Putin is now engaged in a power struggle on three fronts: against the still-lingering forces of Prigozhin and Wagner; against discontents within his own military hierarchy; and against the Russian public itself which, spurred on by nationalist influencers, have proven themselves far from loyal to the regime. Putin knows that Prigozhin’s rebellion could open a Pandora’s Box of pretenders and uprisings for the rest of his reign. But at a deeper level, the nationalist Right, for whom Prigozhin has become the favoured avatar, now offers an alternative to Putin’s monopoly on political thought in Russia. And this is a far more fundamental threat to Putinism — the emergence of an ideological movement to challenge the stranglehold he has maintained on Russia’s political culture for a generation.

Far from defeated, Prigozhin now stands as a symbol of future defiance. Though his coup failed to topple the Russian Defence Ministry, for now his Wagner Group continues to operate outside of the military establishment. And though the Russian authorities have already begun to dismantle his personal commercial empire, Prigozhin is far from penniless: Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko confirmed that he had arrived in St Petersburg to claim billions in cash assets and personal weapons that had been seized, while authorities cleared him of financial responsibility for the rebellion. The balance of power between him and his President is therefore unclear, with Putin clearly unable to clear or quash him. This week, the Kremlin confirmed that Prigozhin met with Putin after the uprising “and pledged loyalty to the Government” — messaging that contrasts sharply with the continuing demonisation of the Wagner leader in the Russian media.

The contradictory narratives around Prigozhin’s future continue to pile up. But for now, he remains active and substantially autonomous. In a recent broadcast, he stated that Wagner fighters would be back on the frontlines in Ukraine soon, in direct contravention of his deal with Putin, which stipulated that Wagner would relocate to Belarus. The group reportedly continued to recruit new fighters in Russia for some time after the rebellion, before finally announcing it would pause as it withdrew from the country — which reportedly has yet to materialise. All of this amounts to a highly frustrating set of circumstances for Putin. He has been reduced to chipping away at Prigozhin’s power instead of confronting him. And this demonstrates his continuing dependence on Wagner: he understands the role the group has played in Ukraine, and would rather reorganise than disband it so as to maintain its influence in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

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So Wagner remain a dormant but present threat. But more proximate are the copycat-rebels Prigozhin may inspire from elsewhere in Putin’s administration. It was evident from the moment that Wagner captured Rostov-on-Don without any resistance and embarked on its march toward Moscow nearly unopposed that Prigozhin may have had help on the inside — a notion that is more terrifying for Putin than the rebellion itself. There are claims that General Sergei Surovikin, one of the most senior members of Putin’s military brass, knew of Prigozhin’s plans in advance. And since the revolt, documents have emerged showing that he and 30 other high-ranking military and intelligence officials had been secret “VIP members” of Wagner since 2018. Surovikin has not been seen in public since he released a video during the rebellion, leading US intelligence reports to suggest he may have been detained or arrested. Other military leaders, such as Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov, who was filmed negotiating with Prigozhin in Rostov (potentially under duress), were also conspicuously absent from recent broadcasts by the Ministry’s leadership this week.

At the very least, the rebellion has exacerbated divisions within the Russian security state, while the influential Russian military blog Rybar, founded by a former Defence Ministry press officer, claims that Putin is in fact executing a “purge”. The scale will remain obscure until Putin is finished, but given the circumstances, a significant reorganisation must be taking place in which personal loyalty to Putin will become the chief currency. Putin has always privileged fealty over competence — Surovikin, a well-regarded military commander who once headed Russia’s operations in Ukraine, was later replaced by Gerasimov, who, despite being widely seen as incompetent by many Kremlin critics including Prigozhin, has served as a faithful foot soldier for his President. For what Putin truly fears is lack of control over his circle of strongmen, the so-called siloviki.

But, rare for an aspiring autocrat, the last front on which Putin has been forced to defend himself is in the theatre of public opinion. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, analyst Tatiana Stanovaya correctly pointed out that Putin has never derived his authority from the Russian people. Nonetheless, public perception still matters, because any form of dissent undermines the central narrative of Putinism: that the only way to secure Russia’s historically justified status as first among nations is through allegiance to Putin and his circle.

Not only did Prigozhin publicly speak out against Putin’s establishment from the outside, but in his broadcasts he often spoke directly to the Russian public. In doing so, he violated another pillar in Putin’s power — the idea the Russian people should remain depoliticised and allow the authorities manage the country as they see fit. The sight of civilians in Rostov greeting Wagner with open arms and shaking Prigozhin’s hand is a spectacular affront to this. And, according to the Levada Center, one of the largest independent polling organisations left in Russia, support for Wagner sat at 58% in the days leading up to its rebellion, including the day when Prigozhin laid out why he believed the Ukraine war had been started for corrupt reasons. Although this support dropped on the day of the rebellion, it continued to hover around 30% for days afterward, despite near-universal denunciations of Prigozhin on mainstream Russian media.

In tandem with these media attacks, Putin has also apparently felt compelled to demonstrate that he can also command the allegiance from ordinary Russians. In a somewhat uncharacteristic move after his long years of isolation during the pandemic, Putin appeared in front of a doting crowd in Derbent in the Republic of Dagestan, on the southern fringes of the Russian Federation. The Wagner rebellion has changed the rules of the game, and Putin has been forced to adapt. But it’s not the disorganised masses of far-flung Derbent that Putin is most concerned about.

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After quashing the last vestiges of Russia’s liberal opposition, and successfully entrenching his historically-informed vision of traditionalist Russian nationalism, Putin positioned himself as the ideological north star of modern Russia. But as the war in Ukraine exposed his inabilities to deliver on that vision, this hegemony began to crack, and the same nationalists Putin had inspired soon took note. Prigozhin gave voice to many of these concerns about the management of the war, including from sub-regime agitators such as Rybar. Now, Rybar and other influencers are bristling at the Kremlin’s campaign to discredit Wagner’s achievements in Ukraine, and are picking fights with a Russian Ministry of Defence that is increasingly frustrated with its inability to get these milbloggers to fall in line with the official narrative. Offline, too, support for Wagner continues to fester, as students brandishing the group’s flags in Moscow earlier this month demonstrated.

