Putin: the blind autocrat

In The Wizard of the Kremlin, a movie whose most impressive achievement is making Russian history boring, Paul Dano plays a Kremlin PR hack tasked with building what Putin, played by Jude Law, calls “managed democracy”. In practice this means manufacturing the appearance of respectable dissent by bankrolling Russian nationalists and liberals alike, so that the regime’s opposition would be under the control of the Kremlin. The film presents this as a feat of sinister brilliance, in which the Kremlin ruthlessly manages reality itself. In doing so the movie conforms to a well-established genre: the glamorization of autocracy by Western intellectuals. The sordid, boring, vulgar and power-hungry bureaucrat is transformed into a Machiavellian prince. The film uncritically adopts the regime’s nar