The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood

Author:Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Khodorkovsky was arrested at dawn, the moment his jet touched down in the Siberian town where he’d gone to conduct some now-forgotten business. Images of the handcuffed billionaire under special forces guard traveled around the world. And had the immediate effect of reminding people that money doesn’t protect you from everything. This is absolutely taboo to you Westerners. A politician can be arrested, why not; but a billionaire, that’s inconceivable, because your society is based on the principle that nothing is greater than money. What’s funny is that you keep calling wealthy Russians “oligarchs,” when the truth is that the only real oligarchs are in the West. That’s where billionaires stand above the law and above the people, that’s where they buy government officials and write laws in their stead. In your part of the world, the idea of Bill Gates, of Rupert Murdoch, of Mark Zuckerberg in handcuffs is unthinkable. Whereas in Russia, a billionaire is perfectly free to spend his money, but not to influence politics. The will of the Russian people—and of the tsar, its incarnation—counts for more than any private interest.

Occurring just six weeks before the election, Khodorkovsky’s arrest served as the leitmotif for the tsar’s noncampaign. My role was limited to reformatting Mikhail’s fall into good television. It wasn’t hard. The head of a powerful man rolling on the ground is a spectacle that the masses always appreciate. When a big shot is put to death, the multitude is consoled for its own mediocrity. I may not have been all that successful, says the man on the street, but at least I’m not up there on the hangman’s scaffold. Public executions have been highly prized in every age. The first time a guillotine was used, the chronicles of the French Revolution report, Parisians complained of not being able to see, and called for the return of the headman’s axe. But when they realized how effective the guillotine was and how terrifying to the condemned, they started to see the appeal of the new technology. Let’s just face it: the people are more bloodthirsty than any dictator; only the leader’s stern but fair intercession can temper their fury.

The election, held in early December, was a great victory. The following day, the tsar confessed on television that he had been up all night. Not to follow the election results, about which he never had any doubt, but because his Labrador retriever, Koni, had given birth to her first litter. I had no dog, so I was at home on election night, alone with a carafe of vodka and a pile of history books. After my last conversation with the tsar, I had started to see my role differently. I’d been burrowing into accounts of the Stalinist trials of the 1930s and begun to realize that these were already big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas—show business in the Soviet style. The prosecutor and the judges worked for months on the screenplay, which the defendants were then called on to act out, with the producers pressuring them in various ways.

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