For Putin, the Wagner rebellion destabilised the ground beneath him as much as it did the walls around him. Though his public responses have appeared restrained so far, the better to project an image of calm, his command is no longer absolute. Even if he is able to neutralise Prigozhin and bring Wagner under his own control, the threat from within the Kremlin and from the nationalist grassroots will remain. And far from an aberration, Prigozhin’s coup may be looked back upon as a turning point, the first link in a concatenation of coups, counter-coups and civil wars, all-too bloodily familiar to Russia and its people.

Rather, President Aleksandar Vučić is treading a necessarily complicated line in a vain attempt to appease both Brussels and Moscow, knowing he must soon alienate either his nationalist voter base or the great powers who have him over a barrel. Among Serbs, polling shows that opposition to sanctions on Russia is considerably more likely to be derived from memories of the devastating sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia in the Nineties (44%), as opposed to a vaguer sense that Russia is the country’s “great friend” (24%). A “noisy minority” (21%) do take an unambiguously pro-Russian stance, but the majority of Serbians still back a policy of non-alignment. It may seem clear to many observers that Serbs have an “irrational” and “distorted” relationship with Putin’s pariah state: but to understand why, we must look West as well as East.

The idea that Serbs are mindlessly pro-Putin is immediately complicated by the presence in Belgrade of around 200,000 exiles fleeing Putin’s Russia — doubtless contributing to Vučić’s recent designation of his capital as a modern-day Casablanca, swarming with foreign intelligence assets. Peter Nikitin, the head of anti-war campaign group the Russian Democratic Society, categorises the Russian expat community into three groups: “former activists and political refugees; those who were never active before the war but got so shocked they felt the need to get active; and apolitical, relocated IT people who want to pretend nothing happened”. This third group is the most visible. One local Telegram channel aimed at Russian expats brims with legal advice, job offers, and tips for treating gastritis (with brandy), offering the chance to “chat about life and migration to Serbia — politics prohibited”. Despite such disclaimers, even the relocated digital nomads’ presence here is necessarily political, testing how deep local support for Putin runs.

One set of Russian young professionals frequents Pub 53, a hole-in-the-wall spot owned by another Russian exile. Here, I meet Ana, a software engineer who emphasises the greater freedom of speech and quality of life available here compared to their native Moscow. “No-one can arrest me for my words,” she says. “I’m gay — you see how my friends are — and I’m just here to live my life. There are lots of liberal Russians here, like me.” As these friends arrive, they toast one another with B52 shots mixed with local rakija brandy. The general openness to people like Ana is partly economically motivated, helping to counteract the steady drain of Serbian young professionals into the EU.

Such stories are not universal. Many less educated men of military age grabbed their bags and left overnight for fear of conscription, and now live in hostels or on friends’ couches while they hunt for work. Each morning, a line of young Russian men can be found waiting below a sternly moustachioed statue of Vuk Karadžić, the father of modern Serbia, hoping to be offered cash-in-hand day labour. “The situation is shit,” says Luka, who used to work in a car factory before fleeing the draft. “Many people are going home because there is no work here, only cleaning toilets or deliveries.” But overall, anti-Putin expats have found a home here. While locals complain about (if they do not profit from) soaring rental prices or supermarket-queue etiquette, actual attacks on anti-Putin activists remain rare. “There is a nationalist minority who call us traitors,” says Peter, referring to a recent assault on one activist. “But even if they think we’re weirdos because we’re against Putin, most people are welcoming.”

Anastasija, a Russian psychotherapist and teacher participating in a protest in Belgrade against Russian war crimes, agrees: “Young people here support Ukraine, but many older people support Russia. We’d like to change this, because people don’t have access to information.” Over a year on from the Russian invasion, turn-out at the demonstration is limited — but an opposing, pro-war protest nearby is even more sparsely attended. There, an Orthodox priest fulminates into a microphone, surrounded by a gaggle of protesters brandishing conspiratorial posters: “Serbia will be freed of the servants of the Antichrist”; “Covid genocide”; “Vučić — Will you break the curse of Nato betrayal?” Neither the well-meant humanitarian appeal nor the apocalyptic rant captures the general public mood, with most bystanders hurrying past.

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Other concerns are more pressing. Prominent Serbian activist Aida Ćorović, recently arrested for pelting a mural of local hero and convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic with eggs, is coruscating towards her compatriots’ nationalism and “selective memory” over their treatment in the Nineties: “One drug, in the form of the Kosovo myth, was replaced by another drug — that Putin will save us from the ‘hateful’ West.” But she makes no bones about the fact that “the main problem is economic. We are number one in Europe for deaths from cancer, people look for food in garbage containers and fight over meat in Lidl, and yet our citizens believe Vučić’s statements that we live in a ‘golden age’.”

Serbian MP Nebojša Zelenović is the co-leader of Serbia’s green-Left Moramo coalition, which stood alone in backing sanctions on Russia during last year’s general elections. Speaking in the apartment where Yugoslav Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić wrote his magnum opus The Bridge on the Drina while under house arrest during the Second World War, he explains that locals are exhausted by lack of service provision, corrupt politicians with fraudulent degrees, scant employment opportunities, and continual brain drain to the West. “There is a strong atmosphere that everybody must be for Russia, and for Putin. At the same time, people don’t believe there is any hope for EU accession. There is no goal, we are going nowhere, and this situation could last for decades.” Serbia’s EU accession has been moving slowly, if at all, since 2009. To Zelenović, the EU is missing an opportunity to use Russia’s increasing alienation to draw Serbia into the fold.

Rather, the EU is using Russia’s increasing isolation to push Serbia into both joining the sanctions programme and make concessions over Kosovo. In downtown Belgrade, a group of men stand around a stall operated by the conservative, nationalist People’s Party, demanding a referendum over the “agreement on the path to normalisation” Vučić this year agreed with Kosovo. As its less-than-enthusiastic name suggests, detail of the agreement remains vague, and practical steps forward a still-distant possibility. Serbia typically counts on Russia to prevent greater international recognition of majority-Albanian, partially-recognized Kosovo. But the EU is now pushing Serbia to agree to Kosovo’s potential accession to the UN, EU and Nato, while offering more protection for Kosovo’s Serb minority in return. Damir Hadžiabdić, who supports the People’s Party campaign against the putative deal, echoes Zelenović’s complaints from the Right: “They don’t give us anything. Just a story of EU accession — but it’s been 15 years with no result.”

