The Wizardry of Power

Charlie Chaplin in and as The Great Dictator

There are three clocks on the wall of our beach shack, showing the time in India, England, and Russia.

There is no one time in Russia, though. The icy eastern fingers of the empire reach all the way to within a hop, skip and jump of Alaska, on the other side of the Bering Straits. In the west, Finland and Russia share a long border, so Russia really spans that part of the globe that the ‘West’ doesn’t. Eleven time zones worth, to be specific.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a friend asked - doesn’t Putin control enough territory? Like many good questions, this sounded naive. How much land is enough? How much wealth? How much power?

A new novel, The Wizard of Kremlin, by Italian writer Giuliano da Empoli, examines the pursuit and practice of political power through the eyes of an advisor to Vladimir Putin, whom he calls the tsar. Who knows how Putin thinks, or any absolutist, but The Wizard of Kremlin has an authentic texture, deep insights into the strings at which strongmen pull. Empoli knows the terrain, not just as an academic: as political advisor to a Prime Minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi, he has been a practitioner of the dark arts. While his book is fictional, its ‘wizard’, Vadim Baranov, closely hews to Putin’s former political adviser, Vladislav Surkov, who the Financial Times describes as the architect of “the ‘vertical of power’, in which the buck stops with one man, and one man alone”.

I hadn’t heard this term before, so it is best explained by one of the characters in the book:

“The imagination of Russian society, of any society, plays out in two dimensions. On the horizontal axis is proximity to everyday reality, while the vertical axis measures authority. In the past few years… too much horizontality has brought chaos. Gunfire in the streets, state bankruptcy, and Russia’s humiliation on the international stage….. All our data tells us that Russians today want verticality, which is to say authority. In psychoanalytic jargon, you could say the Russian people want a leader who’ll leave off momspeak and go back to using the language of the father, to laying down the law.”

Vadim Baranov, in whose nightlong discourse the book is told, was a TV producer, recruited to help Putin construct the mythology around his  power. At one point, he polled Russians to find out who their heroes were; perhaps, the great thinkers, Tolstoy, Pushkin. Instead:

“What did our viewers tell us, who did the formless mass of the people, accustomed to bowing their heads and looking at the ground, propose? Dictators! Their heroes, the country’s founding figures, were all bloodstained autocrats: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin.”

Stalin, despite being the perpetrator of purges, at whose command tens of millions of Russians were purged?

“You think Stalin is popular in spite of the massacres. Well, you’re wrong, he’s popular because of the massacres. Because at least he knew how to deal with thieves and traitors.”

It is not even necessary for the thieves and traitors to exist. When mythology sits at the centre of statecraft, heroes and villains are created in the telling, and retelling, in the veneration and the demonisation. State power purveys these myths and reinforces them, through the hundreds of TV channels that tell the same story. State power crushes dissonance, and in the ideal, “no more symphonies will be composed unless they glorify Marxism-Leninism.” 

Of the current sweep of authoritarian regimes across the world, Empoli writes:

“When you think of it… the first half of the twentieth century was just that: a titanic confrontation between artists. Stalin, Hitler, Churchill. After them came the bureaucrats, because the world needed a rest. But today the artists are back. Look around you . Wherever you look, there is nothing but avant garde artists who, instead of depicting reality, are busy creating it. Their style is the only thing that has changed. Today, instead of the artists of yesteryear, we have reality-show personalities. But the principle is the same.”

Gandhi is missing from Empoli’s list of political artists. In a sense, I am glad, for I would hate to see him bracketed with that trio of amoral practitioners of power. But Gandhi knew how to craft events that shifted the narrative, how to mobilise, even without the brute force of state power at his command. The Dandi March was one of the most significant political events of the twentieth century, and like all events, it had its unique aesthetic - in that instance, of simplicity, asceticism almost. His artistry existed in a different universe from the imperative this century demands, in Empoli’s telling:

“The scale of the production dictated the mode of expression. It would have to be kitsch, which is the only language that can reliably communicate with the masses, because it simplifies everything, and avoids nuance.”

Though this seems to be the zeitgeist of today’s event management, I disagree. Ascetism, too, is simplicity, morality tales avoid nuance, and have a shelf life of millennia. In India, the naked fakir had a moral power to which kings bowed their heads. In Gandhi’s case, the relationship between poverty and money was problematic for some, expressed best by Sarojini Naidu - “It costs a lot of money to keep this man in poverty”. Of the modern Russian courtiers, Empoli writes:

“The Russian elite all share a common origin in poverty… some people trumpet their start in life, others are ashamed of it, but when they look at each other, wearing their thirty-thousand dollar suits, they know they share the same rage, the same shock at how things have turned out. Even the tsar. Despite being convinced of his destiny, of the inexorable force that put him where he is, he can’t always hide an expression of disbelief… here I am at Buckingham Palace, and the queen is serving me tea…”

Russia, England, and tea - the trio makes me think, not of Buckingham Palace and the queen (or king) but of polonium and spies, of the brutal practice of statecraft, which needs to be pursued regardless of borders. This ruthless pursuit of power needs:

“A new elite that brings together a great deal of power with a great deal of money. Strong men who can sit down at any table, unhampered by the complexes that afflict (your) ragged politicians and powerless businessmen. People who are whole, who can use the entire range of instruments that impact reality: power, money, even violence when necessary.”

The narrative, to be sure, is quite different. As Charlie Chaplin had the Great Dictator say:

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone.”