Inside the mind of Putin… and why the West can never understand him: PETER HITCHENS reviews The Wizard Of The Kremlin

BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Wizard of the Kremlin

by Giuliano da Empoli, translated by Willard Wood (Pushkin Press £16.99, 304pp)

No one ever says how beautiful Moscow is. Yet I have never lived somewhere so full of myths and sinister glamour.

That toothless old woman in black, standing on the street corner in the December slush with a goose for sale, might as well sell you a handful of magic beans – and who knows what they might grow into.

In May, the evening sky is so beautiful that you feel like you can see all the way to the end of the universe.

There are many neighborhoods with old, low streets where the past is so strongly present that nothing would surprise you. There are others where the corpses of Stalin’s victims reappear now and then, pushing up from their shallow, hasty graves under the balsam poplars, which the great dictator had planted by the thousands.

The wide old roads leading east out of the city run all the way to China, with not much in between. Forget the Ural Mountains. They don’t get much use out of it anyway. This is the edge of Europe, the edge of the known world.

And in this setting begins The Wizard Of The Kremlin, a witty, mocking, clever book about the tyrant who sits in that great walled fortress with turrets and terrifies the world.

I knew that Giuliano da Empoli, its author, had understood Russia when he wrote about that “looming sense of menace that is part of Moscow’s charm,” noting that the best places to live in the city are blocks from the 1950s, built by German prisoners of war. .

This is actually true. I lived in a building like that. I knew it was built by slaves just like that, because that’s what they were. And I was as excited as I was shocked.

He describes a brutal city, the saddest and most beautiful of the imperial capitals, where a smile is a sign of idiocy, where the women are as fierce as they are beautiful (when young), where no one knows anything, and when they do know, they do that too. I’m not saying, “So you can deal with it or leave.”

Many leave. I stuck with it for a short time and it changed my life forever. And this introduction to the gigantic, majestic, terrifying Russian capital is only the opening of the door to the Kremlin, from which dark energy emanates.

In the middle of the night, after a long and worrying drive deep into the Russian forest, the reader is taken straight into the presence of Vladimir Putin, deep in his mind.

Although this is a work of fiction, it is very closely based on reality, and I doubt I have seen anywhere a smarter portrayal of Russia’s view of power, politics and the world, or a better explanation of how the colorless, secretive policeman Putin grew into the monstrous, fascinating thing he has become. Some Western critics have accused Da Empoli of being too sympathetic to the Russian despot. He answers that it is a novel, not a political work. He has no obligation to teach. And he’s right. Understanding does not mean forgiving or excusing. But if you don’t understand it, or refuse to understand it, you are foolish.

Giuliano da Empoli, the author, wrote about that “looming sense of menace that is part of Moscow’s charm” (file image)

The Putin we see here stems deeply from Russia’s past of Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin. He instinctively understands something forgotten by the West in the nearly eighty years of settled, prosperous peace that followed 1945 in North America and Europe, and which is now coming to an irregular but final end. He understands what all cynics know: that power comes from fear, that those who wish to exercise it must at least appear to be curing the nation’s ills, if necessary by force, and not preventing them by building better drains and to spend a lot of money. money to the NS.

The moment when Putin rudely snarls in public that he will, if necessary, kill Chechen rebels wherever he finds them, ‘even in the s***house’, is the moment when the authority of a Russian people who have longed for years for a man with strength, ready to kill. They are fed up with liberal rule, which has led to chaos, inflation, unemployment and crime.

From that moment on he has all the power he wants. And from then on, he can’t stop using it, or the people who look up to him will turn against him instead.

Those in the West who despise the Russian people for this behavior may wonder what the cult of Trump in the US is all about.

Da Empoli knows crazy politics quite well. His father was shot in 1986 (he survived) by the Red Brigades, an ultra-violent far-left militant group that terrorized Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, while da Empoli himself had worked for a period for Matteo Renzi, a radical reform Italian . politician, Prime Minister of Italy from 2014 to 2016, known as ‘the scrapper’ or ‘the wrecker’.

The main character in this book, Vadim Baranov, is clearly modeled on the bizarre showman and eccentric Vladislav Surkov, who had a close relationship with Putin for years and is no longer so. After a stint as a senior TV director, he was a senior official under Putin until 2020, deputy prime minister and then senior presidential adviser.

His exact date of birth is unknown. He is rumored to have worked for the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, and to have written a novel under a different name. His critics accuse him of suppressing what remains of Russian freedom and developing a technique of political showmanship and theater that has helped Putin become an autocrat. He is now officially out of power.

In the middle of the night, after a long and worrying drive far into the Russian forest, the reader is taken straight into the presence of Vladimir Putin, and deep into his mind

Surkov once took a Westerner to lunch in Moscow and told him, “There are two options. The first is Anglo-Saxon. I’ll give you the menu. You can choose what you want. The second option is Russian. There is no choice. The chef chooses you because he knows better what you want. I propose the Russian option.’

It is a good summary of the so-called ‘sovereign democracy’ that Baranov (or is it Surkov?) advocates in the book. To begin with, Baranov is shocked by Putin’s willingness to use ruthless violence. Putin tells him at a table in a restaurant: ‘You have swallowed the Western idea that an election campaign consists of two teams of economists debating a PowerPoint document. It doesn’t work that way. In Russia, power is something else.”

Seen from the shadowy halls of the Kremlin, where power comes from violence and cruelty, and both are respected, we in the West live hypocritically, thinking that power itself is old-fashioned and that all we need is a few lawyers. ‘The difference in mentality between a Russian and a Westerner is as great as that between an Earthling and a Martian.’

We don’t care what happens inside Russia, as long as Russia is weak. Putin (often referred to as “the Tsar” in the book) is quoted as saying, “If cannibals came to power in Moscow, the US would immediately recognize them as the legitimate government – ​​as long as they treated America as the boss.”

I don’t know if he ever said anything like that, but there’s a lot of truth in it, especially when you think about Yeltsin’s dirty years.

Take this magical mystery tour of the Kremlin and see if it doesn’t make you think (Putin pictured in October 2023)

If you want to know what and how Russians think, this book is a very good guide. I shuddered a little when I read the passage in which Baranov says about Ukraine: ‘What we seek is not conquest but chaos. If you make the mistake of trusting the West, it always ends up like this. The West drops you off at the first bump in the road and you are left alone to deal with a devastated country.’

This book has been a huge success in France, where it was first published, so I have no qualms about saying it should be a success here too. But will that be the case? The French have always been more interested in Russia than we are, especially after Napoleon’s failed invasion brought boastful Russian troops to Paris. (There, famously, they shouted ‘Bistro!’, the Russian word for ‘fast’, at harassed waiters, thus creating a new French expression).

We, unlike the Parisians, are too sentimental, not cynical enough, too inclined to inject morality into our politics, to understand what the Russians are up to. And we hardly know them. When my father served in the convoys to Murmansk in 1943, the Russians he met there may have been from another galaxy. Maybe for our own good it’s time we got to know them better.

Take this magical mystery tour of the Kremlin and see if it doesn’t make you think. And what pleasure is greater than that?