Jude Law as Vladimir Putin and Paul Dano as Vadim Baranov, a fictional character modeled after the Russian president’s former chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, in Olivier Assayas’s *The Wizard of the Kremlin.*

I Worked for the Real Wizard of the Kremlin

In early-aughts Moscow, Vladislav Surkov educated me on the finer points of “pop propaganda.” Now he’s the inspiration for Olivier Assayas’s new film

By Andrew Ryvkin

Do you want to see Mother Russia? Not the export version—bears, nesting dolls, the Bolshoi—but the Russia of Rilke, Cap d’Antibes, and truffle risotto. The country where the only thing that matters is how close you are to the czar, and everything else—people, laws, even money—is simply an instrument for getting closer. In other words, do you want to see the Russia that existed for people like me—those who worked under Vladislav Surkov, the inspiration behind the protagonist in Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin?

The film, based on the novel by Giuliano da Empoli, tells the story of Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a soft-spoken intellectual with dreams of directing theater who instead becomes a spin doctor for an ambitious former K.G.B. officer named Vladimir Putin (Jude Law). Baranov is modeled primarily on Surkov, the all-powerful deputy chief of Kremlin staff, but the character also stands in for the hundreds of TV producers, spin doctors, and politicians who worked for him. Baranov’s story is framed by a 2019 interview with Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright), an American journalist who travels to Moscow to better understand the nature of power.