Casting has just been announced for The Wizard of the Kremlin, an upcoming Hollywood movie about Russian geopolitics leading up to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The biggest star involved is Jude Law, who is slated to smear his face with greasepaint and his hands with blood as President Vladimir Putin.
Law has a great challenge ahead of him. Being the Russian President is a tough part to play for any actor – apart from Mr. Putin himself, if the film’s main message is to be believed.
The Power-Play’s the Thing!
The movie is based upon a 2022 French-language novel of the same name by Italian-Swiss political scientist Giuliano da Empoli, the paperback edition of which has just been released in English. Da Empoli’s book is very clearly based upon the career of Vladislav Surkov, ‘Putin’s Rasputin’, the former chief spin-doctor for the Kremlin, now retired. The author did not have to go far when devising his plot; he just took popular accounts of the real-life Surkov’s story and put the main events into the mouth of a barely fictionalized version of the man re-named ‘Vadim Baranov’, who acts as the first-person narrator throughout.
During his two decades spent at Putin’s side, Surkov busily went about transforming the reality of Russian politics and foreign policy itself, earning himself the soubriquet ‘The Demiurge of the Kremlin’, after the evil godlet from Gnostic thought who was supposed to have created the fallen and fake world of physical matter which surrounds us.
Like the real-life Surkov, Baranov starts out from a background in avant-garde art and theater, but, tempted into the realm of politics by Putin, Baranov soon prefers to work at staging coups and wars rather than normal art. Life in post-Soviet Russia had been nothing but a series of swift scene-changes, Baranov perceives: from Communism, to the hyper-free-market, to democracy, and then, under Putin, back around to dictatorship again. Through such social metamorphoses, reality is revealed as being inherently malleable, with the post-modern, post-Soviet, Russian State supported by media-driven narratives every bit as much as by Kalashnikovs.
Yet, as Communism and capitalism alike both failed Russia, culminating in national bankruptcy and social chaos by the end of the 1990s, the Russian people began longing for a more durable backdrop for their society that might finally yield stability. As Baranov says: “Gorbachev and Yeltsin had led a revolution, but most Russians woke up the next day to a world that was unfamiliar, one they didn’t know how to navigate … They had grown up in a nation and now found themselves in a supermarket.”
All the World’s a Cage
In both real-life and in da Empoli’s book, a pivotal moment comes when a reality-TV show in which the public had to vote for who had been the greatest Russian of all time was won not by Tolstoy or Pushkin, as its creators had expected, but by Josef Stalin. So embarrassed were the showrunners that they doctored the results so someone slightly less genocidal could triumph – the 13th-century military prince and saint Alexander Nevsky, on the grounds that “at least he was a warrior not an exterminator.”
Clearly, Russia’s age-old love for a strong leader to protect them from perpetual war was the one facet of reality that could not be banished from the national consciousness. Instead, Baranov, the stand-in for Vladislav Surkov, realizes the stage has been set for a new Stalin-aping Great Dictator in the form of Putin, referred to throughout the book as “The Tsar,” as well as by his true name.
Putin’s initial ascent to the presidency was arguably facilitated by a literal act of political theater, in a series of apartment block bombings which took place in Moscow in 1999, officially at the hands of Islamist jihadis from the breakaway Russian province of Chechnya, but allegedly the true work of Putin’s old friends from the KGB (later GRU). Coming conveniently just prior to Russia’s 2000 elections, they allowed Putin, then Prime Minister, to make his name as the military strongman who would restore glory and safety to Mother Russia by launching a brutal revenge-invasion against Chechnya, thus facilitating his subsequent landslide selection to the top role of President.
From this point onwards, the novel argues, the main purpose of Russian political life became to manufacture a series of artificial ‘perma-crises’ modeled after the original 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that were used as a pretext to invade Chechnya. Therefore, Baranov helps create a whole litany of purportedly imminent threats to the national soul and national borders alike from ‘pedophiles’ in Brussels, to ‘Satanists’ in Washington, to ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine, with ‘Putin the Protector’ then posited as the only viable solution to them, just as his predecessor Stalin had once been in relation to Adolf Hitler.
Irrational Actors
The only trouble was that, as soon as he donned his costume as Dear Leader, Putin immediately turned out to be a committed method-actor straight from the Stanislavski school, becoming “the actor who puts his own self on stage, who doesn’t need to act because the role is so thoroughly a part of him that the plotline of the play has become his own story, flows in his veins.”
Putin successfully plays the tyrannical though necessary national leader because he really believes in it; his stage-presence becomes so all-consuming that everyone must play along or face the consequences, as in old Stalin-era Soviet show-trials. Studying the obviously fake contents of such show-trials, Baranov perceives so many of the Russian public believed them at the time because of their sheer narrative strength and emotional potency, not their plausibility, much as enraptured viewers suspend disbelief when watching a Hollywood fantasy. The only true necessity of any successful political message is that of narrative consistency: although Russia has 120 TV channels, under Putin, “those channels all tell the same story.”
Besides the kind of legal dramas the Stalin show-trials represented, war-films are also quite poignant and capable of shaping a national narrative. Why should Baranov not do the same with Ukraine? Like Surkov in real life, Baranov thinks the wars of the future will be fought more over narratives than territory, complaining of how fools in opposition NATO militaries “pursue naïve objectives, like victory”, when really “war is a process … [whose] goals extend far beyond military success. The fact is that it is important for us never to succeed completely, never to let our conquest become definitive”. If the ‘Nazis’ in Kiev can remain never quite fully vanquished, just perpetually on the ropes but still dangerous, as in today’s half-frozen front-lines, the scripted public need for Putin to continue acting as the nation’s ‘indispensable’ protector will never disappear.
“This war is not being fought in the real world,” continues Baranov, “it’s being fought in people’s heads. The importance of your actions on the battlefield isn’t measured by the number of towns you’ve taken, but by the number of brains you’ve conquered.” Try telling that to all Ukraine’s and Russia’s dead and injured, or their mourning families …
Overall, The Wizard of the Kremlin is an excellent read, and I look forward to the movie. The only real criticism I have is that, despite all the many incredible political crimes it reveals, Giuliano da Empoli’s book is, sadly, only all too believable.
