The Wizard of the Kremlin E-Book

Giuliano de Empoli

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 333

Beschreibung

THE INTERNATIONAL SENSATION – a stunning work of political fiction about the rise to power of Putin's notorious spin doctor 'Compelling and convincing' New Statesman 'A must-read' Foreign Policy 'A fictional wandering through the dark corridors of the Kremlin' The Times, Biggest Books of the Season __________ They call him The Wizard of the Kremlin. Working at the heart of Russian power, the enigmatic Vadim Baranov—Putin's chief spin doctor—has used his background in experimental theatre and reality TV to turn the entire country into an avant-garde political stage. Here truth and lies, news and propaganda, have become indistinguishable. But Vadim is growing increasingly entangled in the dark secret workings of the regime he has helped build, and now he is desperate to get out... Propelling the reader from the fall of the Soviet Union to the invasion of Ukraine, this breathless story of politics and power has become an international sensation.

Leseprobe

For Alma

Life is a comedy. One must play it seriously.

—Alexandre Kojève

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraph12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031AcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorsAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin Press Copyright

1

FOR A LONG TIME, the most disparate reports had been circulating about him. Some said he’d retired to a monastery on Mount Athos to pray among the rocks and lizards, others swore they’d seen him partying at a villa in Sotogrande with a cast of coked-up supermodels. Still others said he’d been spotted on a runway at the Sharjah airport, at the militia headquarters in the Donbas, or wandering the ruins of Mogadishu.

Since Vadim Baranov quit his post as advisor to the tsar, stories about him had been multiplying rather than fading away. This happens sometimes. For the most part, men in power derive their aura from the position they hold. When they lose it, it’s as if a plug had been pulled. They deflate like one of those giant puppets at the entrance to amusement parks, and if you see these men in the street you wonder how they ever stirred such passions.

Baranov was of a different order. What order that might be, though, I’d be hard-pressed to say. In photographs, he seemed sturdily built but not athletic, always dressed in dark, slightly overlarge suits. His face was ordinary, somewhat boyish, with a pale complexion, and his straight black hair was cut like a schoolboy’s. A video taken on the fringes of an official meeting showed him laughing, a rare sight in Russia, where even a smile is considered a sign of idiocy. In fact, he seemed to pay no attention whatever to his appearance—surprising, considering that his stock-in-trade was exactly that, setting mirrors in a circle so that a spark could become a wildfire.

Baranov went through life surrounded by mysteries. The one thing about him that was more or less certain was his influence over the tsar. In his fifteen years of service to him, he’d helped build up the man’s power considerably.

He was called the “Wizard of the Kremlin,” and the “new Rasputin.” At the time, his role was not clearly defined. He would show up in the president’s office when the business of the day was done. It wasn’t the secretaries who’d called him. Maybe the tsar himself had summoned him on his direct line. Or he’d guessed the right time on his own, thanks to his extraordinary talents, which everyone acknowledged without being able to say exactly what they were. Sometimes a third person would join them, a minister enjoying a moment in the limelight or the boss of a state company. But given that no one ever says anything in Moscow as a matter of principle, and this goes back centuries, even the presence of these occasional witnesses failed to shed light on the nocturnal activities of the tsar and his advisor. Yet the consequences sometimes stood out clearly. One morning, all Russia awoke to learn that the richest and best-known businessman in the country, the symbol of the new capitalism, had been arrested. Another time, all the presidents of the federal republics, duly elected by the people, had been dismissed, and the morning newscasts informed their still-drowsy audience that from now on the tsar would appoint the presidents himself. In most cases, though, these late-night sessions produced no visible effect. Only years later would changes occur, as though naturally, but in fact as the result of meticulous planning.

At that time, Baranov lived very privately. You never saw him anywhere, and an interview was out of the question. He did have one quirk, though. From time to time he would publish something, either a brief essay in an obscure independent journal, or a research article on military strategy aimed at the highest echelons of the army, or even a piece of fiction that showed off his talent for paradox, in the best Russian tradition. He never wrote under his own name, but he interspersed his texts with allusions that offered clues about the new world that was taking shape in the late-night Kremlin sessions. That, at any rate, was what the court followers in Moscow and in foreign ministries abroad believed, racing to be the first to decipher Baranov’s hidden meaning.

