Two books I read recently, ‘Limonov’ by Emmanuel Carrère and ‘Le Mage du Kremlin’ by Guiliano da Empoli, ignited my old passion for Russia.

In 1997 I spent a few days in Moscow on my way to Tajikistan, where I learnt to speak Russian. I took the train from Bishkek to Moscow on the way back, managing to blend in sufficiently to cross into Russia without a visa, and spent a week or so in Moscow figuring out how I would travel onward. After that experience I did a Masters in Post-Soviet Studies (in a programme set up by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the mother of Emmanuel) and returned a few times to Central Asia, Russia and Ukraine for research or simply travelling, before life pushed me southwards to Afghanistan and the Middle East.

My experience of Russia is thus very limited, but speaking the language, my vivid memories of bumming around without money, visa or purpose in the streets of Moscow or St Petersburg (where I spent the winter of 2000-2001), my thirst for Russian literature and art, and occasionally following events in Russia, have kept my passion softly burning in the recesses of my conscience. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I was only angry that the attention to the latest report of the IPCC was being diverted (who cares what happens between those two countries if the world is about to burn?). In Europe the consensus formed immediately – a bit too fast not to be suspicious – that Russia is ‘bad’ and that we need to stand by Ukraine. EU politicians were elated by the newfound unity and sense of purpose that justified vast increases in military spending, and that seemed more important than the destiny of Ukraine. On the other side of the spectrum, a few nutheads seem to believe Putin is actually the victim and that he may save the world by standing up against the evil West. I do not identify with any of these points of view and thought it was smarter to shut up and admit I have no opinion.

But these two books have helped me clarify some of my own thoughts and provided me with a few insights I wish to share.

First, though, it should be pointed out that they are both written from a French perspective. Da Empoli is Italian, but born in France and he has spent part of his professional life there; he wrote ‘Le Mage du Kremlin’ in French, not Italian. French intellectuals have a weak spot for Russia; they love casting Russians as the non-Cartesian ‘others’ who are more in touch with their soul and spirit, whose lives are somehow more meaningful, even though they are terribly inefficient and absurdly destructive: throwing their vodka glass over their shoulder after having downed it in one gulp. Carrère addresses his position as an observer squarely, and that makes his book richer, giving a more calibrated perspective on the character Limonov. Da Empoli writes his book as if he had gone to visit the character Baranov (in real life, his name is Vladislav Surkov) who then, in one long night, tells him his story. But the author never intervenes in that narrative; Baranov addresses him as ‘you Westerners’ sometimes but the author allows himself no reaction. It feels like he has edited them out.

The last chapter of Da Empoli’s book shows Baranov, having finished his story, interacting with his five-year old daughter, and supposedly brings the monstrous ideologue of the Kremlin back to human proportions (as a doting father). That is a distasteful trick, and narratively a very poor and unoriginal device. As I was reading the book, I often wondered why it had qualified for so many literary prizes, barely missing the Prix Goncourt and winning the ‘Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française’ in 2022. Although the book is nicely written and contains some memorable phrases, as a novel it doesn’t stand out in any way. The appreciation the book received in France must reflect the French intelligentsia’s desire to break with the anti-Russian atmosphere in Europe.

There is an interesting confusion of categories: while ‘Le Mage du Kremlin’ is ostensibly a novel, it follows the real life of Vladislav Surkov very closely, and most of the other characters keep their real names (Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Putin himself etc). What is fiction is the encounter between the author and his character, and thus everything he tells him, Surkov’s self-interpretation. ‘Limonov’, on the other hand, is a work of journalistic investigation, but its novelistic qualities are obvious. Limonov’s personal life is more interesting than that of Baranov/Surkov, it is narrated with a beautiful rhythm and style, and the author confronts his own position, as mentioned above. His sympathy for the young Limonov gradually makes place for increasing doubt – Limonov shooting a Serbian machine gun on besieged Sarajevo, not out of conviction but as an act of provocation, is an image that neither the author nor I can accept without losing any remaining sympathy for the character – and just before Carrère starts actively disliking Limonov as leader of the National Bolshevik Party, he manages to disengage emotionally and bring him back to size, objectifying his subject.

Both books portray political adaptation strategies of Russians to the new, post-Soviet times. The story of Limonov starts out in a bad neighbourhood of Kharkov in the 1950s and 1960s, where he is a poetry-writing hooligan (exactly the kind of Russian character that endears French readers). Later he moves on to Moscow as a punk (Konkret) poet in the late 1960s, marries a beautiful girl and emigrates with her to New York in the mid-1970s to flee repression. There he loses her and himself, but he survives somehow as a writer, and that is how he arrives in France, where the 1980 publication of his autobiographical novel ‘Le Poète Russe Préfère les Grands Nègres’ (turned down by publishers in the USA) is an instant success. He lives the literary life of Paris for a decade as one of its hot protagonists, churning out book after book, and then returns to Russia in 1991. There he becomes engaged in radical politics, sets up the National Bolshevik party in 1993 and goes off to fight with Serbian chetniks against Bosnians and Croats. His incitement to ethnic hatred and Soviet-inspired revanchism against the new system land him in prison, but he remains leader of his party – that changes its name to ‘The Other Russia’ and will have many followers until his death; he also continues writing books. After his release, Putin approaches him (through Surkov) as a potential ally that can mobilize the fringes of Russian youth to participate in the great Russian renaissance Putin is striving for. But Limonov, although he will support efforts to keep Ukraine attached to Russia and shares Putin’s contempt for the West, will not allow himself to be used by Putin’s people, whom he despises for their crass materialism and bureaucratic servility.

