Review: “The Wizard of the Kremlin”

The trouble with power is not that it corrupts, but that it clarifies.

In “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” Giuliano da Empoli offers not a portrait of Russia, but a field guide to the management of collapse. How to choreograph disorder until it begins to look like destiny.

Vadim Baranov, the so-called wizard and inspired by real-life Putin-whisperer Vladislav Surkov with a touch of Putin press secretary Dmitry Peskov, isn’t a believer in anything so fragile as truth.

He deals instead in gradients of perception, in the subtle calibration of fear and fascination. His great discovery is that reality no longer needs to be suppressed. It need only be fractured. Enough competing narratives, enough static, and even the most stubborn facts dissolve into mood. Democracy isn’ overthrown. It’s simply drowned.

Da Empoli’s prose is cool to the touch, almost indulgent in its restraint. He doesn’t moralise. He deftly catalogues. The Kremlin he depicts isn’t a fortress but a studio, producing crises the way others produce content - iterated, tested, refined. Nothing is stable, because stability implies limits. Chaos, by contrast, is infinitely generative.

Baranov thrives in this environment precisely because he expects nothing better. He governs by disorientation, cultivating a world in which certainty feels naïve and coherence suspicious. The state becomes a hall of mirrors with every reflection plausible, none reliable, all useful.

What lingers is the quiet, almost offhand suggestion that this isn’t an aberration but a prototype. Russia isn’t the exception. It’s the beta version of modern governance, the new operating system of control. Others are already importing the code, mistaking volatility for vitality, spectacle for strength.

The system doesn’t require belief. You don’t have to agree. You only