The pseudonym he used for these pronouncements, Nikolai Brandeis, added a further element of confusion. Adepts quickly recognized it as the name of a minor character in a seldom-read novel by Joseph Roth. Brandeis, a Tatar, plays the part of deus ex machina, appearing at crucial moments in the story only to disappear immediately after. “It doesn’t require strength to conquer something,” he says. “Everything yields to you, everything’s rotten and surrenders. Knowing how to give things up, that’s what counts.” Just as the other characters in Roth’s novel track Nikolai Brandeis’s actions obsessively, since his extraordinary indifference is the only guarantor of success, so the high-ranking officeholders in the Kremlin and their satellites would pounce on the slightest indication of Baranov’s thinking, in the hope of learning the tsar’s intentions. What made the whole exercise precarious was that the Wizard of the Kremlin believed that plagiarism was the foundation of all progress. You could therefore never truly tell whether he was expressing his own ideas or playing with someone else’s.

This game of cat and mouse reached its high point one winter night, when a dense pack of luxury cars, with their escort of sirens and bodyguards, converged on a small avant-garde theater in Moscow where a one-act play by a certain Nikolai Brandeis was being performed. Queueing at the door were bankers, oil magnates, ministers, and FSB generals. “In a civilized country,” says the play’s central character, “civil war would erupt, but as we don’t have citizens here, we’ll have a war between lackeys. It’s no worse than a civil war, just a bit more distasteful, more sordid.” To all appearances, Baranov wasn’t in the crowd that night, but to be safe the bankers and ministers still applauded wildly. Some claimed that Baranov was watching the audience through a tiny peephole to the right of the balcony.

Yet even these somewhat childish games hadn’t cured Baranov of his disaffection. At a certain point, the few people who actually met with him began to notice that his moods were growing darker. He was reported to be anxious, tired. Thinking of other things. He’d climbed the ranks too soon, and now he was bored, with himself most of all. And with the tsar, who for his part was never bored. And who was starting to hate Baranov. What? I brought you all this way and you have the gall to be bored? One should never underestimate the sentimental side of political relationships.

Until one day Baranov disappeared. A terse note from the Kremlin announced that the political advisor to the president of the Russian Federation had resigned. And then all trace of him disappeared, except for occasional sightings of him around the globe, though none were ever confirmed.

When I arrived in Moscow a few years later, Baranov’s memory hovered in the air like an amorphous shadow. No longer tied to his quite-substantial physical body, it was free to appear in one place or another, wherever it could be used to explain a particularly obscure action on the part of the Kremlin. And given that Moscow—inscrutable capital of a new era whose contours none could define—had come unexpectedly into the forefront once again, obsessive interpreters of the former magus of the Kremlin had cropped up even among those of us in the foreign community. A BBC journalist had made a documentary arguing that Baranov was the man responsible for bringing the techniques of avant-garde theater into politics. Another journalist described him in a book as a kind of magician who made people and political parties appear and disappear at the snap of his fingers. A professor had devoted a scholarly monograph to him: Vadim Baranov and the Invention of Fake Democracy. Everyone wanted to know what he had been up to recently. Did he still have influence over the tsar? What role had he played in the war in Ukraine? And what was his contribution to the propaganda strategy that had worked such profound changes on the planet’s geopolitical equilibrium?

I personally followed these lines of inquiry with a certain detachment. The living have never interested me as much as the dead. I’d felt unmoored in the world until I realized that I could spend the better part of my time with the dead. Which is why my stay in Moscow was mostly spent visiting libraries and archives, along with a few restaurants, and a café where the waiters gradually became accustomed to my solitary presence. I pored over old books, took walks in the pale winter light, and in the late afternoons went to the steam baths on Seleznevskaya Street to be restored. At night, a small bar in Kitay-gorod warmly enclosed me behind its doors of rest and forgetfulness. And at almost every point, there walked at my side a marvelous phantom, a potential ally.

