Last year, speaking at the Venice film festival premiere of The Wizard of the Kremlin, based on a book about the rise of Vladimir Putin, actor Jude Law said he “didn’t fear any repercussions” over his portrayal of the Russian president. Law may be right, but not for the reason he thinks he is. The film aligns so closely with the mythologised version promoted by the Russian media that, domestically, it reads as a compliment rather than an affront.
The Kremlin and Russia’s pop-culture machine have long collaborated to craft a made-to-measure version of Putin that is far removed from the man himself: a political superhero without age or mistakes, a perfectly calculated strategist, a former spy reframed as a Russian James Bond who always knows more than he reveals.
One recent example is the TV series Chronicles of the Russian Revolution, released in October and directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, a Silver Lion winner and longstanding Kremlin supporter. Its main character is a fictional blue-eyed lieutenant colonel in the secret services, inexplicably chosen by the emperor’s inner circle and presented as the man who “saves” Russia from chaos, a role played by Yura Borisov, an Oscar nominee this year. Although the character is named Mikhail rather than Vladimir, the implication is clear: in this narrative, the saviour of Russia must be the familiar security officer.
In Russia, the manufactured Putin has long eclipsed the real one. And yet western portrayals often end up reinforcing the same narrative rather than undercutting it. French director Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, based on Giuliano da Empoli’s bestselling satirical novel and adapted for screen by Emmanuel Carrère, in some ways sets out to subvert the Putin cult. In the film, which is released in French and Spanish cinemas this month, the Russian president is framed not as a cause but as a symptom, and the narrative shifts its centre of gravity towards spindoctor Vadim Baranov and the political machinery around him.
The film does not present itself as a documentary or biopic. “What makes this film unique, and ultimately what fascinated me, was precisely that it showed the consequences of political evil, but also tried to portray its nature. How it works, its inner workings,” Assayas told Variety last year. Some characters appear under their real names, including Putin himself and the oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. Others are fictional but clearly modelled on real figures. Baranov (Paul Dano) appears to be based on the political operative Vladislav Surkov. Dmitri Sidorov seems to represent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the businessman who spent 10 years in prison after clashing with Putin.
The portrayal of Putin, however, resembles a Kremlin manual entitled A Short Guide to Romanticising the Leader. Putin is presented as having been chosen by Berezovsky and Baranov to stabilise the country, because he is “young, athletic and a spy”. Berezovsky and Baranov visit him in his office and all but beg him to become president. He replies that he would prefer to rule Russia from the shadows, since governments come and go and he seeks permanent power. This is the Kremlin’s export myth: the cool, reluctant strategist shaped by destiny. In reality, none of this ever happened.
In fact, no one ever begged Putin to take the job. In cinematic terms, the presidency was effectively a casting call, and there was no shortage of candidates. At the centre of this process stood Berezovsky, one of the most influential oligarchs of the late Boris Yeltsin era, who expected to run the country de facto once a successor was installed. The shortlist he considered included Boris Nemtsov (murdered near the Kremlin in 2015), Sergei Kiriyenko (now first deputy chief of staff), former security service director Sergei Stepashin and several others.
The journalist Roman Badanin, who has spent his career studying Putin’s biography and recently published The Tsar Himself, argues that Putin simply fitted the parameters Berezovsky was looking for. “Berezovsky was a political animal and wanted someone the public would understand, preferably from the security services,” Badanin told me. “The key was that the candidate could not be a communist, since they were at war with them at the time, and could not be a liberal either – the kind of guy with glasses and a good suit, who irritated voters and looked too pro-western. That ruled out half the contenders, but Putin was perfect: a loyal state servant.”
Property developer Shalva Chigirinsky, a close friend of Berezovsky and a witness to the choice of Putin as successor, also believes that Putin was not selected for his leadership qualities.
“In the summer of 1999, Borya [Berezovsky] told me they had settled on Putin,” Chigirinsky says. “I said, ‘Are you out of your mind? Who is going to vote for him? He can’t even pick a shirt in his size or tie a tie.’ Putin made no impression as a leader; he had no political charisma and ambitions. Borya explained that they didn’t need a strong candidate, they needed someone controllable, someone who would follow instructions. The key criterion was that the future president had to be manageable and loyal, so he wouldn’t turn on ‘The Family’.”
The Family had emerged in 1995 and included Berezovsky, Yeltsin’s wife Naina, his daughter Tatyana and her husband Valentin Yumasheva, politician Aleksandr Voloshin and others. Their priority was self-preservation. Russian political history is full of predecessors being sidelined or destroyed, and Chigirinsky said Putin personally assured them he would protect their interests.
Both Badanin and Chigirinsky agree that the image of Putin as a powerful KGB spy was constructed retrospectively and has little to do with reality. Even the claims about his “recruitment work” during his KGB years in Dresden from 1985 to 1990 do not stand up to scrutiny; most of these stories were added later as part of the wider mythology around him. As Badanin puts it: “He handled paperwork and technical tasks, not operations. In essence, he was a low-level clerk who spent 10 years in the internal intelligence system, not someone engaged in actual agent work.”
In a strange intermingling of fact and fiction, the shift to framing Putin as a “spy” may in part have been triggered by Daniel Craig’s arrival as James Bond. His harder, more minimalist interpretation of 007 prompted Russian media and online audiences to draw visual parallels with Putin. By 2011, mashup posters replacing Craig’s face with Putin’s on Casino Royale artwork appeared on central streets in Moscow. Their origin was never officially established, and they were removed relatively quickly by municipal services, but the images were widely photographed and picked up by international tabloids, feeding the growing tendency to frame Putin as a Russian 007.
But if the parallels between Putin and Craig were always somewhat manufactured, the situation is different with Law, an actor who has been popular with Russian audiences across generations. The Kremlin will not miss the chance to frame his casting as a minor diplomatic triumph, much as it once framed the proposed invitation for Putin to meet Donald Trump in Alaska. The fact that the film shows none of the mass protests, the opposition or Alexei Navalny, despite covering events up to 2019, is a pleasant bonus for the propaganda.
In Russian cinema and television, Putin is portrayed as an omnipotent figure who never appears on screen. His presence is instead signalled through portraits in the offices of governors and ministers or calls “from above”. Now, in Assayas’s film, he finally acquires a face.