Vučić is in a bind. Nominally pro-European, he relies on a nationalist base still smarting from Nato’s 1999 bombing of Serbia, who will turn against him if he is seen to cave to Western pressure. “People in Vučić’s own party don’t support [the deal], but they are scared to admit it,” Hadžiabdić says. “They think the international pressure from the West is huge.” There is a general public belief that only Russia (and China’s) vetoes on the UN Security Council have prevented Kosovo from gaining further recognition, as MP Aleksandar Jerkovic, of Right-wing parliamentary coalition “No Going Back — Serbia Is Behind”, observes: “If you start from the wrong, but widely accepted, point of view that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, you get a simple answer as to why Russia has so much support.” Putin’s popularity in local polls now outstrips Vučić himself.

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The EU has generally seemed satisfied with more cosmetic signs of “reform” (including a failed attempt to hold Euro Pride in Belgrade), while Serbia’s leaders have continued to foster more significant personal and national ties with other powers (Russia’s Gazprom controls Serbia’s only gas import company; in 2021, China saved 10,000 mining jobs). Under Vučić’s premiership, public support for EU accession has dwindled from almost 60% to under a third, showing the failure of the EU’s own investment to create similar political traction, and offering Vučić a convenient excuse for stalled accession talks. EU investment in Serbia actually well outstrips investment from the East, but as Jerkovic explains, a favourable media climate has allowed Moscow to paint themselves as the country’s saviours, while ordinary Serbian people do not see the profits from European investment.

Moreover, as Ćorović indicates, a “constellation” of financial ties still links Vučić’s Progressive Party to Russia: “The party, which was created by Slobodan Milošević with significant support from Moscow, still functions according to the same principles and finds crucial support in the Kremlin.” Vučić therefore faces a Catch-22. Move toward Europe, and face domestic discontent; reject the EU line, and face hard or soft intervention against his rule. “If we make a decision to become part of the West, Vučić will begin to fall,” says Zelenović. “He knows this, so he will buy time, and spend years waiting for [foreign] elections.” Jerkovic echoes this analysis, adding that Vučić’s “pragmatic strategy to buy himself time” will likely last “until the denouement of the Ukraine crisis”, aided and abetted by physical attacks on the media and opposition politicians.

Is there a way out of this impasse? Though wary of the negative impact still more waves of neoliberal restructuring would have on Serbia’s already heavily-privatised economy, progressive opposition figures are generally agreed that closer ties with Europe are necessary to drive reform — particularly on minority rights, the environment, and press freedom. But to Zelenović, Europe’s current approach is all stick, no carrot: “Our voters think the EU forgot us. So what’s the point? If politics just means fighting Vučić, it’s too risky. It would be different if there were hope.”

Jerkovic and Ćorović both condemn Brussels’s willingness to turn a blind eye to authoritarian excesses and non-democratic elections in exchange for security cooperation — resulting in so-called “stabilocracies” where non-democratic regimes are granted external legitimacy , along with the EU’s promotion of extractive mining methods and the brain drain into Europe. “It’s clear to every intelligent Serb that these are double standards. Since the beginning of Serbia’s so-called relationship with the EU, there has been only one topic — what can be taken from Serbia?”, Jerkovic says. As Ćorović puts it, this leaves ordinary people “between the hammer of a radical government and the anvil of European hypocrisy”.

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With varying degrees of weariness, and from across the political spectrum, all three observers want the EU to take a more proactive and equitable approach. (“I am sure that British readers are very familiar with… EU praxis,” Jerkovic adds wryly.) Zelenović’s proposals include: a joint EU-accession process for all six Western Balkan states; EU support in exchange for reforms, such as offering agricultural subsidies in return for judicial reform; and exploring the ways Serbia can proactively support the EU — for example by using its historic links with former Non-Aligned countries in the Third World to ease migration into Europe.

The Yugoslav leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement is a reminder that Serbia was not always at the mercy of the great powers. The eponymous Bridge in Andrić’s novel represents Yugoslavia’s unique, strategic location between East and West. And this was the role adopted by Yugoslav President Tito, negotiating between Moscow and Washington to establish his nation as a crucial interlocutor on the world stage, surviving not despite but because of its position between two power blocs. Negative pressure on a country with these historical memories can only go so far. If the West is serious about drawing Serbia out of Putin’s web, it would do well to listen to both Left and Right and offer concrete support for reforms. Absent such measures, it is little wonder its politicians and population will continue trying to steer a third way through troubled waters.

The episode with Konni, in common with much that transpires in Le Mage du Kremlin (The Wizard of the Kremlin), really took place (during a Putin-Merkel summit at Sochi in 2007). Giuliano da Empoli affirms that, although his debut novel lends “a private life and imaginary words” to living people, nonetheless it’s about “real Russian history”. That history, of the rise of the “Tsar” (Vladimir Putin) to dictatorial power and the tangled ruses of the courtiers who enabled him, runs across a quarter-century from the collapse of the Soviet empire to the dress-rehearsal incursions into Crimea and Donbas in 2014. At that moment, when the Tsar’s intrigues crossed the line from the domestic arena onto the global screen, his ideologist-in-chief has to remind a patriotic biker chief that “war is a process, and its goals go much further than military success”. In Ukraine, “our objective isn’t conquest. It’s chaos.” The world now frets daily in the shadow of that chaos.