To all intents and purposes, Yevgeny Zamyatin appears to be an early twentieth-century writer, born in a village of Romani and horse thieves, who was arrested and sent into exile by the tsarist authorities for taking part in the 1905 revolution. Admired early on for his fiction, he worked as a naval engineer in England, where he manufactured icebreakers. He then returned to Russia in 1917 to join the Bolshevik Revolution, but quickly realized that building a paradise for the working class was not on the agenda. And so Zamyatin began to write a novel, We. And at that point, something happened that helps us understand what physicists mean when they talk of parallel universes.

In 1922, Zamyatin stopped being just a writer and became a time machine. He thought he was writing a biting criticism of the Soviet system as it was then being built. That’s certainly how the censors read We, and it’s on that basis that they stopped its publication. But the truth is that Zamyatin was not addressing them. Without realizing it, he had stepped into the next century and was speaking directly to our era. We depicts a society governed by logic, where everything has a number, and where each person’s life is regulated down to the tiniest detail for maximum efficiency. The result is a rigid but comfortable dictatorship, one in which anyone can compose three sonatas in an hour by pushing a button, and where relations between the sexes are automatically regulated through a mechanism that selects the most-compatible partners and allows copulation with each of them. Everything is transparent in Zamyatin’s world, down to a membrane in the street, decorated as a work of art, that records the conversation of passersby. Clearly, this is a place where voting also has to be public. “The ancients are said to have voted secretly, furtively, like thieves,” says the main character, named D-503. “What was the point of all this mystery? It’s never been fully determined … We don’t hide anything, we aren’t ashamed of anything. We celebrate our elections openly, loyally, and in the full light of day. I watch everyone else vote for the Benefactor, and everyone else watches me vote for the Benefactor.”

I’d been obsessed with Zamyatin ever since discovering him. His work seemed to concentrate all the questions of our times. We didn’t describe the Soviet Union. It was about our own smooth, seamless, algorithm-driven world, the global matrix presently under construction, and the total inadequacy of our primitive brains to deal with it. Zamyatin was an oracle. He was not just speaking to Stalin, he was targeting all the dictators waiting in the wings, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley as well as the mandarins of China’s single political party. His book was the last weapon against the digital beehive that was starting to enmesh the planet. My task was to dig it up again and point it in the right direction. The problem was that I didn’t exactly have the means at hand to make Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping tremble, but I did manage to talk my university into financing my research into Zamyatin’s life, by pointing to the fact that he had spent his last years in Paris after escaping Stalin. A French publisher had expressed a vague interest in reissuing We, and a friend who produced documentaries had been willing to consider the possibility of a project involving Zamyatin. “Try to find some material while you’re in Moscow,” he’d said, sipping a negroni at a ninth-arrondissement bar.

But I’d no sooner arrived in Moscow than I was distracted from my task, discovering that this pitiless city held its share of enchantments, tempting me to venture out every day into the narrow, frozen streets of Petrova and the Arbat. The moroseness of the blank Stalinist facades was tempered by the pale reflections of the old boyar residences, and even the snow, pounded to mud by the constant passing of black town cars, became pure again in the courtyards and small hidden gardens, which murmured their tales of times past.

These different timelines—the 1920s of Zamyatin and the dystopian future of We, the scars Stalin had left on the city and the more benign traces of prerevolutionary Moscow—all converged in me, producing a temporal dislocation that became my normal state of being. Still, I wasn’t completely uninterested in what was happening around me. I’d stopped reading the newspapers by then, but my limited need for information was amply supplied by social media.

Among the Russian accounts that I followed was one that went by the name of Nikolai Brandeis. It was probably a student in some studio apartment in Kazan, rather than the actual Wizard of the Kremlin, but I read his posts without knowing for certain. No one knows anything in Russia, and either you cope or you leave. It was no great commitment, because Brandeis only posted a sentence every week or two. These never commented on the news, tending instead to hide a literary reference, or quote the lyrics of a song, or allude to a piece in the Paris Review, all of which supported the hypothesis of the student in Kazan.

