“There are three ways to act on men: blackmail, vodka and the threat of assassination,” said Vladimir Putin, a few months after coming to power in 2000. For two decades, the former officer of the KGB never deviated from the line. He perceives the world only through the balance of power and considers his relationships with others only through operations of manipulation. For him, a human being has no free will. Either he controls it, or he escapes it, because he is under the influence of forces other than his own.
And that’s the limit of this former spy. “The job of counterintelligence people is to be paranoid. To see conspiracies everywhere, traitors, to invent them when you need them; they were trained like that”, evokes the main character of Giuliano da Empoli in the formidable novel The Mage of the Kremlin. This narrow view of humankind could well be the downfall of the Russian autocrat. It prevented it from understanding why a whole people lined up behind its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the very one he had catalogued, in his cynical reading grid, as a jester.
The puppeteer got tangled up in his strings and it took two novelists to tell the story. L’Express brought together Giuliano da Empoli and Andrei Kurkov. The first is familiar with the world of spin doctors, these opinion manipulators to whom the former adviser to Matteo Renzi devoted a book (The Chaos Engineers). The second, born in Russia but become the most famous Ukrainian writer, warned for years that one could not trust a leader who “perceives everything that happens in the world as the possibility of carrying out a special operation”. As confirmed this week in L’Express by historian Françoise Thom, a great specialist in Russia, the “chekist Putin was convinced that the possibilities of manipulation were limitless. He did not see that his practices could be turn against him, and that the manipulator could become the manipulated”.