Empoli, a political analyst of Swiss-Italian background, finished Le Mage du Kremlin early in 2021. With scarily good timing, it came out in Paris in April 2022. It takes the form of a confessional monologue delivered to a mesmerised French expat over a decanter of Scotch by “Vadim Baranov”: a barely disguised version of Putin’s legendary strategist and in-house thinker, Vladislav Surkov. A former avant-garde theatre director who served as deputy chief of staff and later deputy prime minister, Surkov seems to have quit the stage of state power in 2020. Last April, reports told of his house arrest during a post-invasion purge of security officials. For UnHerd, Maximilian Hess cogently argued that Surkov’s star had fallen and that the great ideological string-puller had proved to be “no puppet-master, just another puppet”. But with Putin and his cronies — as Empoli makes plain — you can never be sure. The treacherous fogs and feints that fill his novel bring to mind Metternich’s apocryphal response when told of the death of Talleyrand, his rival diplomatic virtuoso in post-Napoleonic Europe: “I wonder what he meant by that.”

Empoli’s accomplishment is to dramatise the Putinist system of intermingled force and fraud as a malign work of art executed first on a national, then a planetary, scale. Baranov-Surkov transfers the stunts, coups and illusions of his art from theatre auditorium to public square, spotlit by TV and internet channels as Russia’s media free-for-all “pushed back the frontiers of trash”. Any masterpiece requires a signature, though the novel deliberately equivocates as to whether the manipulative “wizardry” belongs mainly to Surkov, or to Putin himself. From the crushing of the oligarchs to the conjuring of nationalist frenzy among the victims of free-market kleptocracy in Russia, Empoli’s Baranov likes to wrap the Tsar’s basic instincts and drastic actions in dainty theoretical packages. It’s Putin himself who warns his court intellectual that conspiracy-prone deep thinkers “systematically underestimate the power of stupidity, forgetfulness and chance” in great events.

The novel rode high in the French bestseller lists after the Ukraine invasion, and won the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française. That august accolade fits the bill, for Empoli turns Baranov-Surkov into a wry, sly epigrammatic raconteur of a distinctively French kind. He strews his discourse with French quotations and alludes familiarly to the court of the Sun King — where his polished aphorisms and paradoxes would have shone. Some critics wondered whether Empoli — who had previously scrutinised the careers of populist spin-doctors in his book The Engineers of Chaos — was giving the devil his most seductive tunes. Did Baranov-Surkov’s worldly, ironic and elegant confession slide from admission into apologia? Only in the sense that Shakespeare’s Richard III (with whom he compares Putin) invites us to sympathise with late-medieval tyranny. Empoli’s Tsar begins and continues as an inscrutable monster, albeit one with a strikingly lucid mind and strong will, as he sets out to reverse the abject humiliations of the Yeltsin era and make Russian power speak once more in “the language of life, death, honour and fatherland”.

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Empoli, though, makes us ask whether his Surkov figure might be a dead-souled ogre of another rank entirely. We even side with the thuggish ultra-nationalist biker Zaldostanov (who really exists) when, in one of the book’s strongest scenes, he rounds on Baranov. Amid the debris of shelled Luhansk, it dawns on the leather-clad militia capo that his blood-stained patriotic crusade to reunite Mother Russia is, to the cynical strategist, just another page on the playbook of spin. Zaldostanov finds a mutilated doll in the rubble of an apartment block. He thrusts it into the abashed Baranov’s face. “This little broken, dirty thing must once have had a name. And a little girl played with it for whole afternoons.”

For once, Baranov fails to fire back with a killer quip. If Le Mage du Kremlin dissects the figure of the intellectual in the corridors of power, it draws back from saluting that role. This ambivalence has a French as well as a Russian face. The original eminence grise, the elusive strategist at the ruler’s side, was Capuchin friar François Leclerc du Tremblay, adviser to Louis XIII’s minister Cardinal Richelieu. Since then, in literature and politics, the backstairs thinker-fixer has transfixed the French imagination, and sometimes adopted human form: for instance, in the shape of Charles de Gaulle’s resilient culture minister, André Malraux.

Intellectuals love, and hate, to see one of their own atop the greasy pole; in France, many have dared to climb it. In a more knockabout vein, the recent acrobatic leaps and falls of what the French would call “Anglo-Saxon” spin-masters — notably Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings — have seen those Atlanticist figures pay their own sort of tribute to a very French tradition. For sure, Russian literature and statecraft has its own tradition of scheming, amoral artists of mind-control. None is more creepily compelling than Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, or (in history) more notorious than the mystic monk Grigori Rasputin. Yet Empoli’s cerebral courtier, “a poet fallen among wolves”, often sounds as if he belongs beside the Seine rather than the Neva or Moskva.

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That said, his ideas do retain a sinister allure. Empoli’s voicing of Surkov’s postmodern politics of spectacle, contradiction and disinformation may not be that original. Peter Pomerantsev has drilled down into the Surkov method in his exemplary books (This Is Not Propaganda; Nothing is True and Everything is Possible). Meanwhile, the documentary wizard of the BBC archives, Adam Curtis, seems spellbound by the Kremlin sorcerer. Surkov’s theory and practice haunts his 2016 series Hyper-Normalisation and the later Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. The theatrical stand-offs Empoli invents with the disgraced tycoons Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, and with restaurateur-turned-Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, could almost appear in a Peter Morgan screenplay. Indeed, Morgan’s most recent drama, Patriots, tracks Berezovsky’s rise.

Empoli, however, lends the Surkov code and its art of lies a glinting, lapidary clarity. Don’t be afraid of chaos, but provoke and channel it. Forget labels such as “government” or “opposition”, “liberal” or “conservative”. Sow doubt and anxiety by backing, then thwarting, every competing social movement: “bikers and hooligans, anarchists and skinheads, communists and religious fanatics, the extreme right, the extreme left…” Foster the war of all against all, turn reality inside out, and in the wake of furious unrest restore “vertical” power with the almighty state and its leader-saviour in sole charge. As Empoli’s Baranov puts it in his suave but sulphurous credo:

“Anger remains the primordial drive you must take into account. You, right-thinking Westerners, think it can be absorbed. That economic growth, technological progress and — I don’t know — home deliveries and mass tourism will make the rage of the people disappear… It’s not true: there will always be the disappointed, the frustrated, the losers, in every age and under every regime. Stalin understood that rage is a structural element… To repress dissent is crude. To manage the flow of rage, to stop it building up, is more complicated, but much more effective. Over many years my work, at root, has been none other than that.”

