There is a high risk that the novel of the Italo-Swiss Giuliano da Empoli (Wizard from the KremlinHumanitas, 2023), which have just entered the market in our country, to be perceived by the majority of readers as an authentic political analysis and as such to influence not only public perception, but even the institutional decision-making environment, normalizing some Kremlin clichés of the opinion that Volodymyr Putin is fighting hard to impose them as orthodoxy.

The case is already happening in France, where the book was published for the first time: the head of the government Mrs. Bornet read it and praised it, and the author is always in political shows where they comment on the war in Ukraine. As he notes New York Timesthe instant popularity of the novel at best betrays the eternal admiration of the French for Russia, fed by a common imperial, revolutionary history and cultural excellence; and in the worst case – a condescending attitude towards President Putin, who always finds mitigating circumstances, as, for example, when Macron said that Russia should not be humiliated.

However, it should be clarified that the danger I am talking about is a potential misreading of the book, it does not come directly from the author. Yes, Empoli is perfectly captured by the literary trick of speaking through the mouth of a character, part real, part fictional, so the pro-Kremlin petition, which is 90% of it, belongs not to him, but to Vladyslav Surkov, a guy who held positions at the top of the Kremlin for more than ten years and was considered Putin’s ideologue and publicist during his first mandates. In the 250-page confession, this imaginary and renamed Surkov, reconstructed according to another Western cultural cliché (gray majesty behind the throne, a kind of Machiavelli combined with Rasputin), plays a cynical-detached analyst and (self-)ironic, explaining from within the phenomenon as Putinist Russia works.

And it doesn’t matter that the biographical details are made up, but the real Surkov, today in disgrace and missing somewhere on mandatory registration, was not some Saturnian intellectual with charisma, as in the book, but a swindler of the same school as Surkov. others, with only a spark of originality to pose as a man of culture and manipulative genius. In fact, we are dealing with a novel, not a scientific essay. Humanizing him by introducing into the book personal details and family events, all fictional, which complete the character and give him believability, are techniques that make for a smooth and engaging read. Da Empoli’s talent is unquestionable, and the second professional hat he wears, that of a political consultant, allows him to insist on correct and insightful observations about Putin’s Russia, post-Soviet society and the mechanisms of power in the Kremlin; he obviously did his homework well.

The problems begin, as I have already said, when readers, stolen by the hard water of reading, assimilate the paranoid-Putin vision of the world, full of fake news and logical breaks, which pours from the mouth of the fictional hero Surkov, as a correct analysis of reality. Or at least as “Russia’s point of view”, which, rightly so, must also be taken into account. The risk is high, especially in a country like Romania, where every day we encounter at the highest level of the state or in social networks people who read and understand the words, but not the message of the written text. Surkov’s false confessions are based on five fundamentally anti-Western ideas:

• The permanent hostility of the West, and especially the Americans, towards Russia, which they want to “bring to its knees” at any cost; as such, any response from Moscow is in one way or another justified in principle, even if not always methodically.
• The 1990s were a period of “collective humiliation” of the Russian people due to plans conceived from the outside and implemented by Western consultants to create a facade democracy and predatory capitalism, and this was possible under the conditions of the competition of a weak leader and a drunkard. (Yeltin) and some immoral oligarchs. Vladimir Putin put an end to this debauchery.
• Thus, the West orchestrated and financed all these Orange Revolutions in the states of the former USSR as part of a scenario to destabilize Russia and expand NATO beyond the historical borders of the Russian world due to anger at the loss of control in Moscow.
• The Russian people are exceptional and masochistic, unlike all others: they can only be governed by cruelty and dictation, otherwise they harm themselves through reckless attempts to imitate democracy; even in moments of balance, he himself prefers such methods.
• And if the above is true, Putin’s policy becomes at least comprehensible, if not inevitable, and the man himself fascinating and somewhat attractive in his cold cynicism, embodying the irreconcilable laws of imperial history.

Here we have the very essence of conspiratorial Kremlin propaganda, which consists of five simple and clear steps. And that makes sense, since the narrator, Surkov, was supposedly the writer and chief director of the system for a decade or more. You can’t help but wonder if the novel’s massive public success is also due to the fact that readers actually resonate with these few fundamental lies with which they attempt to legitimize the aggressive, imperial, and anti-democratic regime of Vladimir Putin. I strongly suspect that this is exactly what is happening, not only in France, but especially in Romania and here in the region.

The literary talent and believability of the wise and analytical voice that Da Empoli gives to the fictional character Surkov will be perceived by many as an invitation to empathize. Excerpts from the book taken out of context have already been distributed in Telegram as evidence that “Western authors have understood the justice of Russia’s cause and no longer swallow Kiev’s lies.” And the venomous, contemptuous attacks on the liberal opposition, belittling of those shot (like Politkovskaya) or ridicule of critics like Gari Kasparov, presented by Surkov’s mouth as a kind of salon puppet, I am afraid will be perceived illiterately and with great pleasure quoted “anti-globalist” opponents and sovereignists , which the Romanian commentary is already full of, where cynicism and moral relativism pass for reason.

It is much more difficult to translate Russian reality into literary forms that are equally attractive to the general public, namely what I once called The Grand Pro-Putin Narrative (MNPP) this is manipulation from head to tail, in which huge propaganda resources have been invested, just as in the times of the USSR. All of the above points are blatant lies because:

• The West not only did not “humiliate” Russia after the collapse of the USSR, but on the contrary, treated it with gloves and with excessive attention, in many ways unjustified: Russia remained among the great powers with the right of veto in the UN Security Council; it has benefited from huge investments, not only in the extractive sectors, but in various industries that have brought modern technology, then it has been welcomed with open arms in the world and included at the highest level in the G8, offering it all forms of cooperation desired, with the EU and even with NATO, without any Western power making any gesture of aggression towards the “weakened, chaotic” Russia of the 90s.
• The 1990s were difficult for all former communist states, which went through equally painful periods of adaptation to socialist economies. Social inequality has increased everywhere. There is nothing special about what happened to Russia: like Romania, it coped with indecisive measures and a transition period that was longer than it should have been, with party mafias and theft through banking schemes and privatization, only on a larger scale. After 2000, all the former socialist countries recovered and entered a sustainable growth trajectory, so the fact that “Putin came and set things right” by generating economic growth is fake news: that was the economic cycle in the entire region.
• The only thing that Putin did after 2000 is that he took power from the first generation oligarchs and gave it to his colleagues in the special services, who became masters of the state wealth and use it for personal interests, as before. The impression that there is no more chaos and street crime in the country is due to strict control over the mass media, which are no longer allowed to publish anti-regime political topics. The economic reforms of the 1990s did not “fail”, but were deliberately stopped midway, as a serious analysis by Chatham House (here) shows. If they continued and political democratization took place in parallel, as in other countries of Eastern Europe, today Russia would be a normal, peaceful and even more prosperous country than it was before the war against Ukraine. Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro