![]() The top half is plain with the book's title the bottom half shows the silhouette of a man walking along a snowy street corner. Surkov, who was a close advisor of Putin for almost two decades, is one of the oprichniki who seems to have fallen from grace recently-although that may well be spin, too.Īn image of the book's front cover is shown. ![]() The opposite, rather: Most of the book, whose title translates into English as “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” is one long monologue by Baranov, who is modeled on Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s longtime spin doctor. It is not that the author, Giuliano da Empoli, a Swiss Italian political scientist who teaches at Sciences Po in Paris, has a lively imagination. ![]() The novel, which was published in French in April and in Italian at the end of June, is a must-read for anyone wondering what Russian President Vladimir Putin is up to and what the Russian people have had to go through during his tenure. ![]() “You can invent whatever you like-a proletarian revolution or unfettered liberalism-but the result is always the same: The oprichniki, the tsar’s elite watchdogs, are at the top.” “No one ever escapes his fate, and the fate of the Russians is that they are ruled by descendants of Ivan the Terrible,” says Vadim Baranov, the main character in Le mage du Kremlin, a novel that is all the rage in France and Italy this summer. ![]()
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