“All is allowed in paradise, except curiosity.”

“If your friend dies, don’t bury him. Stand by and wait. The vultures will gather soon, and you’ll have many new friends.”

“There is nothing sadder in this world than to watch a strong, healthy family reduced to shreds by a stupid banality. A pack of wolves, for instance.”

The young man had a fairly dark turn of mind, but it fit in well enough with the local character.

One night, instead of going to my usual bar, I decided to stay home and read. I was renting two rooms on the top floor of a handsome building from the 1950s, built by German prisoners of war—a mark of standing in Moscow, where power and bourgeois comfort always rest on a solid foundation of oppression. Snow squalls lashed the window, muting the orange glow of the city beyond. Inside, the apartment had an air of improvisation that seems to follow me wherever I go: stacks of books and a scattering of fast-food cartons and half-empty bottles of wine. Marlene Dietrich’s voice layered a touch of decadence over the scene, reinforcing the sense of strangeness that at the time gave me great pleasure.

I’d set Zamyatin aside for a Nabokov short story, but his work was quietly putting me to sleep, as it often did. The writer in residence at the Montreux Palace had always been a little too highbrow for my taste. My eyes would wander from the page every few minutes, unconsciously looking for sustenance, and inevitably be drawn to my computer tablet. There, among the trending expressions of outrage and the koala bear pictures, this sentence suddenly leaped out: “We live surrounded by transparent walls that seem to be knitted of sparkling air; we live beneath the eyes of everyone, always bathed in light.” Zamyatin. Seeing it materialize in my news feed hit me like a sledgehammer. Almost automatically, I added these words from We to Brandeis’s tweet: “Besides, this makes much easier the burdensome and noble task of the Guardians, for who knows what might happen otherwise?”

Then I threw my tablet across the room to return to reading. The next morning, when I fished the device from under the cushions, the blasted thing was flashing at me to check my messages. “I didn’t know that people still read Z.” It was from Brandeis, writing at three in the morning. I answered without thinking: “Z is the hidden king of our times.” And a question came back, “How long will you be in Moscow?”

I hesitated for a moment. How did this student know where I was? Then I realized that the tweets I’d posted in the last few weeks had probably let slip that I was in Moscow, maybe with a little reading between the lines. I answered that I didn’t know exactly, then went out into the frozen city to perform the daily rituals of my solitary existence. A new message was awaiting me on my return: “If you’re still interested in Z, I have something to show you.”

Why not? I had nothing to lose. At worst I’d make the acquaintance of a student with a passion for literature. Possibly a touch lugubrious at times, but that could generally be fixed with a glass or two of vodka.

2

THE CAR WAS WAITING at the curb, its motor idling. A new, black Mercedes—the basic unit of Moscow locomotion. Two hefty men stood smoking quietly beside it. Seeing me approach, one of them opened the rear door for me, then took his place beside the driver.

I made no attempt at conversation. Experience had taught me that I would draw nothing but monosyllables from my two minders. Locally, they’re called postage stamps, because they have to stick to their charges. These are men who talk little, convey a sense of calm. Once a week they dine with their moms, bring them flowers and a box of chocolates. They pat the blond heads of children when the occasion presents. Some collect wine corks, or else they polish their motorcycles religiously. The most peaceful people in the world. Except on the rare occasions when they’re not. Then it’s a different story—and you’re better off being someplace else.

Glimpses of the beloved city flashed past. Moscow. The saddest and loveliest of imperial capitals. Then an endless dark forest appeared, linked in my mind to the forests that extend unbroken to Siberia. I hadn’t the slightest idea where we were. My telephone had stopped working when I climbed into the car. And the GPS stubbornly maintained our position at the opposite end of the city.