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Le Mage du Kremlin shows us Baranov-Surkov in placid, domestic retirement. He’s happy to cherish his daughter and his library while posting pseudonymous tweets about the prophetic genius of the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of the classic dystopia We (also, incidentally, a major influence on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four). Reading the novel in 2023, one inevitably wonders whether the absence of Surkov from Putin’s nocturnal brooding contributed to the catastrophic blunders of the Ukraine invasion.

For Empoli portrays a ringmaster of steady-state disorder and permanent crisis — at home and abroad — who knows how to dodge final showdowns and settlements. The aim, remember, is “not conquest but chaos”. Chaos in the service of the spellbinding Tsar, a world-wide digital hubbub fed by Putin’s adversaries more than his allies, spreads “the myth of our power”. All-out war, on the other hand, drives events back from post-truth flux, blurring them back towards the old world in which binary alternatives of victory and defeat come into play again.

Without a Surkov-style counsellor, the Tsar seems to have broken his wand and retreated into an antique, analogue landscape of visible battle-lines, measurable advances and retreats. If Le Mage du Kremlin raises ethical questions, it does so not because it excuses the Tsar and his adviser’s stunts and frauds, but because it endorses their effectiveness. “I couldn’t bear the idea of losing,” Baranov reflects. But “indefatigable labour” ensured that “I was lucky; I nearly always won.” Will the real Surkov survive to re-emerge amid the ruins of the Tsar’s epoch? It would make a tasty sequel.

***

Le Mage du Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli is published by Gallimard; translations by Boyd Tonkin

“Ivan” pauses. He is involved in civilian resistance activities in Southern Ukraine, and he has pointed views on the occupiers, borne from first-hand experience. “Well, actually, the Russians generally just leave their dead behind in the field. So they don’t go back to Russia, in fact. We fertilise our soil with them.”

On the morning of 21 September, President Vladimir Putin went on Russian State TV to face his nation and, by proxy, the world. He told his people that there would be a mass but limited mobilisation for the war in Ukraine. He would be calling up “military reservists, primarily those who served in the armed forces and have specific military occupational specialities and corresponding experience”. It would be Russia’s first mobilisation since World War II, which he announced on the International Day of Peace. For all his flaws, Putin does have a sense of humour.

The speech comprised Putin’s usual mix of mendacity, self-pity and delusion: a toxic combination in autocrats that invariably leads to violence (just ask the people of Iran). He began by talking about the need to protect the “sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Russia”. By this, he meant areas inside Ukraine that Russia has stolen and now occupies.

His declarations come in the wake of the recent Kyiv counteroffensive that has driven Russian troops out of much of the north-eastern parts of Ukraine. Of course, Russia could never have lost to Ukrainians. It was, as Putin explained, the West that is behind Russia’s recent defeats — not that he calls them defeats — because it “wants to destroy our country.” For that reason, the West is trying to “turn Ukraine’s people into cannon fodder”.

According to Putin — and it’s important to understand this — the West unleashed this aggression “back in 2014”. What actually happened was that Russian soldiers marched into Crimea without provocation, stole it, and then invaded eastern Ukraine. It was retaliation against the Ukrainian Euromaidan Revolution of 2013, which overthrew Kremlin stooge Viktor Yanukovych: Putin could not allow a democratic revolution next door to pass off without issue. Who knew what thoughts it might put into the heads of his own oppressed citizens?

Putin refers to Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan government  as “the result of a state coup”. He is, it seems a stickler for democracy. Between the 23-27 September, there will be “referendums” in the occupied territories of Ukraine over formal annexation to Russia. Pretty much the entire world has, inevitably and correctly, denounced them as a sham.

Putin now posits his unprovoked and militarily foolish invasion of Ukraine as an existential conflict for Russians: “The goal of that part of the West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are saying openly now that in 1991 they managed to split up the Soviet Union and now is the time to do the same to Russia, which must be divided into numerous regions that would be at deadly feud with each other.”

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With its paranoia about Western intentions, nostalgia for a supposedly halcyon USSR, and belief that Russia must fight (ergo, conquer more land) to survive, this statement pretty much sums up the entirety of Putinist foreign policy over the last 15 or so years. The international reaction has been as expected. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was typically eloquent: “Putin wants to drown Ukraine in blood, including the blood of his own men.” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace saw it as an “admission that his invasion is failing”, and that Russia is fast becoming a “global pariah”.

Recent events have undoubtedly been a colossal setback for Russia. There have now been 7 months of fighting and Putin has failed to meet the 15 September deadline he set his army to take the Donetsk region. In that time, it has suffered. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has gone on record admitting that his people may have sustained up to 6,000 casualties. Ukraine claims the figure is over 55,000. The truth lies somewhere in between (though almost certainly closer to Kyiv’s estimation than Moscow’s). And this doesn’t take into account the hundreds of desertions from the Russian army to date.

Back in Moscow, there was even public criticism from former parliamentarian Boris Nadeszhdin. “It’s either full scale war or we get out,” he said on a heated panel discussion on state TV. Nadeszhdin is an “approved” opposition figure, so his comments were to be expected. Nonetheless, he voiced what many are thinking: the war is not going to plan, despite Kremlin claims that its retreat in Kharkiv was a tactical move.

The Ukrainians are, naturally, loving all of this. The Defence of Ukraine tweeted on Tuesday: “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was regrouping”.

Putin is not the only one with a sense of humour.

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Putin's war is just beginning

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“This [mobilisation] means the war is coming ever closer to ordinary Russians.” “Petya” is a Ukrainian soldier on the country’s southern front, and he’s weighing up what recent events mean for those on the front lines. “He recognised that he needed more troops, more people to reach his goals. Before this moment, for ordinary people in Russia, this war was something very far away but now, ordinary Russian people will feel what this war means in their personal life.”

This is important. Even in a dictatorship, which Russia emphatically is — no matter how many democratic veneers Putin tries to paste over his actions — you can’t enrage too many people too many times if you want to govern more or less unhindered. When I was last in Ukraine, over the summer, I lost count of how many people told me the USSR’s failed invasion of Afghanistan was the final nail in its coffin.

