uses that charisma as a blunt instrument to renovate the country’s dilapidated power structure.

Whereas the world-weary Boris Yeltsin required propping up in public appearances, Putin towers proudly before the cameras. An avatar of vertikal vlasti, he stands at the peak of a top-down power structure predicated on the paranoid supplication of staffers and civilians alike. Baranov has no illusions about Putin’s hardwired authoritarian nature even as he works fast and furiously to conjure illusions for others. “There is nothing wiser,” he explains wryly, “than to bet on the madness of men.”

On the page, The Wizard of the Kremlin excels as a twisty, fact-based picaresque about high-rollers gambling with matters of life and death, and hung up on the breakneck exhilaration of letting it ride. Olivier Assayas’s film version of The Wizard of the Kremlin is impressively faithful to its source’s speed and sprawl, as well as to its Matryoshka-like narrative structure. In the adaptation, with a screenplay co-written by Assayas and French novelist Emmanuel Carrère, an American academic, Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), visits the wily, worldly........

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