Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
“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 narrator of this controversial French novel, finally translated into English. Baranov is a lightly fictionalised Vladislav Surkov, poet, politician and key architect of Putin’s Russia – known until his retirement as Putin’s puppet master, or a modern day Rasputin. In an eerily smooth reconstruction of recent Russian history recounted one night from his mansion, Baranov dissects his role in creating Putin’s post-Gorbachev Russia, combining the trappings of democracy with the machinery of authoritarianism. The novel has been criticised as an apologia – less a critique of the inscrutable Putin than a road map to the ideological enigmas of the Russian mentality. As such it’s almost indecently seductive. “You understand that war is a process… its goals extend far beyond military success,” says Baranov. “What would Russia do with two new regions? We took back Crimea because it was ours, but our motivation [with Ukraine] is different. What we’re aiming for is not conquest but chaos.”