At a certain point, we turned off the main road and onto a track plunging into the forest. The car slowed very little, attacking the forest trail with the same vehemence it had previously shown on the highway. Let no one say that Russian drivers allow stupid banalities to intimidate them—a pack of wolves, for instance. We continued driving into the dark, not for terribly long, but long enough for somber premonitions to surface. The amused curiosity I’d felt till then gradually gave way to apprehension. In Russia, I told myself, things generally go very well, but when things go bad they go really bad. In Paris, the worst you have to fear is an overhyped restaurant, a contemptuous look from a pretty girl, or a traffic fine. In Moscow, the range of unpleasant experiences can be considerably greater.

We came to a gate. From inside the sentry box, a guard waved us on. The Mercedes finally started driving more conservatively. Through the birch trees, a small lake appeared with swans floating on its surface like question marks in the night. After a final turn, the car pulled to a stop in front of a large white-and-yellow neoclassical structure.

I got out of the car and found myself before a Hamburg townhouse, tucked alongside Alster Lake, rather than an oligarch’s mansion. It was the home of an old-school professional, a physician or a banker, in any case a strict Calvinist, devoted to his work and not given to ostentation. At the entrance, the hesitant figure of an elderly butler in corduroys made a striking contrast with the two thugs who had driven me here. If they belonged unequivocally to the bright and cruel city we had just left, this slightly stooped valet seemed to have been chosen by his employer to preside over an older, more private world.

Once through the door, I discovered a paneled entrance hall. Again, no concession had been made to the contemporary style so much in vogue elsewhere. Instead, as I followed my fragile Charon through a series of rooms, I saw a profusion of veneered furniture and lighted candelabra, gilt frames and Chinese rugs, all of which created a warm atmosphere, to which the frosted windowpanes and big, tile-decorated chimneypieces added. The impression of stern harmony that had met me at the threshold grew stronger from room to room, until we arrived at a study, where the butler ushered me to a small, formal divan straight from the waiting room of a character in War and Peace. On the opposite wall, the oil portrait of an older man, dressed as a court jester, eyed me mockingly.

I looked around, delighted and a little surprised. Luxury often has a distracting effect, but here it gave a sense of strength and concentration.

—You expected gold-plated faucets, maybe?

Baranov was smiling. He spoke without sarcasm, seeming instead to be at ease, a man accustomed to taking possession of other people’s thoughts. He had materialized without warning, probably through a side door. He wore a dark, lightweight jacket, supple and expensive. I stuttered an answer, but the Russian paid no attention.

—I apologize for the late hour, a bad habit that I’ve fallen into and now can’t shake.

—You’re not alone in following that pattern, I said, thinking of the gaiety of Moscow nightlife, and then realizing it could sound like a reference to the tsar’s nocturnal habits.

A fleeting thought seemed to move across his heavy gaze.

—At any rate, I went on, it’s a true pleasure to be here. What a magnificent place.

I’d barely spoken these words when I felt Baranov’s eyes come to rest on me for the first time: Have you come all this way to bore me like the rest?

The Russian continued to stand.

—So you’ve read Zamyatin, he said, walking toward the door through which he’d entered. Come, I’ve something to show you.

We entered a room whose walls held a library fit for a Benedictine monastery. Thousands of ancient volumes gleamed on the bookshelves, reflecting the bright glow from an imposing stone fireplace.

—I didn’t know you collected old books, I said, extending my record for stating the obvious.

—I don’t collect them, he said. I read them. Two very different things.

The Russian appeared irritated. Collectors are little men, obsessed with a control they’ll never have. Baranov didn’t consider himself one of them.

—Actually, the books are not all mine, he said. Many of them I inherited from my grandfather.

I barely managed to hide my surprise. In the Soviet Union, handing down a library of old books through the family was not a normal occurrence.

—This, however, is something that I found, said Baranov, still not disposed to explanation. He fished a few handwritten pages from a leather briefcase. Take a look, he said, handing me the yellowed sheets.

It was a letter in Cyrillic characters, dated Moscow, June 15, 1931. I started to read.

Dear Iosif Vissarionovich,

The author of the present letter, condemned to the highest penalty, appeals to you with the request for the substitution of this penalty by another. My name is probably known to you. To me as a writer, being deprived of the opportunity to write is nothing less than a death sentence.

