“Tonight, on LCI, we’re going to break audience records again, you’ll see!” Vladimir Fedorovski does not budge: he is a “television beast”. “I make difficult things simple, I don’t ride for anyone and I never lie. And then I’m a very sharp analyst”, assures the former diplomat of perestroika converted into a successful writer, seated in a Russian restaurant in the Place de la Madeleine, in Paris.
LCI, Le Figaro, Le Point, CNews… The media continue to call upon this exuberant storyteller to decipher the developments of the war in Ukraine. “Fédo” has however made errors of analysis. On February 22, 2022, two days before the start of the Russian invasion, he said at the microphone of Classic Radio : “To say that Russia wants to invade kyiv, it’s bogus, it’s not true”. More embarrassing: on the 24th, when the explosions echoed in the city, he persisted in France 3 Normandy : “No one wants to hear me when I say that the Russians are not going to attack Kiev. I am a supporter of the truth, it is a lie on the part of the United States to have spread the idea that the Russians wanted bombing the capital. The Russians, even if they support Putin, will never accept the bombing of the city.”
“On Ukraine, I had a sentimental bankruptcy”, concedes today the person concerned by planting his verdigris eyes in yours, with this accent that the years spent in France have not erased. “My father was Ukrainian, my mother Russian. This conflict is a great tragedy for me.” The attack on the Ukrainian capital? “I was saying that I couldn’t imagine the street fighting in kyiv, the cradle of Russian civilization.” Putin, he has been fighting it for a long time, denouncing, in a cross interview with the writer Andreï Makine, his “low-end Sovietism” (Le Figaro, 2007). He is also proud to have alerted, in 2021, in the columns of the Figaro Magazine, on the dangers of the rupture between Russia and Europe. Didn’t the American secret services seize, according to him, of the scenarios which he had worked out for the continuation of the conflict?
“The Eternal Tourist of St. Petersburg”
His audience, Vladimir Fedorovski owes it first of all to his career, and to the character he was able to embody in the eyes of the French public. At 72, this native of Moscow wears a very British distinction: white shirt striped with purple, irreproachable courtesy of a lord sipping tea. He gladly returns to his journey, so often told. His studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). USSR Embassy in Mauritania. The day when Brezhnev, suffering from deafness, falls in love with this interpreter with a strong voice. The effervescence of Paris, where he was appointed cultural attaché in 1977. The return to the Soviet Union, where he was chief of staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Paris again, in 1985, as embassy counselor and promoter of perestroika. Spokesperson of the Movement of Democratic Reforms during the Moscow putsch (August 1991). Then the final installation in France, where he turns into the author of bestsellers devoted to eternal Russia.
France, he has been inundating him with books on the mysteries of his country of birth for years: The Russian Muses, The Loves of Catherine the Great, The Magic of Moscow… “He is the interpreter of a very folkloric Russia, that of the tiaras of the tsarinas, Russian ballets, matryoshka Russia, a Russia of second-hand goods”, laughs an observer. And this even if, in general opinion, his gifts as a stylist in his adopted language do not equal his oratorical talent.
Too bad also if “Fedo” is not the finest connoisseur of contemporary Russia… “I have the impression that he knows the Russia of Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev better than the current one. He is not necessarily a geopolitician, but rather the eternal tourist of Saint Petersburg,” said Manuel Carcassonne, who was his editor at Stock. “All that is comedy, spectacle! For specialists, he is a bit apart: neither really historian, nor political scientist, nor novelist”, annoys Hélène Blanc, researcher at the CNRS and expert of the Russian world. .
Above all, the author had taken the risk of getting bored. “He knew how to tell Russia as it had not been for a long time in France, but he did not renew himself much. He is someone who never went there and played a lot on his image, his accent, his quickdraw”, affirms Bruno Nougayrède, his former editor at Le Rocher.
Ironically, this conflict that Fedorovski did not see coming breathed new life into his editorial career. The sales of his books, long astronomical (more than 100,000 copies for The Novel of Saint Petersburg, in 2003), began to decline. 15,000 readers, for example, have purchased his Poutine from A to Z (Stock, 2017), including the paperback edition. By way of comparison, his work Putin and Ukraine: the hidden facespublished last year by Balland, exceeded 25,000 copies.
“One day, I will publish my conversations with Chirac, a visionary”
Today, the observer displays his concern. “I’m optimistic by nature, but sometimes I can’t sleep at night. We’re going straight to World War III, that is to say the end of civilization. I support Emmanuel Macron, because he used the term of de-escalation, to which I am very attached.” He ranks, with Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean-Pierre Raffarin or even Henri Guaino, in the camp of the “Gaullo-Mitterrandiens” who want to put an end to the spiral of the conflict.
Behind his histrionics which becomes, by force, a little mechanical, one guesses in him a sincere melancholy. According to Manuel Carcassonne, “Vladimir Fédorovski embodies a kind of somewhat broken dream. He is an heir to the Russian diaspora of yesteryear.” “There is a sad clown side to him, a little saturnal and twilight”, abounds an observer of Russia who rubbed shoulders with him.
Is it the war in Ukraine that hits a man who has remained “completely faithful to his pro-Western, pro-democratic, pro-human rights commitments”, as his friend the pianist Mikhail Rudy, whom he met in the years 1980? Or the feeling that his great hours are behind him? The time of splendor, of fabulous advances for his books and the authors he published in his collection at Éditions du Rocher, is over. “I created the mafia: all the newspaper directors were there! I worked with the people I liked,” he jubilates again. The skilful exile also maintained a network of followers there. In fact, he has the gift of creating solid friendships. Gilles Martin-Chauffier, culture editor at Paris Match and who has published books in his collection, speaks warmly of his “old friend”, “very, very good connoisseur of Russia”, with the “amazing editorial career”.
Vladimir Fedorovski is publishing a book these days devoted to a figure that fascinates him: Richard Sorge, the secret agent who helped save Moscow in October 1941, when Hitler was at the gates of the city (Sorge – A Spy For Eternity, Balland). Anxious to stay in the loop, he recorded a series of shows on the Kremlin conspiracies for the Majelan podcast platform. And promises a slew of books, each more resounding than the other. “One day I will publish my conversations with Chirac, a visionary, everyone will be amazed!” He is also preparing, with a “very great French composer” whose name he prefers to conceal, a musical aroundAnna Karenina. It’s raining on the Place de la Madeleine.