At first glance, Russians are unhappy. The most searched terms on the internet in Russia following the announcement were, according to one anonymous tweeter, “how to break your arm”; “how to leave Russia”; “foreign passport”; and then “how to avoid mobilisation”. There’s a great joke doing the rounds in Moscow right now, too. “As a reservist, you have been mobilised!” “Who are we fighting with?” “The Nazis.” “Yes, but against whom?”

Discontent is being expressed in various ways. One-way airline tickets are soaring in price and selling out fast. Meanwhile, small-scale protests are making themselves heard in towns across the country, and over 1,000 Russians have now been arrested for dissent. In a country where you can get 15 years in prison for speaking out, these are the acts of either extremely brave, or extremely fed up, people. Both are a grave danger for despotic regimes.

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Then again, Russians are often unhappy. As a Russian friend once said to me: “Yeah, politics sucks, but it’s like the weather: you can’t do anything about it.” Any claim that Putin is in imminent political or indeed personal danger must be dismissed as almost certainly false — with the caveat that in life, and especially in Russia, anything can happen.

Petya understands the truth of all this. “The future of this war depends not only on the force of the Russian army against the Ukrainian army, but also on the views and position of the Russian people.” And he is hopeful. As are most military-minded Ukrainians I speak to. Ignore the noise (or as one so memorably put it, “politician bull poo poo”) and look at what is happening on the ground. Ukraine continues to advance in the North, having retaken over 8000 square kilometres to date, and soon hopes to encircle the city of Kherson in the occupied south (a goal that might be a touch too ambitious).

Kyiv is not letting up. Zelenskyy is now focused on “speed” in liberated areas. Ukrainian forces just captured Bilohorivka, a small village in Luhansk, which is a small but symbolic achievement, as it’s 10km west of the city of Lysychansk, which fell to the Russians in July. This causes Russia more problems. In each new territory that Ukraine seizes back, more evidence of Russian atrocities emerges: more mass graves, more scenes of torture, more tales of the brutality of occupation from those who endured it.

Putin’s response is simple. “People in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, in Lugansk and Donetsk, saw and are seeing now the atrocities perpetrated by the Neo-Nazis in the (Ukrainian-)occupied areas of the Kharkiv region,” he said. It’s a simple rhetorical device beloved of despots everywhere: just deny the reality of everything. And keep denying it. Blame the victims; you know most won’t swallow the nonsense, but the crucial constituency will.

It doesn’t matter that people can see the truth on TV. It doesn’t matter that they can read it in the press and hear it on the radio. This is what totalitarianism is: the Leader controls not just your civil rights and your freedoms, but your very senses, too. What you heard you did not hear; what you saw you did not see.

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But once you go down the road to outright despotism, there is no going back. There can be no failure either, as failure can only lead to downfall or death, and usually both. “Partial mobilisation by Russia means only one thing,” continues Petya. “The defeat of the so-called special military operation declared by Vladimir Putin. And practically, it means that Putin has recognised defeat.”

But if Putin has recognised the defeat of what he thought would be a “special military operation”, he cannot accept the defeat of the wider invasion of Ukraine. In his speech, he said Russia will “use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.” He was talking about nuclear weapons — his ultimate trump card. If it’s a sign of weakness (and it is), it’s also a sign of how far nuclear taboos have been eroded. Throughout the whole of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, neither John F. Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev once mentioned the possibility of nuclear strikes. The Kremlin now alludes to it on a daily basis.

The Russian establishment remains mostly united and on message. Recently, Andrey Gurulyov, State Duma Deputy, expressed a desire to end Ukraine’s existence. Russia’s largest defence company, Rostec, has drastically increased its arms production after bringing in an overtime schedule.

On the ground, though, Petya is equally determined. “Nothing has changed because we still continue to defend our country,” he says. “We see our task as still the same as it was before [the mobilisation]. Our goal is to liberate occupied territories of Ukraine and achieve victory over Russia. Every soldier understands this goal, and the military spirit [morale] is still very high.”

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But to do this, as Petya knows, Ukraine will keep needing Western weapons and support. Key to the Kremlin’s strategy is the belief that we will eventually give up and abandon Ukraine. It’s easy to see the logic behind this. Putin looked at Iraq; to Barack Obama’s failure to keep to his own redline after chemical weapon use in Syria; and most recently to the flight from Afghanistan; and he concluded the West was exhausted and spent.

So far, we have proved him wrong. The EU Council just adopted a new €5bn assistance package. When I met Foreign Office officials recently, the message was simple: full steam ahead with supporting Ukraine. Britain has a new Prime Minister, fully aligned with her predecessor. She has made this abundantly clear.

Petya is keen to emphasise the importance of this continuing support. “To reach victory we need more help from the side of our Western partners,” he says. “We need new armaments, we need new technologies. We see that Russia’s entire policy is its human potential but not technology — winning by quantity, not quality. That’s all they can do.”

Now, across the occupied territories the referendums are beginning. Putin is going to annex larges parts of southern Ukraine to Russia. But as much as he tells himself — and Russians — otherwise, this will only make Ukrainians, yet again, more determined to resist; and the Russians, yet again, more violent. Yesterday morning I received a message from a Ukrainian friend. “News from Kh [Kherson] are bad. Russians with riffles and unforms [sic] coming in villages from house to house and press people top vote. Often threaten if they don’t want to.”

The war is far from over — the violence will continue; Ukrainians will continue to die. And so the West’s involvement must continue, too. There can be no retreat — either for Ukraine, or for the international order we have so painstakingly built over the seven decades, since the last time a tyrant unleashed industrial war on the European continent.

Further setting the stage for what might be his final farewell a poem attributed to Surkov was published on Facebook a few days later. It is suitably full of contradictions, opening with the declaration, “I stand at the bottom of a pit, like a mountain’s summit, like the culmination of a drama, like the beginning of the game”. Its macabre ending — “I am going out into the negative, like Magellan into the Ocean” — may describe his fate, or that which he has engineered for Russia.