I looked up. Baranov made a show of scrutinizing his book, giving me time to gather my wits.

—It’s the original letter Zamyatin wrote to Stalin, he said, not looking around. When he requested authorization to leave the USSR.

I continued staring at Baranov for a long moment after hearing his explanation. I couldn’t believe what I held in my hands. Then I found the strength to keep reading.

I have no intention of presenting myself as a picture of injured innocence. I know that I have a highly inconvenient habit of speaking what I consider to be the truth rather than saying what may be expedient at the moment. Specifically, I have never concealed my attitude toward literary servility, fawning, and chameleon changes of color: I have felt and still feel that this is equally degrading both to the writer and to the revolution.

I remained deep in the letter for a time. When I raised my eyes, Baranov was observing me.

—It’s among the best letters of entreaty ever sent to Stalin by an artist, he said. Zamyatin never abases himself. He speaks straight out, as an ex-Bolshevik. He’d fought against the tsar’s soldiers, he’d survived exile, he’d returned to join the revolution. The one problem was that he understood it all too quickly and was foolish enough to say so in writing.

Fresh from my communion with the author, I felt a duty to interject, uttering a number of platitudes on the implacable tension between art and power, on Zamyatin’s nomadic nature, and on his belief that even a revolutionary idea, once it wins out, inevitably starts to become bourgeois. Baranov considered me with the amiable air of a family friend dragged to an end-of-year school event. When he saw that I’d exhausted my subject, he spoke again.

—Yes, that’s all true enough. But I think something else is happening here as well. Zamyatin tried to stop Stalin, he understood that Stalin wasn’t a politician but an artist. That the future would be determined not by the competition between two political programs but between two artistic visions. In the 1920s, Zamyatin and Stalin were two avant-garde artists vying for supremacy. The forces on either side were disproportionate, of course, as Stalin’s medium was the flesh and blood of his people, his canvas a vast nation, and his public the inhabitants of an entire planet, who spoke his name with reverence in hundreds of languages. What the poet brings to life in imagination, the world-builder enacts on the stage of global history. Zamyatin fought the battle in near-complete isolation, yet he tried to resist the new order. He knew that Stalin’s art would inevitably lead to the concentration camp—if you were going to regulate the life of the New Man, there could be no room for heresy. Which is why, although an engineer, Zamyatin turned to the weapons of literature, theater, and music. He understood that from the moment state power was used to crush dissonance, the gulag would follow as a matter of course. If illicit harmonies are suppressed, soon there will be nothing but marches in double time. The minor key, no longer compatible with the ideals of the new society, will become a class enemy. Major! Nothing but major! All roads lead to major! Music, even instrumental music, will be subservient to words. And no more symphonies will be composed unless they glorify Marxism-Leninism.

As he spoke these last words, a trace of emotion entered Baranov’s voice, as though he were not just analyzing a historical event.

—When Zamyatin convinced his friend Shostakovich to compose Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, he went on, it was because he knew that the future of the USSR depended on this portrayal. That the only way to get away from show trials and political purges was to reintroduce the individual who rebels against planned order. And when Stalin stood up, furious, and marched out of the Bolshoi after the third act, it was because he knew that the freedom of the composer and his characters was a direct challenge to his own power, his global art project. That’s why he commissioned the infamous editorial in Pravda denouncing the composer for paying too much attention to his characters’ broad sensuality and “bestial” behavior. In the Stalin project, there was room for the bestial instincts of only one person. Lenin’s admonition that “It’s necessary to dream” was followed to the letter, but only Stalin’s dream was allowed; all others had to be suppressed.

Baranov paused. The comfortable room around us offered a striking contrast to the harsh world he was describing.

—When you think of it, he continued, 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.

—Are you one of them? I asked.

—Of course not, he said. I played at being an aide for a while. And now I’m retired.

—You don’t miss the adrenaline?

—You know, the biggest wager you’ll ever face is to wake up, drink your morning coffee, and take your daughter to school. Seriously, I think I’ve only really wanted something three or four times in my life. But when I have, I’ve usually managed to get it. And what I want now, I can assure you, is nothing more than this.

