Synopsis

The Magician of the Kremlin is a novel at once chilling and warm. Its author immerses us in the brilliantly twisted psyche of Vadim Baranov, the fictional alter ego of Vladislav Sourkov, Vladimir Putin's spin doctor until 2021. Over the course of one night, Baranov, the man known as the "magician of the Kremlin," recounts how he helped build the image of the "tsar" in 2001, when the latter was just another pale and unknown prime minister of the Boris Yeltsin era. Baranov, a man of avant-garde art and reality TV, is a cultured man, but also, and above all, a fascist ideologue, capable of exploiting Putin's resentment and legitimizing his brutal authoritarianism by correcting his crude vocabulary. Baranov, in short, helps give the dictatorship a mask of democracy and quickly becomes the unscrupulous architect of disinformation, exacerbating and channeling popular anger on social media and elsewhere. This novel reads fearfully, like a Roman tragedy: the people who brought Putin to power are eliminated or imprisoned while, with the help of dollars, manipulation, cyber attacks, and support for extremist movements of all kinds, the myth of an omnipotent Russia capable of controlling the most hidden plots is created. The goal is not to seize power but to create chaos. But beyond the relentless X-ray of the Putin system with its servile courtiers, its oligarchs, its hunted exiles, its escorts, its relentless killers, The Magician of the Kremlin makes us feel the icy breath of Russian power. An empire capable of weaving together all the narrative threads of the great Russian novel: from Ivan the Terrible to the "troll factories" to the creation of a frightening, illusory fresco illustrating "the glorious history of an undefeated people." An empire for which war, as current events tragically remind us, is the only possible horizon for survival. Underpinned by a searing relevance, this modern and visionary book has the timeless grace of a classic. Giuliano da Empoli's erudition, style, and storytelling skill imbue this raw and brutal story with an almost metaphysical level of purity. It is The Prince, permeated by John le Carré's mists, narrated with the cadence of great Russian literature.