Publishing poetry is only one way that Surkov positioned himself as unique among Kremlin insiders. And he has always been taken at his own estimation. An advisor to Vladimir Putin from when he first assumed the presidency, Surkov made his name by not only acknowledging that the ‘sovereign democracy’ he helped usher in was a façade, but also by revelling in the fact that he was doing so publicly.

The brashness with which he effected this has made Surkov far better known outside of Russia than anyone else in Putin’s inner circle. In addition to articles in Foreign Policy and a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report dedicated to his ‘management’ of Russia’s proxies and media strategy in Ukraine, he has been profiled in both the London and the New York reviews of books. The Atlantic and Business Insider have also given it a go.

Surkov was an attractive subject because he would let Western journalists in on his not-so-secret tactics, and in a language they understood. His quip in response to being sanctioned in 2014 — “The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing” — brought him to the attention of those beyond the usual Kremlin-watchers. The fact that he wrote his own novellas, Almost Zero (gangsta fiction) and Mashinka and Velik (gaga saga), and had an on-and-off relationship with Russia’s avant-garde, meant he was also a subject of curiosity for the art establishment.

His ex-wife, the artist Yulia Vishnevskaya, founded Moscow’s Museum of Unique Dolls in 1996, the year they divorced. Since 2004, Surkov has been married to Natalya Dubovitskaya – adapting her name into Natan Dubovitsky as his nom-de-plume. She presents as an art-inspired interior designer but her glamorous Instagram, real estate holdings, and ever-expanding business interests are archetypal of the Russian elite. So too is the rumoured reason for Surkov’s purported arrest — pocketing cash intended to destabilise Ukraine.

Surkov arguably reached his peak cultural prominence when the director Adam Curtis used his ideas as the centrepiece of his 2016 film HyperNormalisation, arguing that Surkov had invented a “new system of political control” by “import(ing) ideas from conceptual art into the heart of politics”. Curtis warned it was spreading from the Kremlin to the West.

Curtis argues Surkov’s open acknowledgement of his puppeteering made it impossible to know what was real and what was true. What many in the West had failed to realise was that — much as he had done with the Russian people — he wasn’t letting them in on the secrets behind his choreography, but turning them into other marionettes.

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Perhaps Surkov once was once in love with the theatre of the absurd, and the idea that we are all mere puppets. But today he sees such postmodernism merely as a tool to impose what he does want to achieve, a strong “long-lasting Putinist state,” the title of one of his occasional public essays.

Surkov has revelled in using the Dadaist approach to mock what he sees as the decadence of the West. He might be the auteur behind the idea that “nothing is true and everything is possible” (as Peter Pomerantsev titled his book on the Kremlin), but on Putinist rule we can take Surkov at his word, given his actions in managing the Kremlin’s extension of power not only in Ukraine but in other parts of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ as well.

His former aide Inal Batuvych Ardzinba now serves as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Abkhazia, one of two Russian breakaway regions in Georgia beholden to Moscow. Surkov also managed negotiations for Ukraine’s Minsk Agreements, while simultaneously hand-picking much of the “separatist leadership” in Donetsk and Luhansk, knowing full well the pacts would not lead to peace. As central as the absurd may be to these actions, Surkov has long effectively managed the expansion of Russian power.

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Surkov’s 2019 article on Putinism did not explicitly ascribe any ideology to the regime he had dedicated himself to building. He spent most of it attacking the West for its failure to understand Russia, for its “distrust and envy”, and for its lack of “belief in the good intentions of public officials”. This, interestingly, runs counter to Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as an “incredulity towards meta-narratives”, dismissing decision-makers as people who merely “allocate our lives for the growth of power”. It seems Surkov was happy to do delve into postmodernism for its use in creating confusion, but expressly disagrees with the criticism of decision-makers. His Putinism article ends by using Albert Einstein’s witticism “sophisticated, but not-malicious” in describing the Russian people’s faith in Putin, painting it as quasi-religious.

Before he was removed from the corridors of power at the beginning of the year, Surkov was open about his role and intent in the Kremlin. In a 2021 Financial Times interview, he declared “I am proud that I was part of the reconquest. This was the first open geopolitical counter-attack by Russia [against the West] and such a decisive one. That was an honour for me.”

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He considered the propaganda that made him famous to be something that “people need”, comparing his output to McDonald’s and dismissing the need for “highly intellectual discourse”. Artistic intent usually requires taking pride in one’s work, or at least in having some underling meaning. For Surkov, his avant-garde tactics are merely a means to an end.

Surkov is by no means the only public intellectual — for that is how he is perceived, even if it fails to accurately describe his intent — to have fallen out with his avant-garde training. The liberal conservative Francis Fukuyama is another.

Fukuyama initially trained in political philosophy and literature, even studying in France under Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most famous of all postmodernists. The very title of his widely misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, is a reference to a concept popular among other Marxist-inspired intellectuals, that there is a linear and perhaps even scientific path to historical development.

Like Surkov, Fukuyama today dismisses postmodernism — in 2018 he told an interviewer that what he had learned from his time in Paris was that postmodernist concept of deconstruction “was total bullshit”. The key difference between Fukuyama and Surkov in their divergence from heterodoxy, however, is in their approach to power.

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Surkov’s last polemic, entitled “Where Has the Chaos Gone: Unpacking Stability” published online in November 2021, placed “powerful statehood” at the basis of “the recipe for establishing and maintaining order”. He describes the state as “primarily an instrument for reducing social entropy”, before attacking the idea of social chaos that so many postmodernists have praised.

For his part, Fukuyama has acknowledged that his arguments about the future of world power are at least in part inspired by his earlier academic experiences, referencing the Marxist roots to his theory of liberal hegemony. But in his lectures in the years since, Fukuyama has emphasised that his belief in individual agency trumps any potential laws of history.

Both Fukuyama and Surkov’s criticise what they see as postmodernism’s offspring — identity politics, for example — and warn it can weaken the West. But Fukuyama recognises something that the war in Ukraine has made clear, and which Surkov has failed to see: namely that agency does not sit with the state.

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Surkov’s view that the state is the primary mover of history explains why he and Putin were so eager for war in Ukraine.