Baranov gestured toward the library around us, the old wooden globe, and the fire burning in the fireplace.

—What did the others in the Kremlin have to say about that?

—How do you think they reacted? said Baranov. Badly, of course. Within the aquarium, all is forgiven, whether you’re a robber, an assassin, or a traitor. Desertion is different. What! You don’t want something we’d kill for? The courtiers can never forgive you for it.

—And the tsar?

—The tsar is another story. He sees and forgives everything, said Baranov, an ironic gleam momentarily appearing in his eyes.

—Are you writing your memoirs?

—That’s the last thing I would ever do.

—You’d have plenty to tell …

—No book, he said, will ever measure up to the actual exercise of power.

—The opposite argument could also be made, I countered.

A faint shadow flickered across his face. Baranov smiled.

“You’re right,” he said. “Let me reformulate. No book that I could write would ever measure up to the exercise of power.”

—And what do you see power as being?

—You’re asking too direct a question, he said. Power is like the sun, like death: you can’t look at it head-on. Especially in Russia. But since you’ve come all this way, and if you have some time, I’d like to tell you a story.

Baranov stood and poured two glasses of whiskey from a crystal decanter. He handed me one and resumed his place in his leather armchair. For a moment he eyed me piercingly, then looked down at his glass.

—My grandfather, he said slowly, was a remarkable hunter.

3

—MY GRANDFATHER WAS A remarkable hunter. At home, he never put on his bathrobe without a servant to help him, but when it came to killing a wolf, he’d spend whole nights in the forest under the stars. Before the revolution, it was just a pastime. He’d studied law, and any career he might have wanted in the tsar’s bureaucracy was open to him. But when the Bolsheviks took over, all he had left was hunting. In fact, the Bolsheviks gave him his freedom, though he would never have admitted it. He hated the Communists. He named his dogs after party leaders: “Here, Molotov!” and “Go lie down, Beria!” Luckily, he lived in relative isolation, and no one ever denounced him for it. But my father, even in childhood, knew how extravagant a man Grandfather was. He was ashamed of him. And terrified as well, I think. He wasn’t wrong to feel that way, given all that was happening at the time. But Grandfather couldn’t have cared less. Besides, things were going well for him. At a certain point, he started writing books on hunting: how to train dogs, identify tracks, that kind of thing. He would mix in a few anecdotes, describe some of the characters he met while in the field, quote passages from Turgenev—readers loved it. His books offered some of the lightheartedness of earlier times, but confined to a limited domain, which made them palatable to those in power. Eventually, Grandfather became something of an authority. In 1954, when wolves were spreading into the Caucasus, he was put in charge of a government expedition to exterminate them. He was practically a public official, but he never changed his attitude. He kept the characteristic insolence of the Russian aristocracy and could never resist making a witticism, even if he had to hang for it.

I remember him mocking my father when I was little: “Nice work, Alyosha, next thing Brezhnev will have you sitting on his lap during the Victory Day parade!” And: “You do know that the party has two kinds of functionaries, right?”

“Yes, Father, you’ve told me before.”

“The good-for-nothings and the stop-at-nothings. So which are you, Alyosha?”

My dad shuddered. His disposition was the exact opposite. From childhood on, he’d tried hard to stay out of trouble. At the first opportunity, he joined the Young Pioneers, then the Komsomol. I think he hoped to atone for his eccentric father and his aristocratic heritage. He wanted to be like everyone else. I understand that. It’s a form of rebellion in its own right. When you grow up with a parent so entirely outside the bounds of normality, the only way you can rebel is through conformity.