This is where ‘Limonov’ most clearly intersects ‘Le Mage du Kremlin’, in which the meetings between Surkov and Limonov are narrated from the former’s perspective. But ‘Baranov’ comes from a wholly different background. His grandfather hails from the Tsarist aristocracy and has managed to survive Stalin’s era with his entire library by not engaging in overt politics. Baranov’s father is a successful Marxist-Leninist cadre, an apparatchik looked down upon by his son for his conformism and lack of courage. This biographic background makes an interesting point about the continuities between the old Tsarist regime, the Soviet Period and the new times, because Vladislav Baranov will rise to great heights in the new era. Some families seem to have it in their karma to be part of the ruling class.

For Baranov the 90s are an exciting time; in the late 80s he’s already working with the people who will become the billionnaire oligarchs. He also dabbles in theatre and in counterculture, but this is not very convincing because at the same time he rises rapidly among Russia’s new rich, in the power elites around Berezovsky, at first, and then Putin, who will remain his master. Da Empoli writes with verve about the crazy ‘everything is possible’ atmosphere in 1990s Moscow, where people make millions overnight. All the characters described in the book seem to be extremely rich and powerful;  the losers of this game are never mentioned, only the winners. Although it is Baranov who is supposedly speaking throughout the book, I wondered whether Da Empoli himself doesn’t share some of his points of view. Namely: that lust for power and wealth is the main driving force in society, and that all actions to secure them therefore enjoy some inherent legitimacy, for aren’t we simply enacting the laws of nature, to speak with Hobbes? I really missed the voice of the author, who is sitting listening to Baranov, but not once interrupts him or asks him a question. Not even at the end, when he silently leaves Baranov’s house at dawn, in a complete anticlimax.

Baranov is the grey eminence behind Putin’s doctrine, that has been called ‘sovereign democracy’. The key to that ideology is that democracy kills the sovereignty of the rulers, therefore the ruler must make ‘democracy’ an instrument to exercise his sovereignty. In Putin and Surkov’s view, the West is in a terminal phase of decadency, without resolve to act, undermined by ethnic diversity, racial mingling and Islam, sabotaged by LGTBQ and post-colonial movements… bla bla bla, this Russian view of the West is starting to become well-known. Surkov helps Putin slowly build up his power in Russia, by removing the oligarchs that are not in line with the Kremlin and curtailing the independent media, and abroad, through cunning manoeuvres. The Baranov that speaks to the author is wholly unrepentant; that is refreshing, but added to the silence of the author, there is therefore no discussion of his professed doctrines. Da Empoli’s book reads like a propaganda tract, a political monologue justifying Putin’s policies. Where his policies cannot be justified (e.g. making political opposition impossible) they can at least be understood. This becomes even more jarring because it is, after all, a work of fiction. The secretive Surkov did not give an interview to the author.

Both books agree that the transition from the Soviet Union to contemporary Russia was a traumatic and deeply unsatisfactory event for most Russians. In my own travels through the ex-USSR, almost all the people I met regretted the passing away of the old system, because while life had been easy and predictable previously, now almost everybody was threatened by poverty and uncertainty. The 1% that became rich and powerful, the people who started travelling to Western countries and representing Russia abroad, have dominated our view of the country, projecting that image of success in freedom that we love to ascribe to our own liberal democratic system. But in our effort to make that system of ours appear universal, we pretend that this transition was natural because it must have been desired by all Russians, and we tend to forget how powerful our influence over that transition was. The two principal steps of the transition were privatizing public resources and then integrating them, in a subordinate position, into the world economy.

Limonov (who passed away in 2020) lamented and tried to revert the first step, but Putin’s people, after seizing or submitting the vast resources of the new oligarchs, resist the subordination of Russia to Western interests. While Limonov, well aware of the impossibility of his objective, was guided by cynical idealism, ‘Baranov’ and Putin’s clique more generally seem to be guided by idealistic cynicism. (The difference between the two is that the ‘ism’ is the goal, and the adjective is the method to reach it).

If there is really a group of people that can be called ‘Slavic’, who share a collective unconscious (or ‘Slavic soul’ to translate the popular French concept of the ‘âme slave’), then they are going through hard times. The ‘shopkeepers mentality’ of Western Europeans and their overconfident rationality, which have become hegemonic and now also order affairs in Eastern European countries, really do not seem to agree with most Russians (and Ukrainians, Serbs etc). This does not mean that the alternative is necessarily dictatorship or an illiberal mafia-like state. The latter seems the natural product of the encounter between local socio-cultural systems and the homo economicus-based representative democracy in a capitalist setting.

Decision-makers in the West should reflect on their own responsibility in the turn Russian politics have taken, instead of conveniently blaming all on Putin’s clique or simply ‘othering’ Russians as an irrational nation that is not quite ready for democratic enlightenment. Our current and future policies towards Russia should be informed by such critical self-awareness.

Banner image: still from Lu Yang’s video art ‘Doku The Destroyer’, first shown in the Garage in Moscow, photographed by the author at the Venice Art Biennale, 2022 / Arsenale