It would be generous to describe the Ukrainian state before Putin’s invasion as corrupt and fragile. Putin too appeared to believe this would make it an easy military target, apparently supported by “intelligence” from Surkov’s friends in the Federal Security Service (FSB). Meanwhile Surkov had helped Putin build a power-vertical that would enable the regime to position any propaganda as a crusade.

But it is Ukraine that retains its agency, while Russia has lost it. Its valiant defence of Kyiv, and litany of impressive actions on the battlefield have begun to forge a new unity and idea of Ukrainian nationhood. They also prove the fallibility of Putin’s own state: while Ukraine is recruiting volunteers from neighbouring countries, and even Russia, the Kremlin is resorting to conscripts, mercenary groups and favours from fellow dictatorships to bolster its ranks.

While Putin has sought to rewrite history in his 2020 article on the legacy of World War II and his diatribe the following year on Russian-Ukrainian”‘unity”, his ideas are not taken seriously. Russian policy academics may now bend their thinking to fit them — as do the once-respected Carnegie Moscow director, Dmitry Trenin, or the director of Russia’s International Affairs Council, Andrei Kortunov — but this hardly boosts his power.

The Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko summarised Putin’s invasion not as the culmination of some superstate as Surkov would have it, but as a “crisis of hegemony; the incapacity of the post-Soviet and specifically Russian ruling class to lead, not simply to rule over, subaltern classes and nations”.

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Putin and Surkov have failed to build a Russia that serves as an alternative force in history. Instead — regardless of how much territory Moscow is able to claw away from Ukraine — they are witnessing the construction of that alternative by the Ukrainian people.

Russia’s long-cuckolded oligarchs, intellectuals and their offspring now know they can make their voices heard by shouting Glory to Ukraine. Simultaneously, Russian soldiers are being killed while fighting under meaningless and unexplained Z’s. No Russian politician has even attempted to invent a symbolism. The BBC journalist Grigor Atanesian noted the absurdity of Russians fighting under a “symbol void of any meaning… like in a bad 1990’s post-modernist novel”. The Kremlin has not even bothered to revive the Novorossiya project — complete with faux-historical flags — that Surkov once engineered to justify further invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s army may be fighting against something, but they are not fighting for anything.

The Ukrainians are fighting for the ability to move West, reinvigorated by Putin’s war, towards Fukuyama’s conception of history and away from Surkov’s. In doing so, Kyiv may also be re-invigorating the values postmodernism’s critics argue it had undermined, concepts such as freedom for freedom’s sake, while Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy revives the possibility that leaders will once again be seen as heroic.

Surkov’s means achieved the opposite of his ends. It turns out he was no puppet-master, just another puppet.

PutinCon was opened by Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned human-rights activist. After a passionate address about demolition of democracy in his native land, Kasparov joked that despots such as Putin preferred playing poker to his sport of chess since they could win with weak cards if their opponents folded. Certainly the diminutive Russian dictator has deployed his hand with malevolent skill – and there is a growing library of books analysing the man and his tactics.

Several are well worth reading. I would recommend Masha Gessen’s superb The Man Without A Face, Bill Browder’s tale of his personal battle with the Kremlin and the late Karen Dawisha’s incisive Putin’s Kleptocracy, which revealed how barely one hundred well-connected characters control almost one-third of their country’s immense wealth. Yet one stands out for me despite barely mentioning ‘The President’, who lurks as just a shadowy presence in the background: Nothing is True And Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia: by Peter Pomerantsev.

This is a book of immense originality painted in vivid primary colours that makes it perfect for the poolside. It reads often like a strange slice of fiction, fast-paced and filled with extraordinary characters. At times it feels like magical realism. Yet this is sharp reportage by an author who spent almost a decade at start of this century working on documentaries and reality television shows in Russia – and it shines penetrating light on the evolution of today’s Russia as its ruler wreaks havoc on the world.

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On one level Pomerantsev – a British citizen with Russian heritage – has simply written an absorbing work about a place emerging from the shackles of Communism into a world of cowboy capitalism. It is a land of glitz, glamour and gangsters; of ambitious young women going to special schools that teach them how to snare oligarchs; of weird religious sects, tragic supermodels and nationalist motorcycle gangs riding Harley-Davidsons; even of urban architecture changing with dazzling speed.

Yet the author, with his insight on television, is really showing how Putin subsumed the media to his cause, blurring the boundaries between truth and reality and, in so doing, rendered truth absurd with propaganda. Not just fake news but fake justice, fake politics, fake terrorists, fake wars. This is the strategy launched with invented terrorists bombing blocks of Russian flats to whip up sectarian hatred and support for savage war in Chechnya. It led to green men invading the Crimea, troll factories in St Petersburg and the hacking of United States political machinery. 

In this world of distorted reality and all-pervasive corruption, Pomerantsev relates how one gangster, fed up with poor quality crime capers on television, uses his goons to make dramas with real guns and then forces a station to broadcast his shows. Even the cults use television to spread their word. One minute an honest woman trading industrial cleaning products is happily driving her Lexus; the next she is accused of dealing drugs and incarcerated for several months – a hapless pawn of political infighting, freed only when Putin tires of the protagonists.

The most symbolic character in the saga is Vladislav Surkov. This key Kremlin player, a puppet master seen as one of the brains behind the creation of ‘virtual democracy’, is a man who writes essays on contemporary art and lyrics for rock bands while supporting religious extremists who attack modernity. In his office hangs pictures of John Lennon, Che Guvera and Tupac. He is almost certainly the author of a savage satirical novel about a dodgy public relations man, while leaked emails have since indicated he was heavily involved in efforts to destabilise Ukraine. 

Surkov demonstrates the dark genius behind the destructive creed of Putinism just as surely as Pomerantsev documents the development of postmodern dictatorship. Now that this is being exported worldwide and similar tactics adopted by admirers, even in the White House, it is imperative we understand this dangerous concept that plays with citizens and countries like they are characters in a reality television show.

As some of us cling to liberal values and a belief in truth, this highly-readable book exposes how the language of freedom, the fundamentals of democracy and the tools of mass communication were subverted to foster autocracy.