At any rate, I was sent every summer to stay with my grandfather in the country. The isba where he lived, a kind of log cabin made of poplar trunks, was just outside the village. Its exterior was rustic, and it stood in the middle of a kitchen garden with cucumbers, potatoes, bay laurel, and a few apple trees. There was also a small table with a set of cast-iron chairs so rusty they might have spent a century or two at the bottom of the Neva. But when you entered the house, you realized that Grandfather had somehow managed to re-create the atmosphere of an earlier age. The small living room and the dining room weren’t luxuriously furnished, but a sense of quiet prosperity hung in the air—completely at odds with the times—and the smell of tea always on the boil. There were plenty of hunting trophies and animal furs, but the master of the house had softened their presence by delicately interspersing them with more-unexpected objects: Chinese statuettes, a bezoar stone, and a few books with elaborate bindings scattered carelessly on the birchwood table. The arrangement was graceful in what I would normally call a feminine way, were it not that my grandfather hated even the idea of cohabiting with the other sex. His wife, my father’s mother, had died of peritonitis at the age of twenty-three, closing the chapter on his romantic life. A few female friends came to visit him from time to time, some more presentable than others. But none lingered more than a few hours in this temple to the gods of literature, the hunt, and virile friendship, fueled mostly by sarcastic repartee and bouts of heavy drinking.

The house was looked after by Zakhar and Nina, a peasant couple who officially worked at the kolkhoz but were in fact domestic servants. Grandfather was a superb horseman, but he’d never learned to drive a car. When he had to go somewhere, Zakhar would bring out the ancient Volga and chauffeur him. My grand-father’s one concession to prudence was to sit democratically beside Zakhar rather than in the back seat. It always made for an adventure to accompany Grandfather, even if he was only going to the village on an errand. Things would happen there that happened to no one but him, as though he were wrapped in a nostalgic aura that protected him from the meanness of the times, thus allowing at any moment for an impromptu celebration. He could walk into the drabbest state café, and a spark of magic from the old days would suddenly flicker to life. Even when he was seated in a plastic chair on a gray linoleum floor, something about him brought forth images of formal balls, of slicing champagne bottles open with a saber. People, often complete strangers, sensed his charisma and were drawn by it, gathering around to hear this ever-courteous, elegant old gentleman tell stories of an earlier age as though he were attending a fashionable salon in Petersburg. Sometimes I’d notice an ill-tempered apparatchik glaring at him from a nearby table, but no one ever dared interfere with him. How Grandfather survived the Stalinist purges isn’t clear, but with time the regime gradually shed its more carnivorous tendencies. Grandfather was just someone you had to put up with, and anyway he showed no interest in politics.

His friends were mostly hunters. A motley group, they included former aristocrats like him, but also peasants and Siberian brigands. There were even a few of what he called domesticated Communists, party members he’d managed to corrupt with his nostalgic talk and drinking sprees. In early winter, they would scatter vodka bottles around the isba’s grounds for the pleasure of finding them again when the snows melted. Meanwhile they would huddle indoors, congregating at least twice a week for cards. They swapped hunting stories and critiqued the current state of affairs, mostly by telling jokes.

“Do you know what a Soviet duo is? A quartet that’s been touring abroad.”

“Some government inspectors are visiting a psychiatric hospital. The patients line up to sing them a song: ‘How Lovely to Live in the Soviet Union!’ But the inspectors notice that one man is keeping quiet. ‘Why aren’t you singing?’ they ask. ‘I’m one of the orderlies,’ he says, ‘I’m not crazy!’”

“Comrade Khrushchev goes to visit a pig farm, along with a photographer from Pravda. Later, in the newsroom, the layout team is trying to decide how to word the caption. Should it be ‘Comrade Khrushchev next to pigs,’ or ‘Comrade Khrushchev surrounded by pigs,’ or maybe ‘Pigs gather around Comrade Khrushchev’? The suggestions are rejected one after another. Finally, the editor steps in. ‘OK, here it is,’ he says. ‘Comrade Khrushchev, third from right.’”

There was hilarity at these gatherings, hearty thumps on the back, and the draining of decanter after decanter. Yet Grandfather’s house was not always pulsating with activity. He liked being alone. He said it was because he didn’t care for Communists, but the truth is that he’d have been a misanthrope under any regime. I think I’ve inherited some of his characteristics …

Baranov smiled. He reached for the bottle and poured a shot of whiskey into his crystal glass.