Book Review: The Wizard of the Kremlin Guiliano Da Empoli Pushkin Press – 2023

And soon to be released as a film under the directorship of Olivier Assayas

‘Politics has just one goal: to address man’s terrors’

Guiliano Da Empoli has created a masterful fiction that reads like a documentary, deftly squeezing in his own characters between well-known contemporary Russian leaders, mainly Putin, government ministers, and oligarchs.

The setting, which I found faded into the background as the story took hold, is an interview conducted by a French intellectual with Vadim Baranov, a retired advisor to ‘the tsar’ (ie Putin).

Baranov, therefore, becomes the main narrator. Through his revelations, we are taken into the heart and mind of the Russian psyche. How Putin emerged as the strong man ‘to address Russia’s terrors’ – the disaster of the free market unleashed in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR and the encroachment of NATO as its former territories, such as Ukraine, flex their newly acquired independence muscles to buddy up to Europe rather than ‘mother Russia’.

As you might expect, there are unexplained deaths of would-be opponents to Putin’s regime, wonderful Russian names, a beautiful love interest, Ksenia ‘a woman who would burn down a whole city to spare herself a moment of tedium’ , Gary Kasparov, and a brooding sense of the depth of the Russian soul and yet a lingering sense of oppression, or suppression, through enforcing a strict communist-based ideal of frugality and equality, ‘you only have to flip a single switch for the entire room to be bathed in the same brutal and uniform light’.

Baranov is portrayed as a hardened and cynical spin doctor and yet Da Empoli invests a critical chink of light in this machine-like personality in the form of his tender feelings for his daughter Anya, ‘each moment that he lived in her company, represented a small miracle…in those moments gratitude flooded through him like a hit of vodka’.

Whether the film version, in which the narrator is an American, I suppose to elicit a further taught string to the underlying menace of Moscow, is a match for the novel remains to be seen…but I will certainly join the queue at the cinema to find out.

A disturbing and yet compelling read. Thoroughly recommended.